What is "open source" to one person is a black box to someone else. I'm thinking here in particular of XS modules. You have to think in C to even begin to have a prayer of altering them in any meaningful way. As far as I'm concerned, a BSD-licensed XS module may just as well be binary-only and free for non-commercial use. I'll use it if there's nothing better, but given the choice I'm going for the pure perl solution every time, even if it's less efficient, less actively maintained, and less popular.

I guess that means I'm not an orthodox Stallmanite, because practical matters concern me more than idealistic licensing issues. But then, we already knew I'm not an orthodox Stallmanite (off-topic details in comment).

As far as proprietary stuff, the number one reason I tend to avoid it (when I don't need the source code) is because of portability concerns. Portability is a big deal in the Perl community, which is a significant part of what attracted me to Perl. I can write code and use modules and expect it to all run totally unmodified on another system, another OS, another hardware architecture, et cetera, as long as I don't do anything unportable myself (such as hardcode paths, backtick out to system commands, assume that filehandles can handle binary without binmode, or cetera). This is *valuable* to me; I can implement stuff *once* and then *have* it, without the need for worrying about whether some future development (such as platform obsolescence) is going to take it away from me. (Sure, when we get Perl6 then Perl5 code will be obsolete, but it will not magically stop working. If necessary, we can keep Ponie around for virtually ever.)

Heck, people will even mod your post down for discussions about Proprietary Systems?

There's no telling what some people will downvote you for. If the thing you're talking about is on-topic, don't worry about it. Now, if you're inserting plugs for proprietary Windows-only stuff in response to a question about some issue on a *nix system, then of course you're going to get downvoted into non-existence for being off-topic. But if someone asks about text editors that run on Windows and can syntax-highlight Perl code but don't have any learning curve and can function as a drop-in replacement for Notepad for a total newbie, I would expect some proprietary solutions to be suggested, and I don't think they would get downvoted much.

In other words, it is (or should be) all about whether what you're saying fits the discussion it's part of. If we're talking about mod_perl and you start blathering about ASP, then you're going to get a visit from NodeReaper and will get no pity from me.

$;=sub{$/};@;=map{my($a,$b)=($_,$;);$;=sub{$a.$b->()}}
split//,".rekcah lreP rehtona tsuJ";$\=$ ;->();print$/
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