ActiveState and Microsoft have signed a three-year agreement for a Perl Open Source development and support contract.
The FAQ of the agreement notes that the four main areas of development will be globalization (i.e, Unicode support), a fork implementation, Microsoft Installer Support, and PerlScript performance. All code added to the perl core in this effort will be released under the same terms as perl, but additional products from this agreement, under other licenses, may also be released.
Beta versions of the next release of ActivePerl (ActiveState's version of Perl for Win32) are scheduled for August 1999, to be presented at the O'Reilly Open Source Software Convention.
