advocacy@perl.org is a bursty mailing list. A couple of years ago, the traffic was light, but regular, and punctuated by the occasional flame war.
Today, the mailing list is silent for weeks at a time, punctuated by an occasional post which sometimes still ignites a flamewar or a reopens a permathread.
I wonder if there's a reason for this list to exist anymore. A couple of years ago, it was a hangout for Perlfolk to trade ideas on "how to make Perl better"; diatribes against Java, Python, PHP or C++; supporting words on how to "get management to accept Perl"; and general commiseration about how it's difficult to increase Perl adoption.
Since then, a few major earthquakes have changed the open source landscape. Linux is no longer infiltrating from the bottom up, but is part of every CIO's long term IT plan. Articles proclaiming apache as the most popular web server on the internet get published approximately once per month. MySQL has proven that open source development can produce software that's a compelling alternative to proprietary systems, at least for some uses.
Then there's Perl. And Python. And PHP. And Zope. And Mason. And....
Looks to me like we don't need Perl advocacy anymore. There's a general acceptance that Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, and even Lisp are perfectly acceptable Ways To Do It. The institutional resistance to open source tools like Perl is waning.
The battle is over. Time to move on.
