Wednesday, December 4, 2013

ActiveState make ActivePerl non-free

I have just received an email from ActiveState which contains the following:

To be better equipped to answer support questions, particularly for customers using ActivePerl in production, we have changed the licensing terms of Community Edition: http://www.activestate.com/activeperl/license-agreement. To use ActivePerl in production, you must now have a supported Business or Enterprise Edition license; we continue to provide the latest versions free for development and testing use.

So now we need a decent free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-free Perl distribution for Windows. And don't tell me Strawberry Perl - last time I looked it didn't work well, and anyway most people don't want to have to install whole development environment just to get Perl.

I guess ActiveState have the right to do this, strictly speaking, but it's a dick move nevertheless. To say I'm annoyed would be understating it considerably. It's a classic bait and switch. Build up a community's dependence on what you give them, and then start charging them for it.

For the time being I will be advising clients on Windows to steer clear of PLPerl for Postgres. I'm not sure what I'll recommend they use instead. It certainly makes it more imperative to make sure that we can use PLV8 on Windows.

11 comments:

  1. What bothers me is that they state it is for support, which would suggest you can use it in production and not ask for support, but you can't. Obviously support is a false justification for a license change to force users to pay.

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    1. My translation is: "We're not getting enough income from customers who need support, so now you're going to have to pay to use it whether or not you need support." It's stupid, because it's enormously destructive of goodwill. I suspect most users will be looking for an alternative when they need to upgrade.

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  2. That's pretty horrible. And AFAICT they did the same for ActivePython. But also, it seems the date on the license that states this is actually from *May* this year, and not new at all? Or am I missing something? (I hadn't noticed it at all before either, and didn't get an email, but it seems we just missed it earlier?)

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  3. Destroying goodwill is the sign of a company on its last legs.

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  4. If not ActiveState then what about Strawberry Perl ? It appears to be the alternative as shown on the perl.org website ?

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  5. Did you not read what I said about Strawberry Perl?

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  6. Before you ask, yes, I read what you wrote about Strawberry Perl.

    "And don't tell me Strawberry Perl - last time I looked it didn't work well, and anyway most people don't want to have to install whole development environment just to get Perl."

    When did you last try Strawberry Perl? It works quite well on Windows 7 (all I have to test with). It's not exactly a "whole development environment", just enough to get a working compiler and Perl.

    If you have specific complaints about Strawberry Perl, you should make them known to the Perl community either at http://www.strawberryperl.com or in #win32 on irc.perl.org.

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  7. Wow. That's kind of a bummer. It sounds as if their management succumbed to temptation and went over the dark side instead of figuring out a decent open source business model.

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    1. Well, I'm not surprised that they're scrambling. ActiveState is suffering from competition with Eclipse and other OSS IDEs, the gradual decline in Perl usage, and the failure to offer integration with modern deployment platforms. This is more-or-less an attempt to monetize their last product that anyone cares about. They've also jacked up upgrade prices for Komodo, even though the new versions have few or no new features.

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  8. We appreciate the concern of the community and I have escalated it to the management team. The policy change was made in response to the number of Community Edition support requests we have been getting from organizations using ActivePerl on large internal systems.

    However, please note that this restriction does not apply to non-commercial use, and it was intentional to not specifically define production use, as we understand there are community use cases where the restriction should not apply.

    If you do have further questions, please feel free to email us at marketing@activestate.com. Thanks for everyone's feedback, and once again be assured that management is aware of your concerns and we are doing what we can to provide the best solution for all developers.

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    1. I see in the license phrase "for non-commercial purposes as determined by ACTIVESTATE at its sole discretion", and I definitely don't like it.

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