On March 1, 1999, the Board of Directors of The Perl Institute unanimously voted to dissolve The Perl Institute.
The specific reasons why have not yet been made public, as The Perl News currently only has access to the meeting minutes, which will be posted on www.perl.org. However, the minutes do speak to the Institute being ineffectual: Larry Wall discussed at the meeting the differences between "top-down" and "bottom-up" development, and he cited the Institute as an attempt at a "top-down" approach, while Perl culture mandates a "bottom-up" approach.
The minutes note that the Institute has no known outstanding debts. The Perl Institute's assets, including the domain names perl.org and cpan.org, are to be gifted to Perl Mongers. It is unclear whether, if Perl Mongers does receive these assets, it will continue to use those domains to provide some or all of the services TPI currently provides (such as Perl News, bug tracking, mailing lists, CPAN Testers, and access to CPAN itself) to the Perl community.
What is clear is that in some way or another, most or all of these services will continue somewhere. Perl News will continue mostly unaffected, as will CPAN Testers, and access to CPAN will, if all else fails, still be available through dozens of other sites around the world.
The minutes mention that Wall and Randal Schwartz will post a press release on perl.org. When it is posted, it will be mentioned in Perl News; any other information we receive will be passed along too, so watch this space.
