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Postings from February 2007
On Tuesday 27 February 2007 21:32, Nicholas Clark wrote: > [and y'all thought that this thread was dead. Well, no, it's undead. :-)] > Aaaaaaaaagh. > > > I'm just guessing here, but my > > feeling about it is that the Tcl (enterprise) users know they have a > > small community, so stuff they want won't get done unless they pay > > someone to do it. > It'll be a sad day if/when Perl becomes a truly minority language. I think at the moment it must be installed on nearly every box running, in one form or another. How it's percieved is another question. > I'm unaware of any one person who is both capable and keen to do work on > the core full time (but alone) if funding were available. > It seems to me that there is no way on earth that paying any one person would work, and yesterday of course. I'm not sure if simply paying the same people who do the exact same work for free at the moment, is a particularly workable model moving forward. But then, what is the solution? A group could be created tasked with generating interest and funding from corporate companies. This group would be responsible for seeing that particular work, requested perhaps from said corporations, was developed and integrated into Perl, by identifying appropriate people to complete certain works, and by paying them by contract. Into Perl might mean core, or it might mean CPAN modules - it doesn't matter so long as the solution works. The Foundation sort of does this, but I'm not aware of it being particularly pro-active. It seems to me also that the grant system is also based on people putting their hand out and asking to be paid to do their favorite hobby, please. I think this idea (and Perl itself) needs a more aggressive and real-world solution to target corporations on terms these corporations would understand, and begin to appreciate. > Maybe I'm pessimistic. > To paraphrase a well known quote: Just because you're a pessimist, doesn't mean it won't all go wrong anyway. :-) -- Richard Foley Ciao - shorter than aufwiedersehen http://www.rfi.net/ ps. Please resend any bounced or unanswered emails.