ANNOUNCE: ActiveState Acquired by Sophos

[Jeff Hobbs]

To the Tcl community --

As some of you have heard by now, ActiveState was acquired today by
Sophos PLC, a UK-based global anti-virus company, as described in this
press release:

http://www.activestate.com/Corporate/Communications/Releases/Press1064364490.html

and in this open letter to ActiveState customers:

http://www.activestate.com/corporate/letter/

Many of you who know about ActiveState's background in the open source
community probably have questions regarding what this means for
ActiveState's future, and the future of Tcl at ActiveState.

In short, there is no downside, only great opportunities.

What will not change:

- Our line of tools, language distributions and enterprise
support for open source programming languages will continue
to be developed and evolve with customer needs.
- Our involvement in the open source language communities
will continue as before.
- All of the ActiveState staff is retained in the acquisition.
- The Vancouver, BC office is poised to expand, not shrink.
- Email addresses, phone numbers, etc. will continue to
function as before.

What will change:

- ActiveState will now have a broader global impact and access
to the resources of a larger company with a great deal of
experience helping businesses secure their networks.
- Our PureMessage anti-spam product will be integrated with
the Sophos MailMonitor product and be sold as Sophos
PureMessage, while the rest of our product line will
still be sold under the ActiveState banner.
- ActiveState is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sophos,
with a focused mission to providing tools and services
for users of open source programming languages.

I want to point out to this audience in particular that the acquisition
of ActiveState is a success story for open source programming
technologies. It is in part thanks to our use of programming languages
like Tcl, Perl, and Python _and_ to our involvement in the programming
communities around these languages that we've been able to quickly build
and sell enterprise-grade software such as PureMessage, as well as very
successful programming tools like Komodo, the Tcl Dev Kit, etc. I'm
glad to say that Sophos appreciates this and is looking to expand the
use of these technologies in the larger company, not shrink it.

Now I have to get back to my Tcl core programming ...

--
Jeff Hobbs The Tcl Guy
Senior Developer http://www.ActiveState.com/
Tcl Support and Productivity Solutions

[Michael Schlenker]

Jeff Hobbs wrote:

> To the Tcl community --
>
> As some of you have heard by now, ActiveState was acquired today by
> Sophos PLC, a UK-based global anti-virus company, as described in this
> press release:
>
>
> http://www.activestate.com/Corporate/Communications/Releases/Press1064364490.html

[snip]

> I want to point out to this audience in particular that the acquisition
> of ActiveState is a success story for open source programming
> technologies. It is in part thanks to our use of programming languages
> like Tcl, Perl, and Python _and_ to our involvement in the programming
> communities around these languages that we've been able to quickly build
> and sell enterprise-grade software such as PureMessage, as well as very
> successful programming tools like Komodo, the Tcl Dev Kit, etc. I'm
> glad to say that Sophos appreciates this and is looking to expand the
> use of these technologies in the larger company, not shrink it.
>

Hehe, introduce a Tcl binding to their AV products..., their Management
Tools are Windows Only and could need a rewrite in Tcl/Tk ;-)

Michael Schlenker