"I really shouldn't respond to the troll", but...

I'm thinking the same thing here.

In your original post, you said:

It's not cool to simply be tapping the CPAN because it's there.

What's cool and not cool is, well, really a matter of subjective opinion. You have yours, and you've made it known. People may agree and disagree with it (the latter group is way more likely to respond, so I'm not going to draw conclusions from the way the posts are going). But it is there.

Now you're saying

There's only an ethical requirement that taking from the CPAN also means giving to the CPAN

That's a huge jump from "cool" to "ethical".

For many people, their advocacy of perl, the programming language, is simply to be effective with it. How did I get perl into our team at work? Simply by proving it to be orders of magnitude more effective than what we were doing (shell), and orders of magnitude better than the alternatives (C++ or Java) at what we were going to do with it (text manipulation and filesystem manipulation - two of perl's strongest points).

Depending on your employment contract, that may be the best you can do. You may not be allowed to contribute to CPAN - it took me 6 months to get management to approve my work on CPAN, for example, including one lengthy conversation with a corporate lawyer. You disparage the good they do for perl simply by being an example of perl's usefulness to their cow-orkers.

Even then, we've (well, you have - I wasn't on PM at the time) had one PM member who was prohibited from using PM at all for a period of time. (Yes, I read random nodes from time to time.) That time only ended when his employment ended. Any assumption or subjective requirement to be a member of the community devalued that member while so employed. I wonder if your statements say that tilly should have quit and starved to maintain his merlyn-sanctioned stature in the community.

Coming from other languages, I didn't join PM for about 3 years after starting to use perl. Perhaps I'm overly taken with the virtue of Hubris, but I would claim I had reasonable "expert" status prior to joining PM or releasing anything on CPAN. In C++, the man pages had URLs in them, but no concept of this type of community. So when perl's man pages also had URLs in them, I didn't even guess that there might be this type of community behind it. I just toughed my way through the learning curve based on the perl docs, especially perlstyle. My coding style may have changed somewhat since joining PM, but not significantly more than if I hadn't - as my coding style has changed slowly over the years anyway.

I've been labelled close-minded pretty much my entire life. But yet, for some reason, I can accept all programmers of perl into Perl. I'm not sure why you want to close the door on them. Ok, that's not quite a good analogy - I'm sure you'd accept them if they came in the PM door. You may even invite people you know outside the site (e.g., on c.l.p if you still participate in usenet). But you'll reject them as "Perl members" until they do so.

I note, Tanktalus, that you spelled it 'perl' in some places, yet I know you to be a competent Perl programmer and active in the community. This pretty much says it all, IMNSHO. There are probably lots of competent Perl programmers in the community who spell it "incorrectly", either because it's no big deal to them, or because they're being cantankerous. This shibboleth tells us nothing more than how someone chooses to spell 'Perl'.