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Free Resources for Windows Perl Development
jamie pointed out an important announcement in the Perl community. Adam Kennedy, known as Alias, developed Strawberry Perl to "make Win32 a truly first class citizen of the Perl platform world." Over the last year, major CPAN modules have used Strawberry Perl to get to releases that work trouble-free on Windows. But the tens of thousands of smaller modules on CPAN are lagging, in many cases because of lack of access to a Windows environment for development and testing. Now Alias has worked with Microsoft's Open Source Software Lab to provide for every CPAN author free access to a centrally-hosted virtual machine environment containing every major version of Windows. "More information (and press releases) will follow, the entire program under which this partnership will be run is so new it's only just been given a name, so some of the organisational details will ironed out as we go. But for now, to all the CPAN authors, all I have to add is... Merry Christmas. P.S. Or your appropriate equivalent religious or non-religious event, if any, occurring during the month of December, etc., etc."
i hate the break it to you but win32 still dominates the landscape, the cpu being 64bit is irrelevant. sounds like you've been duped by the marketing.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
"...lack of access to a Windows environment..."
Hello? Virtualization?
Hello, obtaining a legal copy of windows?
"...lack of access to a Windows environment..."
Hello? Virtualization?
Hello? They would have to pay if the wanted to do it legally?
I think someone needs to get their head out of their ass and face reality. Outside the desktop, Windows isn't visible? Really? Windows Mobile is everywhere. So is Windows Embdedded. Windows Server is gaining marketshare.
YOU may consider Windows a second-class citizen, but the market sure doesn't. In an above post, you compared Microsoft to GM, and declared that they were dying. Yeah, sure, they're dying exactly like GM, except for the fact that they're making money hand over fist, have over $70 billion in assets, and haven't required a government bailout.
On top of licensing issues, other accumulated comments included the fact many Unix greybeards have never used Windows before, so the accumulated time to find the right torrent, download it, work out how to install everything etc etc was something they greatly didn't look forward to doing.
It's not that they couldn't, it's just that they are busy people, like everyone else, and the time investment was too big for the relatively small win of closing one or two bugs on Windows.
Shortcutting that process by just letting them log directly into a running instance is considered a significant improvement for that group.
Whatever other benefits there are, the main beneficiary of porting open source software projects to the Windows platform is Microsoft.
Bear in mind that if there were no Linux, many of the other open source software projects would not have existed.
Microsoft don't even have to embrace and extinguish when the open source projects are doing it for them.