From: Conrad Schneiker Date: 2001-10-06T13:41:28+09:00 Subject: [ruby-talk:22151] Re: Let's work on Windows support Hi, "Robert Hicks" wrote > Furio R. Filoseta (tlf.) wrote: > > > Why wait until Activestate does it ? Alter all, I've read some bad stuff > > about them right here. Stuff that I hadn't have the chance to confirm, > > by the way. > > > > ActiveState has not done anything "bad" as far as I know. So if you > can't confirm it don't say it. There's nothing wrong with raising a warning flag prior to being able to confirm something as long as you are up front about it; it may be very difficult for one person to confirm or refute something, whereas other readers might be able to readily confirm or refute a warning flag. Advocating self-censorship needlessly thwarts this synergistic collaborative division of labor. The main thing to avoid is jumping to any conclusions one way or another in the mean time, and to avoid making any decisions based on unconfirmed alligations. Anyway, many months ago (partly in response to threads relating to my suggesting seeking collaboration with ActiveState), one or more people (including Ben Tilly IIRC) mentioned some problems involving the way ActiveState handled Perl releases a year or so ago. I won't try to recount those here, but I think he was well-informed on the issue, I think his complaints were mostly well founded, and so far as I know, these issues were more or less satisfactorily resolved and haven't reoccured since. Early one, ActiveState indicated that its cosmic Mozilla IDE was going to be a free open source product, but then released it as a commercial product for non-Academic users (or something like that); I don't know what the current status is. I suspect that that annoyed and dissapointed some people too, myself included. That said, I still think it is in our interest to collaborate with ActiveState whenever mutually advantageous opportunities present themselves. Although my knowledge of such things is no longer current, I think ActiveState's involvement with Python was generally considered a big boost for Python, and it has certainly been tremendously advantageous for Perl, past problems notwithstanding. Conrad PS: Rational or not, ActiveState provision of Perl made Perl an acceptible alternative to C and VB at one place I used to work some years ago. And thank goodness for that.