Ben Tilly wrote:

# As a long-time member of the Perl community I have to
# say that ActiveState has earned my distrust upon
# multiple occasions.  They wish to be the One True
# Source of everything.  This sometimes conflicts with
# the needs of the community.

Well, years ago, in an earlier programming life working elsewhere on
other things, I found ActiveState's support of Perl on Windows to be
extremely useful. On the other hand, it was somewhat troubling that
they had forked off a somewhat incompatible version of Perl that was
only later re-merged at the urgings of (Tim) O'Reilly and others, IIRC.

# Ask me some time about the speculation on why Perl
# 5.6.1 is over 6 months late but the important bugs in
# it have all been fixed in the (binary only) releases
# from ActiveState.  5.6.0 is unusable. :-(

OK, I'm asking. I can hazard a guess, but I'm also curious why
*others* haven't fixed such things in the source. Is someone from
ActiveState the pumpkin holder or something? Are there (or do you
expect) similar problems with Python?

Also, what do you think it would take to get ActiveState to support
Ruby on Windows to the same extent that they do for Python and Perl,
in addition to the .Net and Komodo stuff? And what would you recommend
that the Ruby community do to protect itself from the potential
downside of such a development?

(Speaking of .Net, FWIW, there was mention on comp.lang.python that in 
addition to the important GUI libraries, MS was also witholding important 
DB libraries from the open standardization process.)

Conrad Schneiker
(This note is unofficial and subject to improvement without notice.)