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Ugly little beastie
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From:
David Grove
Date:
April 3, 2000 22:53
Subject:
Ugly little beastie
Message ID:
000101bf9dfa$1e4cd5c0$e4f58bcd@petesplace.com
[aw heck with it, might as well give you the long one]
So, the ugly little beastie finally popped up. I hate to say I told you so,
but I told you so. I had a feeling it was waving a four-colored flag. I told
you it wouldn't be long, and that it was pretty obvious why 5.6 was so
hurried to release, and who was responsible for it. I remember being called
"paranoid" when I said it, and flamed out the wazoo.
I accept your apologies.
Now, rather than write a long rant, which I'm sure you all appreciate my
refraining from, let us come directly to the question at hand. The question
last week was, "What have we learned from this?" I believe this has now
changed to, "How long are we going to let Microsoft and ActiveState drag
this group around by the short hairs?"
Clear: 5.6 was released too soon, with many features unfinished or unstable.
Even Tom (intermingled with other, shall we say, somewhat bigotrous
statements, and immodest, irrelevant commentary) and Sarathy have said this
in clear words. Others have admitted this, and questioned it, as well, but I
think the statements of these two are enough.
Clear: ActiveState had a financial motive for manipulating this release, and
appear to have financial benefit from its being released at this time.
Clear: As an employee of ActiveState, Sarathy almost certainly knew about
this in advance, yet said nothing about it when we were all looking for a
reason for the timing of the release.
Clear: If, in fact, Sarathy did know about this in advance, and a dilemma
appeared between a Microsoft deadline and an unfinished perl 5.6, then a
choice would have needed to be made by him at some point between
ActiveState's pocketbook and the well-being of the perl language and
community.
Clear: If that choice was made, it was clearly made in ActiveState's favor.
Clear: The harm done by the early release of perl 5.6 is not limited to the
Win32 operating system.
Clear: Microsoft has made VERY CLEAR statements (the "Halloween Letter"),
and has publically ratified those statements, of their intention to copy,
alter, and monopolize free commodities such as communications protocols and
whatever else is in favor of the free-choice user community.
Clear: Perl is a major force at this time standing in the way of Microsoft's
dominance of web technology and programming.
Conclusion: Well, when I bring conclusions to you, and give you correct
predictions, you tend to jump all over me, even though I'm right as rain.
So, make your _own_ conclusions this time. Make a choice. Sacrifice perl to
the four-colored flag, or put a stop to it before it goes any farther. This
is certainly not as far as it's going to go. Take your time. I'm stepping
out of the room for a smoke.
I do wish you guys would get a clue about this problem, and prevent further
ActiveState interference and Microsoft influence. There are a whole lot of
Perl users who would prefer not to be paying $1500 for the privilege of
using perl in the next 5 years.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nathan Torkington [mailto:gnat@frii.com]
> Sent: Monday, April 03, 2000 10:36 PM
> To: advocacy@perl.org
> Subject: Perl 5.6 shipped by Microsoft
> http://www.networkworld.com/news/2000/0403msunix.html
> Microsoft are shipping a Unix integration/co-existence kit, and part
> of the package is ActivePerl 5.6. Cost for the package is $149 (it
> includes commercial implementations of NIS, NFS, and 60 utilities like
> grep, ls, ps, etc.)
> Woo, way to go Perl. Sneaking into all those hard-to-reach
> Billborgian crevices.
> Nat
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Ugly little beastie
by David Grove