Before you go any further with this

Comes across as very negative. Implies there's something very bad about Amazon that we and the OP should be aware of.

you should read Mark-Jason Dominus is Boycotting Amazon for a different view on Amazon.

Different view indeed, I agree. It's his opinion, as I stated in my reply, he's entitled to it. I don't see what it has to do with the OP's question, however. As I said, I think any boycott is a matter of personal preference, and as the OP said in his response, it's not relevent: he's doing this as a "survival strategy", rather than to achieve the moral high ground. The OP also fails to state any viewpoint for or against Amazon: he's simply trying to put together some scripting to make himself some money, so any attempts to counter his views are misplaced.

In the interest of balance, however, merlyn has a link to Amazon from his Perl Training page

Indeed.

so the boycott is obviously not universally adopted by those in the Perl community.

I'd agree. Looking through the responses to this post, it seems a fairly well-balanced split - so you could go as far as saying "some" of those in the Perl community support this boycott. Pointing out one person who disagrees, and then saying that it's "not univerally adopted" doesn't push the argument in either direction, and certainly doesn't balance the negativity of "Before you go any further": your argument still has a very strong implication of "Amazon is bad". If anything, "not universally adopted" simply implies that a minority disagree with your position (for example, like Windows isn't universally adopted because a minority of businesses choose to use Linux).

I think, in summary, that I read your post as being quite negative, when, in my opinion, there was no need for that negativity. If the OP was debating the morals of getting paid for sending customers to Amazon, then maybe it would have been justified. He was, however, asking a technical question in a technical forum, and hence objectively the moral implications are irrelevant. We regularly help people with email scripts capable of spamming millions of internet users every day, and yet questions are rarely raised over what it'll be used for, the morality of it, or boycotts of those posts planned.

While you personally disagree with Amazon's business practises, I don't think your post had any relevance to the OP's question or the subsequent discussion: it was simply off-topic.

-- Foxcub
#include www.liquidfusion.org.uk

Thank you for your explanation as to why you thought I was negative towards Amazon.

My actual request was to explain why you claim I have attempted to imply anything other than what I clearly stated. Your words were "Implying that that opinion is that of the Perl community as a whole, which I think is the attempt here". I simply want to know why you said that because it certainly wasn't in my statement and I totally disassociate myself from that sentiment although having created the myth, you seem intent on perpetuating that idea.

As I said above (although not very clearly), two phrases (in the context they were in) really led me to that conclusion: "Before you go any further", and "not universally adopted". I thought that both of those detracted from the balance of the post, putting the argument against in a much better light than the argument for.

Maybe it was more of a bad choice of words on your part than an actual attempt to imply what I thought you did?

-- Foxcub
#include www.liquidfusion.org.uk