After all, Netscape was number one before AOL laid hand on it.

"Laid" it hands on it? Well, it wasn't that Netscape was as dominant as they used to be, and that it wasn't clear they were going to lose against Microsoft when it comes to marketshare. And it wasn't that Bina, Andreesen and Clark started Netscape with any other objective than to make some big bucks. From the start, Netscape played the Microsoft game of not following the standards for the sake of gaining marketshare. Do I feel sorry they lost? Not at all. Does it make me snicker? Certainly.

That makes me think (a scary thought), what stops a big corporation from acquiring/devouring Perl?

Many things. First of all, from whom would they acquire Perl? Perl isn't owned by anyone in particular. Secondly, what's there to gain? It's not that everyone uses Perl. I bet 90% of the computer users haven't even heard of Perl. There wouldn't be a big enough market for Perl. If suddenly people had to pay a fee for using Perl, the already relatively small amount of people using Perl would decimate; people would flee to python, Ruby, C, Java, etc.

Abigail