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Businesses Software Spam

Sophos Acquires ActiveState 30

Posted by timothy from the sophosticated-dealings dept.
Jacco de Leeuw writes "I was checking the website of anti-virus vendor Sophos when I noticed a press release: " Sophos Acquires Anti-Spam Specialist ActiveState for $23 million in cash". I didn't even know ActiveState was into anti-spam! What will this mean for their ActivePerl or ActivePython products?"
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Sophos Acquires ActiveState More

Sophos Acquires ActiveState

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  • ...for their ActivePerl or ActivePython products?

    A diet containing significantly less processed dog and cat meat?

  • What will it mean for open source? ... RTFA? (Score:4, Informative)

    by thing12 ( 45050 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @08:33AM (#7043049) Homepage
    Maybe the story submitter should have read the article he submitted...

    ActiveState's product lines for open source programmers will continue to be developed and sold under the ActiveState brand. As a division of Sophos, the existing ActiveState team is committed to continuing its support of the open source language community.

  • Windows language distributions (Score:3, Informative)

    by phch ( 398574 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @08:42AM (#7043137)
    The Python project provides convenient installers [python.org] for Windows, so I've never relied on ActivePython. Besides, they're still a version behind anyway. But ActiveTcl and ActivePerl still seem to be the most convenient binary distributions on Win32. Hope they're still maintained.
    • "Hope they're still maintained."

      yes they are! for linux and solaris as well =)

      • Hmm, I guess I never considered using ActiveState language distributions on Linux and Solaris, since Perl/Python/Tcl are usually readily available on those platforms (via the platform distribution itself, or buildable from source).

        Since Win32 doesn't come with either a compiler or language installations, ActiveState is a convenient distribution point for getting binaries on Windows.
      • What the reason to have ActiveState language distros for Linux when most (if not all) Linux distros has them already?

        Is it anything that ActiveState Tcl or Perl does better than a native port?

        I guess if they would not spend their resources on useless ports they would have more chance to stay on profit. Then we may not discuss this acquisition of ActiveState by a company which has nothing to do with the original busness of ActiveState.

  • All is good ... (Score:5, Informative)

    by hobbs ( 82453 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @09:00AM (#7043336)
    As an ActiveState employee, I can say that this is all good, even for the tools and open source languages side of our business. While Sophos' anti-virus products merge well with ActiveState's successful PureMessage anti-spam software, Sophos is fully aware of the value ActiveState has received from the tools and languages side as well.

    All ActiveState employees will be sticking around, doing what they were doing before. We will continue to make the Active(Perl|Python|Tcl) language distributions and continue development on Komodo, TDK, PDK, etc.

    There is more in the open letter here:
    http://www.activestate.com/corporate/letter/ [activestate.com]

  • ActiveState perl is the shit! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Anybody know if they're planning on porting Active State perl to linux? Work that I used to do in linux with awk, sed, and shell scripting is now done in windows 98 with ActiveState Perl. A lot of the perl features and syntax reminds me of unix shell scripting, so it probably wouldn't be too hard to port it to linux.

  • Anti-Virus for Linux/Unix (Score:4, Interesting)

    by hbo ( 62590 ) * on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @09:07AM (#7043398) Homepage

    Sophos's anti-virus technology will be integrated with PureMessage, ActiveState's enterprise email protection software, to deliver industry-leading anti-virus and anti-spam protection in a single, consolidated solution - Sophos PureMessage. PureMessage currently supports AIX, HP-UX, FreeBSD, Linux and Solaris. For more information please see http://www.sophos.com/products/pm/ [sophos.com]


    So the real news here is that the hole created by Microsoft's purchase of RAV is about to be filled. Since ActiveState's relationship with Microsoft is important for their tools this could impact that relationship.

  • What Does it All Mean?? (Score:4, Funny)

    by kurosawdust ( 654754 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @09:13AM (#7043469)
    Sophos Acquires Anti-Spam Specialist ActiveState for $23 million in cash". I didn't even know ActiveState was into anti-spam! What will this mean for their ActivePerl or ActivePython products?"

    It means they will be able to consolidate their debt and significantly lower their monthly payments, of course...

  • How about that Sophos antivirus (Score:3, Insightful)

    by scrytch ( 9198 ) <chuck@myrealbox.com> on Wednesday September 24, 2003 @10:34AM (#7044409)
    ... When is Sophos going to stop sending out bounce notices to the forged "senders" of email viruses? These do nothing but spamvertise the product. I must have blocked millions of sophos bounces of Sobig. Not that Sophos is the only offender, but it seems designed to do so...

    Fact is, more than 99% of virus traffic is "stealthy" sends of trojans now, not some macro virus attached to a .doc file. And in every case it's forged. Bounces have to stop.
  • I just received a call from someone at ActiveState (we use their Spam filter). She told me that they would continue to support all the ActiveState products, including the open source languages. She also said there would be no staff reductions. Let's hope the transition is painless (for the employees and the rest of us).
  • Hmmm, perhaps less spam? Who isn't anti-spam? (except, of course, for spammers).

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