While still a young language, Pike has matured over the last few years. While initially developed by a team at Roxen Internet Software AB as the backend of their commercial web content management system, it is now maintained by the Software and Systems division (SaS) of the Department of Computer and Information Science (IDA) at Linköping University (LiU). Pike is still released under the GNU General Public License, GPL, but also under GNU Lesser General Public License, LGPL and Mozilla Public License, MPL. It is, and will continue to be, freely distributed. This means that you are free to use and modify the source code in any way you please. IDA maintains the right to the brand name and the copyright, guaranteeing that Pike will continue to be developed and enhanced, and remain free software. Pike is easy to learn, and just as easy to use in the development of powerful applications. Experience from development in Pike at Roxen proves that Pike is suitable for large projects with more than half a million lines of code. The language is designed to be useful and powerful. As the syntax of Pike is similar to that of Java, C and C#, most programmers will find it easy to use. As Pike is a high-level, interpreted and modular object-oriented language, powerful applications can be rapidly developed. Pike has evolved rather than been designed, and the changes made have been guided by its users' needs. In general, the better you get to know Pike, the more you will appreciate it, from a user's perspective. Pike is just as suitable for large and intricate applications as for creating use-once scripts. When needed, you can also write Pike modules in C, to gain better performance or access C libraries. This is transparent to the module's users; modules written in C are accessed in exactly the same way as those written in Pike. It is also possible to access Java code directly from within Pike, making it possible to make a Pike glue for Java libraries and programs.