Gabor's been taking a lot of criticism for attempting to promote Perl, and proposing it so he gets paid for it. Apparently, many people seem to be of the opinion that getting paid to do community work is trying to pull a fast one over on the community.
It's interesting to see the backlash from people when they think someone is going to somehow profit from a community they are part of. I see nothing fundamentally opposing someone making a profit from the Perl community (not that I think that's Gabor's goal). The only metric that matters here should be whether the gains outweigh the costs.
Personally, I don't care if Gabor is paid $1, $10,000, or $1,000,000 dollars. If the gains match or exceed the cost, it was worth it. Quantification can be hard to determine, but I find it hard to believe we can't agree that the attempt is worthwhile, and we can determine whether it was successful in any part at a later date.
As a thought exercise, let's examine this from the opposite direction. Assume the community or a part thereof has the option to pay $1,000,000 (which let's assume it has) to an individual which guarantees Perl to become the #1 most popular programming language within the next year. Is it worth it? Is it even desirable? If the answer to those is yes, you should be in fundamental agreement with Gabor's proposal, and only the implementation details are to be worked out. And if that's the case, if not Gabor, then who else?
