You didn't do any research, did you?

If you had done a modicum of research, you might have found that an O'Reilly employee submitted a patch to p5p last year changing the core documentation as well as the text that appears when you type perl -v to point to perl.org as the Perl home page, not Perl.com.

You might have noticed that the same employee (and another employee) convinced the rest of the company to donate the text of the glossary of the third edition Camel to the core documentation -- under the same license as the rest of the documentation.

You might have noticed that the company also sponsors, in part, the time of the same two employees to work on Perl 6 for part of every week.

You might have noticed that the company has hosted a CPAN mirror for years, is exceedingly generous into letting useful contributors into the rather expensive conferences for free, contributes often to the Perl Foundation, and publishes as much information as financially possible on Perl.com for free to anyone -- even you.

You might have noticed that "a million books every few months" has, in common with the actual truth, only the word "book".

Now maybe in your ideal world people would do the same amount of work at the same level of quality for free. (Maybe in your world bandwidth is free.) Would I (hey, one of the employees mentioned earlier, strangely enough...) still write and publish about Perl if I weren't an O'Reilly employee? Absolutely.

I wouldn't be able to write or code or publish as often, though.

You certainly don't have to be grateful for the meager scraps a big (ha) bad (ha ha) publishing monopoly (ha ha ha stop, you're hurting me!) throws your way, but given the amount of research and careful thought your post here demonstrates, I'm surprised you didn't spell "Perl" with a Q or something.

PS - publishing celebrity news would be more financially rewarding than technology books. Trust me.