This is my first time, so be gentle.
I'm a perl newcomer when lined up with most of you, just using it regularly for a little over a year, and sporadically for a bit longer then that. I'm rapidly turning from user to advocate...
I manage a small IT department for a US Navy command. Like most other Navy sites, we have the impending doom of the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI) deployment shadowing our every move.
What's amusing about it is that as this Windows-centric, heavily single-minded concept gets deployed (slowly and at great cost to the taxpayer), the use of open source systems and tools is experiencing a quiet but effective surge from within the dark crevices of IT shops and developer's desks.
The big initiative in the Navy's information management future is the concept of fully-standardized web portals, using concepts like XML and languages like Perl and PHP. One layer below that is the push to use an open source foundation to run all this stuff. So, the use of Linux and the BSDs and Apache is slowly becoming more apparent.
I've been doing it for some time now. About time the rest of them caught up. ;)
