First off, documentation is important. I love good documentation, and I try documenting my code as good as I can. But I do that because I want, I can, and I have the time. It is not because I have to.

As you might have noticed there’s been some talk about whether people should be free to release Open Source software the way they want to, or if we should try to bully them into compliance. Since the original author has now started to drop ad-hominems and directly attacking people who disagree with him, I will follow Gabor’s example and not link there. I’m also not gonna go into the topic of “People should be allowed to bully others. If you don’t like it, go away.” That one is left as an exercise to the reader.

I’m of the opinion that a free CPAN is what got us this far, what kept Perl alive, and what will allow it to stay alive in the future. Be it code, documentation, tests, RT tickets, or casual help on IRC. The sum of all the people doing this for free is what makes this community great.

I’ll try to demonstrate below why I think we need to further to work as a community, and the freedom and ease with which people participate. I also hope to demonstrate how cursing, belittling and being condescending to people who do something that isn’t of immediate use to you will not help.

But first off, to all people sharing any of their resources with the community, be it just code, documentation, tests, marketing, user support, or even just by keeping up with the community and using the modern tools, furthering their use and progression: Thank You! Perl needs you, and I couldn’t write Perl for a living if you all had just decided to keep it to yourselves. The Perl community is not a hive-mind, and we’re made up by many different minds.