Perl, in a way, is just another way for them to advertise their books and services.

OK... so they support Perl because it's profitable for them to do so. I don't see a problem with that, as it causes no problems with the way Perl is written, released, distributed or supported. Their support is helpful to the Perl community, and I'm glad that they are able to profit from that. Win-win propositions are good things.

First clue was Perl.com is owned by O'Reilly. The domain should be public domain as Perl is open source. Instead it's owned by a specific company trying to reap money off of it.

First, you have a factual error. Perl.com is not owned by O'Reilly, but by Tom Christiansen. TC is an O'Reilly author, but is not their employee -- they just publish his books. O'Reilly has chosen to sponsor perl.com to make it as useful as possible. In exchange, they ask for publicity. Seems like another win-win to me. If O'Reilly stopped sponsoring perl.com, I would hope that Tom would either get another sponsorship, or that the community would step up and keep the site running. At that point, of course, all the O'Reilly marketing materials would probably disappear.

Secondly, they release a million books on the topic every few months it appears and trying to be the only books available for this specific language. It's obvious they are trying to be a monopoly for Perl and it's really heartbreaking.

That's ridiculous: you said yourself that Perl is open-source software. It's impossible for O'Reilly to monopolize Perl -- they don't and can't own it. Lots of other people publish Perl books, too, and there is nothing O'Reilly could do to stop that.

The fact that O'Reilly's books appear to be the only ones sometimes only says two things. First, that they were first to fill a niche that no one else was publishing for. Second, that their product's quality is such that they have very little competition. Even if they could monopolize (which they haven't) the Perl book business, they have no way of turning that into control of Perl.

So the community gets many good Perl books, and O'Reilly gets to make some money. Plus, major Perl community members (like Tom Christiansen, for example) get to make some money from their knowledge of Perl, which provides motivation for them to continue to be active in the community. Hm, win-win again...

I don't purchase O'Reilly books anymore because I don't like what they're doing and requested our local library a year or two ago to stop their books all together. They said they'd look into it, but since they don't have much money and the IT department is not a top priority, no such books will be ordered any time soon.

Your decisions are yours to make, of course, and if you feel O'Reilly isn't helping in the way you want, you're free to vote with your wallet. But to ask your library not to provide some of the best books on the market because you have a gripe with O'Reilly's motivation is just stupid. Firstly, by denying access to excellent material, you'd only hurt the community's ability to grow and learn. Secondly, if you're after O'Reilly, you'd be shooting yourself in the foot -- they are the most-recommended Perl books around, and so if the Library doesn't have them, more people will just buy a copy.

I'm not saying the information they give is bad and they don't help the Perl community. I just think they are here more for monetary gain than to assist others.

Why is thier motivation even relevant? As long as they are not out to hurt Perl (which you acknowledge they aren't), then who cares why they help?

O'Reilly is actually fairly enlightened as a company: they realize that Perl can help them make money, and that a strong Perl community means more potential customers. So, they support the community. Since that helps us, and does no harm to us, why should we care if they make some money in the process?