If only it were that simple. I get to use AIX 6.1 at $work. Released in 2007 (according to Wikipedia), it comes with 5.8.8. Not even 5.8.9.

Yes, I've complained to the devs, well over a year ago. My contact passed it on, and now she's at a new job ("IBM = I've Been Moved", she tells me). *sigh*

Earlier this week, I compiled my own copy of Perl 5.14.0 to ship with our AIX product. Getting management and legal approval to actually ship it, though, means another year of 5.8.8, at least.

I suspect that this is not the only commercial platform that has not incremented its base level of perl in ages. Without paying customers complaining, they likely don't have anyone who cares enough to drive it internally. Then, those of us who do care, have only a few choices, including: pester the vendor (you may not give them enough $$ to make your requests a priority), or convince your lawyers to allow you to build/install it yourself. In the latter case, if you don't already have the compiler for the platform, you may need to buy that for some platforms, which increases the cost considerably (the README.aix file said gcc would work, but using xlC is better - in my case, I found a box with a licensed xlC, making that easier). If you're using it internally, this is about it. But if you then need to ship that version of Perl to your own customers, you may need another round with the lawyers. This, of course, all depends on how comfortable your lawyers are with open-source tools, combined with the bean-counters' need to monetise everything and eliminate all risk to that money. In my case, the lawyers are slow and the bean-counters don't get that shipping Perl is not a risk.

All in all, there's still far too many 5.8.5-5.8.9 installations out there. And I'm not terribly happy about it, either.