Taking a break from all the presentations I am slowly starting on my
journal entry for today.
Expecting I was about to that a journal entry full of technical material
on all the new projects I have ideas for, based on the many presentation
I have heard today and which I listed in my journal entry yesterday.
Well all these presentations where fine and technically inspiring, but I
heard a presentation this late afternoon entitled 'Can a Company Use
Perl to Develop - and Sell - Commercial Tools?', which for some reason
really gave me food for thought.
The presentator (Fabrizio Sanface) asked 'Why it was so difficult for
Perl based shops to get their products made visible in the Perl
community?" - well I guess the answer is quite simple, Perl evolves
around a community of developers, people whom are used to doing much
themselves and who likes to poke around under the hood.
And since Fabrizio represented a company who sell their product under a
shareware license the problem might be that the community is not used to
components they cannot turn upside down if they like.
So where the community is used to being the carrier for all this stuff
it can also work as roadblock for Perl based software not necessarily
being distributed under the same terms as Perl itself.
(Ref: http://www.perl.com/language/misc/Artistic.html).
The presentor of ExtUtils::ModuleMaker (R. Geoffrey Avery) has a nice
feature in his software: 'pick what license should accompany your
module', which probably mean that you could problably distribute your
code through out the Perl community, perhaps even via CPAN or at least
comp.lang.perl.announce even with a license being non-opensource and
non-artistic.
I think for some reason the community works as a barrier for these
things to happen, even though the community have all the best of
intentions, it has no history of embracing commercial aspects, as for
example the Linux community (the example given by Fabrizio Sanface).
So what is the solution?
Well that commercially founded software has to be accepted by the Perl
community, it could make way for many 'new' modules which currently is
located on company CVS servers etc. all over the world, and Perl and its
community will benefit from alot of programming hours and domain
knowledge.
Software can and should be able to be distributed via CPAN etc. under
other licenses (and I even think it is)?
So is this possible at all?
Well I think the Perl community can handle it - it will take some time,
but they will eventually, but can the software vendors?
They should remember a few things (no I am not going to go all the way
in the discussion on Open Source and Freeware etc.) well they should
consider whether they want to distribute their code via a community which
will copy, improve and outperform whatever they come up with, because
molding something existing is much easier than building it from scratch
and simply because there is more than one way to do it.
So letting commercially developed modules and code (products), be able to
be distributed via the Perl community under the proper licenses should not be
a problem, the problem or challenge so to speak will be to convince more
companies to distribute?
