Background
I have given it a lot of consideration on my latest discussion topic related to the Perl Monks Community, and would like to introduce it with great care, so as not to come across as sounding like I have nothing interesting to discuss with this new discussion topic.

Thesis
I believe that there should be a ( insert monthly, biweekly, bimonthly here, ) collection of the Perl Monks site on a single ( if the majority of important information fits on a typical 640 MB cdrom, ) cdrom, and either freely distributed with a cost for shipping and handling, or maybe a small donation of money as to benefit the monastery ( similar to how the offering plate works, ).

Reasons
There are many reasons why I think that this new idea should be considered, or at the very least, discussed among interested monks. Here is a shortened list of the key reasons:
  1. It reaches a far greater audience for those who either
    • can’t access the internet (due to financial reasons, or otherwise.)
    • don’t have any way of getting online in their area.
    • like to have a collection of great scripts and code snippets and helpful answers to tough questions at their fingertips without having to go online to check the archives of the current cdrom version collection.
  2. It could benefit the monastery financially (if there was a small donation charge, etc.) since creating and distributing cd’s is very simple, and cheaper than ever before.

Anti-Thesis
Of course, whenever you make a distribution on cdrom, typically if you don’t want various people to freely distribute it without the Monastary’s consent, you would have to make cd keys, which isn’t hard, it’s just more of a hassle (possibly.) Note: This wouldn’t be a problem if the cd was freely distributed, but for a donation type of charge, so you would think that people would gladly donate if they were really into the information they are receiving on the disc(s). Ultimately, if the monastery was not making enough money to create and distribute more cdroms of these collections, it could cause various financial problems, namely: ‘where did all our funding money go?’ type of questions.

Conclusion
After one weighs the reasons for creating a cdrom distribution of various collections or updates of Perl Monks, there are both many good reasons to think about creating a cd distribution of this type, although on the other hand, it could hurt the Monastary’s funds if there was not enough people donating money for the cd’s. It would be a difficult decision perhaps of what to do on this possible project, but if it ever were to at least be tried out, I am convinced that it would be successful, provided it was distributed to the right crowd of programmers.

Note: Just to let you know, I didn't use font tags in the main part of this discussion topic, since a certain monk has let me know what they think about old font tags ^^;

Andy Summers

In reply to Perl Monks Cdrom Distribution by bladx

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