Dick Hardt

Hardt has spoken at tech events such as Web 2.0, Supernova, Digital ID World, ETech, OSCON, PICNIC,[1] International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2007),[2] ISOC, Anti-Phishing Working Group, at New York University (NYU), Harvard and many other locales.

Under his leadership as CEO, ActiveState became a leader in tools for open-source programming languages and anti-spam software and was acquired by UK-based security company, Sophos, in 2003 for $23 million.

Hardt claims to have made the original port of the Perl programming language to Windows in the mid-1990s, which was highly controversial in the open source community.

[citation needed] In 1999, ActiveState signed a contract to add features previously missing from Windows ports of Perl.

[4][5] On December 9, 2008, Hardt announced that he was joining Microsoft as a partner architect and will be working on consumer, enterprise and government identity problems.