Now known as ActiveState Software Inc, the Vancouver, Canada-based company offers the Komodo integrate development environment as well as development tools and services based around Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl, and Ruby, and enterprise support and education.
It has been acquired from Oxford, UK-based antivirus software vendor Sophos for $2.25m and will be led by president and chief executive Bart Copeland, as well as chief technology officer and VP of engineering Dr David Ascher. Ascher is a key figure in the Python community, and ActiveState is also home to some of the core PHP, Perl, Tcl, and ruby developers.
The involvement of Pender Financial Group sees the investment firm’s president and CEO Kelly Edmison becoming chairman of Active State, while David Roberts, president of Pender subsidiary PenderFund Capital Management, joins Edmision and Copeland as directors.
Sophos acquired the original ActiveState Corp for $23m in September 2003, primarily for its anti-spam software, but maintained the open source development tools business as a separate division under the ActiveState brand.
