Elaine and Jason's comments are all valid, the advocacy has to be done on
many fronts, at the roots level, along the trunk and at the crown. So we
shouldn't waste our time trying to prove to each other what kind of
advocacy is better, but rather share techniques and use them all.
One of the things I was thinking about is that we simply need more press,
and the press coming from big companies has a heavy weight, since it's
being read by many corporate managers.
I'll give you an example.
I've worked at Intel for 4 years, 3 years in the microprocessor department
and 1 year in the networking department. Perl has been used heavily in the
both, mostly for in-house developed tools.
I've two things to say about Intel:
* a majority of Perl coders at Intel, who were trained in house are
isolated from the Perl community, they don't even know about CPAN and
reinvent everything from scratch. Something that Intel could save money on
if they were using CPAN modules, and put this money back into community.
The idea is to start a program where the Perl community builds bridges
with Perl brothers and sisters trained in isolation with a motto of saving
money and time[=money] for these corporations and hopefully have them give
back in money, support, PR announces, etc.
* It'd be very important for Perl acceptance to have someone like Intel,
mentioning that they use Perl pretty much everywhere in the public
announcement, their sites, etc. But the thing is, Perl is something
obvious at Intel, and nobody makes a lot of fuss about it, since it's
worked for years and the human nature is more about bragging about
problems than recognizing things that just work.
So here I'm shifting from my suggestion of finding the Big Company into
making these Big Companies admit that they use Perl. Does it seem like a
better idea?
This reminds me of the funny stories, where the Big Companies have used
linux for years, but had no guts to admit it, mainly because of fear of MS
disapproval.
_____________________________________________________________________
Stas Bekman JAm_pH -- Just Another mod_perl Hacker
http://stason.org/ mod_perl Guide http://perl.apache.org/guide
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://apachetoday.com http://eXtropia.com/
http://singlesheaven.com http://perl.apache.org http://perlmonth.com/
