Ben_Tilly@trepp.com (lists.fsb):
>The purpose of the Artistic License is very simple.  Allow people to do
>anything they want with Perl *EXCEPT* muddy the water about what Perl
>itself is.  (Think Microsoft, embrace, extend, and all that.) 

You know as well as I do that Microsoft products have a disgusting habit
of becoming the de facto standard. (Java? Read what Judge Jackson said.)
Yes, they embrace and extend. 

I really don't want to see them embrace and extend Perl, because if
Visual Perl is - or becomes[1] - an embraced and extended version of
Perl, then I'm exceptionally worried that this will become the de facto
Perl, "real" Perl or not. So long as they call it "Visual Perl", they'll
be well within their rights to butcher it how they like. 

And they're within their rights to publicise it as being the "improved"
or "business standard" Perl; they've got the marketing forces to push
their own version into the fore and ours, *mine*, dammit, the language I
spend my working life hacking away on, into the darkness. That worries
me. That really, really worries me, and it makes me angry.

Perl's a language I love, and I don't want to see bad things happen to
it, especially when I can't do anything about them. The Artistic license
relies on people playing fair; some businesses don't do that.

This is leading me to have to some very heavy thinking about where
Perl's going to go, and if I want to go there with it. Like I said,
we'll have to see.

[1] because I don't (or rather, won't) believe that ActiveState have
this in mind, but I suspect that MS do.

-- 
Thus spake the master programmer:
	"After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless."
		-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"