ActiveState and Microsoft recently signed a three-year
agreement for a Perl Open Source development and support contract.
As part of the agreement, ActiveState will add features to Windows ports of
Perl, as well as support for Unicode on Windows platforms, a feature for
users utilizing Asian language content. Some amount of the development
effort is expected to be released as Open Source code under the Artistic
License, Perls Open Source license.
News.com reports
that Microsoft has run into trouble with the open
source community before, with accusations of an “embrace and extend”
approach of undermining the standard technologies by adopting them and
then modifying them.
The report added that ActiveState’s chief
executive Dick Hardt said the goal isn’t to help Microsoft make Perl its
own, but rather to make Perl work better on machines running the
Microsoft Windows operating system.
Beta versions of the next release of ActivePerl are scheduled to debut in August at the Open Source Convention.