The open source market is changing, and so is ActiveState. The firm has rolled out a host of changes to its pricing and support models for the dynamic languages Python, Perl and Tcl. Developer.com takes a look at how the new policies will affect developers, and what ActiveState’s goals are for the open source community.
As is the case with many things in open source, users of the Python, Perl and Tcl dynamic programming languages enjoy the support of the community for their technical needs. Developers can also leverage commercial support for those languages by way of IT vendor ActiveState.
ActiveState this week released a new business edition of its ActivePerl, ActivePython and ActiveTcl software distributions. The new business edition provides support for users on Unix (HP-UX, IBM’s AIX and Oracle/Sun Solaris), Linux, Windows and Mac with standardized server pricing.
To date, ActiveState has provided its dynamic language distribution through free editions with community support, and an enterprise edition, which carried custom pricing based on user deployments and needs. ActiveState notes that its dynamic language tools are in use by more than 2 million developers, though it had not specifically targeted the midmarket of development for support until now.
“We have the free distributions and then there is our enterprise edition stuff which focuses on larger enterprises and it’s a 5 to 6 figure a year solution with tight SLAs,” Jeff Hobbs, ActiveState’s director of engineering, told InternetNews.com. “The business edition is a $1,000 per server per year and it allows you — if you you’re just a small shop that relies on one of the dynamic languages — to get expert support.”