I dont have a lot of time to put into this topic, but I do have a few ethings to say.

  1. I am a big fan of shareware. That is, try it and if you like it, then buy it. I do this for all software I work with -- games, spreadsheets, etc. I think Perlmonks is the best way for me to get help about Perl and thus am willing to pay money. But note well, when I pay money I have expectations about what I get. In some cases, it's a warranty, In other cases, a support contract, in other cases, I have "stock" in the company. vroom has made it clear that this is his site, meaning he sees it as something that he maintains final word on at alltimes. Thus with that privilege, comes the responsibility of keeping it going, all by himself if need be. I would be happy to pay for disk space, bandwidth, or whatever. But it is reasonable and common to expect something in return.
  2. sorry to hear about vroom being laid off. I guess he finished school in Michigan didn't he?
  3. We need to be able to vote on a priority list to set vroom's marching orders. Excuse me? Have we hired vroom? Are we paying his bills? Not the last that I looked!
Again, the issue of paying for control of a person is coming up. mirod's retort contained this same sentiment. Other CPAN authors, ERYQ, jean-louis leroy and others seem to think that their role in the freeware community is limited because no-one is paying them.

But many others work tirelessly for free and don't get into hot and testy battles with those expecting service from them.

so, we can see Perlmonks as a big contribution to the perl community just like DBI or CGI or Perl itself. And with that comes (usually) free support channels, good documentaiton and some degree of democracy and some means of submitting suggestions and patches to the system.

This isn't all my thoughts on this issue but I do wish vroom were a bit more vocal about that status of perlmonks and whether it stands a chance of collapsing. And just how much control of the site he would give up so that others can help keep it going. Ie, someone buy a DSL line, someone but disk space, etc.

In reply to I pay for what I like by princepawn
in thread Why did people vote for this? by tilly

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