Does anyone know the status of this project and whether or not they will indeed intend to make it open source?

On the second page of the interview you linked to:

We use as much open source software as we can; we make as much of our software as we can open because we're a library.

A quick search on google didn't turn up the answer, but that quote makes it sounds like they should be releasing it, if they haven't done so already. I'm definately interested in checking it out and seeing how much of it has been done in Perl, if/when they release the source code.