AOL is laying off its Netscape developers and stopping its development altogether.

AOL blames Microsoft for that. But I feel AOL surely has its fair share of responsibility. After all, Netscape was number one before AOL laid hand on it.

Microsoft tried to make Java its own. But Sun had the financial and legal muscle to fight it. (Now MS came up with C# instead.)

That makes me think (a scary thought), what stops a big corporation from acquiring/devouring Perl? The sheer size and diversity of the Internet and the Open Source make it impossible and unprofitable for a single organization to dominate them. But what about Perl? What practical barrier does it have?

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Update: As a comparison, O'Reilly has a sales figure of $75 million; AOL, 40 billion.