Hacker News Reader

Open source is not a business model.

Perl was created by someone in their spare time away from their day job.

When he needed money he just wrote books and charged for those. Ironically the publisher of those books hired him to continue working on the _language_, and of course, write more books.

Makes total sense.

View on HN

nah, it was created for their day job in order to provide reliable quick to write code under difficult conditions

I meant the company did not participate in it's creation nor did they fund it in any way. If they had they certainly would not have approved of it being released under an open source license. Also Perl 1.0 was released using Larry's NASA email address and not any other corporate one.

I believe it was NSA not NASA - in his hubristic style larry wall described perl as being born from "a secret project in a secret laboratory".

I'd say the biggest influence on my programming work is recognising how to use that style of humour can help deal with situations that can sometimes get to quite high pressure - e.g. "please rescue this failing 9 month long $x^e6 project before it goes live in the next fortnight"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com