Last year, Dave Cross had a humorous lightning talk where he proposed that we mandate widespread adoption of Perl by various legal means.
Apparently, someone from Microsoft took Dave's ideas quite seriously. A recent column from Nick Petreley talks about forthcoming issues in digital rights management at the OS level:
It seems natural for Microsoft to be interested in digital rights management because Gates and company are perhaps the most paranoid creatures on earth when it comes to piracy. However, I believe there is an even more ulterior motive here. Microsoft has a patent on the concept of a digital rights management operating system. If Microsoft can make the Palladium successful, it can present the open source community with two choices. PCs running Linux or any other non-Microsoft OS may not use the chip, in which case these PCs will not be able to play any copyrighted DVDs or music CDs. If the open source OS uses the chip, someone has to pay Microsoft for the right to do so, since it owns the patent.Looks like the standard Microsoft cut off their air supply tactic writ large...
Actually my lightning talk was about keeping Perl a secret so only clever people would use it.
You're thinking of the paper I presented called Perl for the People - A Modest Proposal for Increasing Perl Usage Using a Combination of Legal and Technological Means. The slides for that talk are also online.
