Much has been said in our inner open source circles about the cost of open source. But now, people outside the inner circle are understanding the value and costs associated with open source. Open source software bits are generally freely available for download, so the acquisition costs are low.
They say there's no such thing as a free lunch. Well, ActiveState has been giving away ActivePerl, ActivePython and ActiveTcl builds for years, and it's been good for us and for the open source language community.
We're going to keep doing that, but we're no longer going to be offering all the old versions for download.
In Jeffrey Hammond's recent article on Dr. Dobb's (What Developers Think, January 16, 2010), his survey results highlighted something we have known for some time based on the developers and companies that we talk to:
Managers don't know everything their developers are using or doing.
His survey showed that:
80% of developers say they use open source components for development or application deployment
Development teams can finally hone their Perl, Python and Tcl programming skills with the new Business Training program ActiveState launched today. There are a lot of benefits to encouraging developers to polish their programming skills.
One obvious reason is that the development team could become better experts in coding with Perl, Python and Tcl. For their organization, this means a couple of things:
Much has been said in our inner open source circles about the cost of open source. But now, people outside the inner circle are understanding the value and costs associated with open source. Open source software bits are generally freely available for download, so the acquisition costs are low.
They say there's no such thing as a free lunch. Well, ActiveState has been giving away ActivePerl, ActivePython and ActiveTcl builds for years, and it's been good for us and for the open source language community.
