The GPL and the Artistic License make it consistently possible for anyone to acquire perl. The issue is exclusivity. A company can't get exclusive rights to perl. They could conceivably make changes to it and call it theirs, but who would use it?

Maybe a lot of people if the company could add a lot of value to it... and that's where the community comes in¹. We don't just use perl... we make it better. We could have more than a "minor boycott" of the new language. We could boycott its use, maintenance, and development. There are few companies that could muster the resources that regularly go into developing perl, not to mention all the modules available on CPAN. And keep in mind also that there are many companies in the perl community. There are corporations both big and small with huge parts of their day to day operations that are dependent on perl².

The Perl Foundation (and YAS) is the least of the factors I mentioned, but it represents a non-profit corporation that is willing to support Perl's continuing development. I.e. unlike most open source initiatives, Perl has a money man. (Not one with real deep pockets, but it's a start.)

To conclude: they could try, but they wouldn't get far. And that's why they won't try.

Update: Added footnotes.

1. The community, in this case, is both the market and the competition. It would be crazy to try building market share under those conditions. ;-)

2. My point being that those companies would have a vested interest in preventing the privatization of perl

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";

In reply to Re: Re: Re: So, Netscape is dead? by sauoq
in thread So, Netscape is dead? by chunlou

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