Dick Hardt will speak about his successful involvement with the Perl, Python, PHP, and Tcl communities as the founder and former CEO of ActiveState, the leading provider of tools for open source programming languages. He’ll discuss the considerable and persistent efforts it took to be successful, despite his extensive involvement with the Perl community, beginning in the mid-1990s with his popular and somewhat controversial port of Perl to the Windows platform. Dick will also talk to the difficulties he encountered in handling community perceptions of the fine line between the open source ethos and commercial software development.

The developer relations activities they undertook included: user group sponsorship, the founding and support of community awards, substantive sponsorship of grassroots and mainstream conferences, and their most valuable work -- building an IDE and making it available for free, as well as maintaining free popular language modules. These efforts combined resulted in over a million hits to their site each month, making ActiveState one of the few profitable open source related companies, and led to the company's acquisition in 2003.