I believe certification is required for Perl to be more accepted by big business

Based on .. what?

Perl is quite well accepted at a variety of businesses -- although it's open source, there is support, especially if you have a couple of decent Perl developers on hand. It's also possible to hire bright people and train them to develop in Perl.

I believe certification is probably favoured more by the HR folks -- it gives them something easily quantifiable. The technical managers don't care so much; or at least (heh) that's my opinion. Likewise which university (if any) someone went to. I went to a great school, but I also graduated a while ago. But get me into an interview situation, and I get really excited to have the opportunity to talk about some lovely complicated thing that I developed recently.

I think bright, enthusiastic (or passionate) and gets things done are pre-requisites for a decent software developer -- some certification means almost nothing.

I believe it'll provide much needed funding for Perl development

Why?

Is funding that badly needed that we need to lower ourselves to organizing certification? Why even connect the two? If we need funding, go out and get it -- no need to tie it to certification (something that I find unnecessary in any case).