Perl is Alive! (Dispatch war rocket AJAX...)

[Andy Wardley]

Nigel Hamilton wrote:
> TPF have never owned the domain "perl.com" - but they have always had a
> right to own it. The TPF and the community have a right to "get the goodwill
> back".
> 
> Tom has never been the owner of the goodwill and trademarks associated with
> Perl.

Tom Christiansen was one of the figureheads of the Perl community long before
TPF existed.  In particular, he was responsible for much of the core
documentation and, of course, the camel book.

In my mind, that makes him very much an owner of the goodwill associated with
Perl, if not the legal trademark.

I believe (but don't have any facts to hand) that he was hosting perl.com
before Perl was trademarked.  My earliest recollection of Perl being
trademarked was around '97 or '98 when ORA started doing Perl conferences
and I'm sure perl.com was around before that.  I also find it very hard to
believe that he would have registered and run perl.com without Larry's
consent.  So the fact that Larry (presumably) consented to him "owning"
perl.com could be construed by a court of law as a failure on Larry's part to
adequately protect his trademark.  By not telling Tom to stop with perl.com
he may have given up his right to claim that perl.com was an integral part of
the Perl[tm] trademark.

IANAL but I think that trying to paint Tom as a cyber-squatter would be
morally questionable if not legally shaky.

> return "perl.com" to its rightful owner.

I agree that it would be in Perl's best interests if TPF controlled perl.com
but I'm not convinced that they have a right to demand it.

A


PS I think we should make "Perl is Alive!" the unoffical secret verbal
handshake by which Perl mongers make themselves known to each other
(spoken in the style of Brian Blessed in Flash Gordon, of course).  The
correct response would be something along the lines of "Dispatch war rocket
AJAX to bring back the document body from a server-side Perl web application
handler powered by Catalyst, DBIx::Class, TT, Moose, and many of the other
fine modules available from CPAN that make Perl a robust and reliable
platform for enterprise-ready solutions".  Hmm... might need to make the
response a little more snappy... but I think it's got promise  :-)