ll writes:
Activestate, the O’Reilly affiliate best known for writing perl
and porting perl to win32, has signed a three-year deal with
Microsoft.
The press
release and faq
are short on detail, especially regarding finances.
On one hand one should be sympathetic to Activestate, which has
done outstanding work on perl and needs financing as much as, say,
Red Hat and Caldera do for Linux development. On the other hand,
Microsoft is rightly viewed with suspicion.
Is microsoft becoming a shareholder of Activestate? To what
extent is this an attempt to develop perl on Windows only, to the
exclusion of unix? Presumably, Microsoft is funding the development
of perl on Windows to help large Unix large shops feel more
comfortable when converting to Windows NT/2000. At the same time,
Microsoft is pushing its proprietary windows scripting host as the
scripting language for windows.