I am an occasional user of the old ActivePerl and now it seems we have to switch to ActiveState Platform. I watched one of the webinars that “justified” the change - maybe that makes sense for large institutions, commercial users, etc; however, for the hobbyist the Platform seems like overkill.
Anyway, I said “what the heck” and started to sign up but got stopped by these two points for the free account:
free accounts can’t be private - so that means everyone has access to my scripts, etc?
free accounts are limited to a single project - I can only have one of my hundreds of scripts in the system without a paid account?
This seems unreasonable and a real money grab by ActiveState.
Hi @lockon – happy to hear that you’re giving the ActiveState Platform a try and thanks for attending the webinar. Let me quickly clear up a few misconceptions which I think will answer your questions:
Re: free accounts can’t be private: while this is true, remember that none of your code – eg. any scripts that you write, etc. is transferred to the ActiveState Platform. The platform only stores your dependency and runtime information – eg. like a CPANFILE but with version history that’s synchronized across a team.
Re: free accounts limited to a single project – that’s not the case. You have unlimited projects on the platform. You can create whatever runtimes you want – however you can only use one at a time. But remember this refers to your runtime environment: eg. Perl and its collected dependencies – it is not talking about your code.
For example, if you have hundreds of scripts but only use a single Perl installation and set of dependencies (eg. the way you would’ve with ActivePerl) – you might only need one project containing all the modules you use across all your scripts. If however you have a custom set of dependencies for each script, you might have a project per script. In either case, there is no limitation on how many projects you can create.
Plus, as outlined in the webinar, the licensing terms are much more permissive than they were under the old ActivePerl terms giving you much more freedom on what you can do with the runtimes you download from ActiveState.