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

In reply to Re: So, Netscape is dead? by Abigail-II
in thread So, Netscape is dead? by chunlou

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.