On Mon, 13 Aug 2001, Elaine -HFB- Ashton wrote:
> Stas Bekman [[EMAIL PROTECTED]] quoth:
> *>
> *>I'm talking about educating companies about CPAN and such, for their
> *>internal product which they probably would never release.
>
> Symantec enquired some in January or so about using Perl in one of their
> products as they were concerned about the licensing. I don't know if they
> ever resolved the issue but I haven't seen the product that was mentioned
> either.
>
> Licensing is important to companies and products, internal or external.
> This isn't always easy with open source code.
What Perl misses is a single face. If you are a corporate body and want to
enquiry about Perl, where would they go? www.perl.com? www.perl.org? what
do they find there? nothing, that will answer their questions. All the
current resources are targeted to those who know what they want, this is
not the situation here. We are talking about those who don't know how and
where.
There is a missing bridge between the vast resources that Perl community
provides and those who haven't crossed that bridge, simply because they
cannot find this bridge. It doesn't exists. The main bridge that currently
exists is the word of a mouth, just like you, Elaine, said before. Another
bridge is probably made of a few good books. C'est tout :(
But we also need to build yet another bridge, which will provide a simple
roadmap to the complex and highly distributed Perl community and
resources. Here is a very simplified version of my vision:
Welcome to the Perl Language
----------------------------
What is the sound of Perl? Is it not the sound of a wall that people
have stopped banging their heads against?"
-- Larry Wall, creator of Perl.
----------------------------
A very short (a few lines) intro to Perl. (link to an extensive intro)
----------------------------
Finding Your Way Around Perl
----------------------------
If you need help with your code go here. (usenet, lists)
If you are looking for a ready made Perl module go here (search.cpan.org)
If you need a commercial support go here (???)
If you want to contribute to Perl
code , go here (pause.cpan.org)
skills , go here (???, perlmonks)
money , go here (yas)
PR , go here (???)
...
...
...
You get the idea. This should be very intuitive navigation map. The site
name should be very obvious (too bad www.perl.com is taken),
perllanguage.com seems to be not taken? It should have simple and light,
but neat design.
The site should go through the heavy usability test by the audience it's
created for (those who don't know), since if it's not intuitive and easy
to navigate, it'd be a waste of time.
And the most important thing, it should be mentioned everywhere,
especially in all online stories. We, Perl advocats, are to make sure to
mention it everywhere, until it catches up and people will start doing it
by themselves. Here is an idea for a sig:
-- Simply Perl http://perllanguage.com
(aka Simply Red :) or justperl.com?
Now if we acoomplish this, those who don't know how, will easily find
their way through the available resources and find their way to
contribute. This will be a big boon to the Perl community.
As you can see, I by myself couldn't suggest resources for some of the
obvious items I came up with. What happens to those who aren't involved in
Perl that much? They just walk away and probably won't come back.
> *>Basically all is needed is to make these companies aware of the forums
> *>where their Perl programmers can ask questions, and thus improve their
> *>productivity. e.g. Q: "I'm writing a wrapper around cvs, may be you know
> *>somebody who wrote such a wrapper already", A: "Sure, here is the link on
> *>cpan.org, in the future you can use search.cpan.org to find the available
> *>modules by yourself."
>
> Google?
There are many ways to find the asnwer. The problem is that these people
won't do that unless told by the management. When they get an assignment
to do something, they will happily reimplement the wheel and never *think*
that it's possible that someone else has done it already and it can be
grabbed for free.
The point is to understand how people who are used to closed source think.
It's true that they use Perl [open source], but they still think in the
terms of closed source.
Now if you talk to their management and explain that they can save a lot
of money and time, without any risks (because otherwise they will have to
implement things anyway).
_____________________________________________________________________
Stas Bekman JAm_pH -- Just Another mod_perl Hacker
http://stason.org/ mod_perl Guide http://perl.apache.org/guide
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://localhost/ http://eXtropia.com/
http://singlesheaven.com http://perl.apache.org http://perlmonth.com/
