“David Ascher, CTO and vice president of engineering for
programming tool vendor ActiveState, has seen his company through
several incarnations. The latest change is ActiveState’s
re-emergence as an independent company after more than two years as
a subsidiary of security software vendor Sophos. I talked with
Ascher about what ActiveState’s new status means, where the company
has been and where it’s going. His answers illustrate the
challenges of building a company around free and open source
software, and reflect how the market for FOSS has changed over the
last six years.“ActiveState was founded by Dick Hardt in 1997 to build tools
for FOSS programming languages…”