ActiveState - Press Releases
Press Releases & Announcements
ActiveState Announces Appointment of David Ascher as Chief Technologist
LAS VEGAS, NV, 11/17/2003
ActiveState, a leading provider of professional tools for programmers, today announced the appointment of David Ascher to the positions of chief technologist, ActiveState; and director, tools and languages, for parent company Sophos Plc., effective immediately. Ascher has over 15 years of experience as a developer, consultant, and advocate of open source software.In this role, Ascher will provide business and technical leadership for ActiveState's tools, languages, and resources for open source programming languages; as well as providing strategic direction for the integration of open source technologies within Sophos's development methodologies.
Ascher is a director of the Python Software Foundation and frequent speaker at software conferences, including the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. He co-authored Learning Python and co-edited The Python Cookbook, both published by O'Reilly & Associates; and helped develop and document the Numeric and PyOpenGL Python extensions.
"David is a key figure in the open source community, and his business and technical expertise make him a natural choice to head up the ActiveState division," said Steve Munford, global vice president, messaging, Sophos. "His guidance will contribute significantly to ActiveState's continued growth and leadership position in the open source tools space."
"I'm thrilled and proud to lead the ActiveState brand forward, especially with the backing of Sophos, which provides a global organization with complementary market reach,� said Ascher. �We are growing our already strong team, which is again hard at work on the next major releases of our core products."
ActiveState continues to develop and support its tools for open source languages, this week releasing several updates to its tools portfolio, including Komodo 2.5.1 for Solaris, Perl Dev Kit 5.3, Visual Perl 1.8.1, and ActivePerl 5.8.1.807. Tcl Dev Kit 3.0, a major release, will ship before the end of the year.
