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Postings from February 2007
On 2/28/07, Richard Foley <Richard.Foley@rfi.net> wrote: > On Wednesday 28 February 2007 08:38, renee.baecker@smart-websolutions.de > wrote: > > > > I think Perl needs some "PR" to make companies aware of Perls cabilities > > and future development... > > > Yes, Yes, Yes. I think there is room for a Perl professional services company in Europe with some responsibility overlap with TPF. I think an issue that maybe isnt so obvious to the North American part of our community is that in Europe there is a vast amount of money and the companies that go alone with them in a very small space so something like this probably is more viable here than there. (The EU has a slightly larger percentage of world GDP than the US in about half the amount of space with more than twice the population density.) Just thinking in terms of political, financial and industrial centers you have London, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Frankfurt, Munich all within a 5 hour train ride of each other, most of them much closer. Add in Milan, Madrid and Lisbon and you have considerable opportunities within reasonable traveling distance. The real question is where to get the money to start and how to establish the relationship between the current volunteer infrastructure and the newly established firm. Ideally the firm would be a services company with high level access into the development process. (Something like AS was back in the day when GSAR worked for AS but was also pumpking) I have a friend who is currently in the process of establishing something like a cross between AS and TPF for a different opensource project. The project has some natural advantages including a benevolent-dictator who is both very familiar with the corporate world and also independently wealthy from previous commerical development so there are obviously some gaps between the two projects, but ive found it very interesting to watch their progress and contrast it with Perl and TPF. What they will be selling is "officially sanctioned support services", something that is very important to the corporate and especially financial world. They will also be doing training and certification processes but these make less sense to a programming language than to an application framework like they are working on. Id very much like to see something along these lines for perl. But i guess the core is that we are in general a bunch of programmers. We need funding and business expertise to make something like this work. And where that is going to come from is a really tough question. Any multi-millionaires with business/sales experience reading this list want to step up to the plate? Yves -- perl -Mre=debug -e "/just|another|perl|hacker/"