My understanding after reading the whole thing was that he wanted to rewrite Bugzilla in Java so that they could get a bug tracking system for governmental use - although what specifically for (given he was referencing library of congress) is anyones guess.

But since I would assume that the bug tracking would be an internal thing, most likely on some internal network - why would not allowing Perl be a concern? Especially since he was talking about devices that don't run Perl.

I'm still at a loss what devices couldn't run Perl that would be governmental that could warrant such a big job for a bug tracking system.

The whole thing was highly confusing. I hope the guy makes a million bucks, but I'm sure he was trying to create a complex solution rather than an elegant solution.