Attn: Business & Technology editors

ActiveState Announces Appointment of David Ascher as Chief Technologist

LAS VEGAS, NV - November 18, 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.

ActiveState's tools are available individually or collectively in
single, value-priced bundles for professional open source language
programmers. Educational, volume, and enterprise licenses are also
available. Free trial licenses, additional details, evaluation copies,
and downloads are at www.ActiveState.com/Products.

About ActiveState
ActiveState, a division of Sophos, is the leading provider of software
solutions that increase developer productivity and organizational
efficiency through the innovative use of open source technology. Over
two million developers rely on ActiveState's open source language
programming tools, language distributions, and enterprise support
services. More information is at http://www.ActiveState.com.

Media & Analyst Inquiries:
Melissa Wong, Horn Group
mwong@[...].com 
1.415.905.4046

ActivePerl, ActiveState, Komodo, Perl Dev Kit, Tcl Dev Kit, and Visual
Perl are trademarks of ActiveState, a division of Sophos.  All other
company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners. 

Copyright 2003 ActiveState, a division of Sophos.