The person may not have a choice. The Unix server may be running on proprietary hardware that has a non-negligeable annual maintenance fee. Maybe the bean counters thought that was an expense they could cut. Maybe they thought that W2K on commodity hardware would be cheaper in the long run (for some definitions of "cheaper" and "long run" that I doubt coincide with mine).

It may be too late for the anonymonk to do anything about it. Looks like (s)he's coming from a Netscape environment, not Apache.

Pointing out how hopeless cgi-lib.pl really is may not do anything, apart from convincing clueless managers that this Perl stuff is pretty whacky, and maybe we better replace it with ASP, or Java, or some other buzzword du jour.

All I can suggest is to try and help the person resolve the porting issues, and then we'll see about converting them to CGI.pm. How much code are we talking about, anyway?

g r i n d e r