An article by Tom Edelstein titled Why I Stopped Promoting Linux in Government was posted at LXer.com the other day. You may ask why this would be relevant to Perl folks? To me, Edelstein's discussion gives a good feel for the obstacles that people working to promote Perl may face.

One nugget of a quote from the article:

"I started three open source efforts. They included governmentforge.org, the Open Government Interoperability Project and a LAMP project called Leopard. The players in the government arena essentially took those ideas and put them in their own projects one of which is Core.gov and the other called Government Open Code Collaborative.

I would characterize the people involved in these type of organizations as nasty bureaucrats. I have never met one of them who cared about the people they serve. The ones I have met only care about their careers. They would cut the heart out of the person in the next office in a minute. I saw this as an intern at the Library of Congress, as an auditor in a DoD Management and Operations contractor, as a Oracle Financials documentation specialist at a DoE facility where I found misappropriations that ran about 50% and how they kept them off the books."

What kinds of experiences have some of you monks had?

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