Re: Perl Works, but that's not the problem.

[Fastolfe]

ActiveState, to pull a vendor out of a hat, offers support contracts for their distribution of Perl. That should satisfy your legal folks as far as the actual Perl environment is concerned. It's not a large leap to make the developer liable for the code used in the 3rd-party modules themselves, but that seems like an imperfect solution.

[coreolyn]

I confess I haven't done much research into ActiveState as (unless I've made a huge misjudgement) this would only provide solutions for the intel side of the house, which is only a piece of the puzzle. If I take away the crossplatform bonus of Perl I loose one of the major crux's of my advocacy.

coreolyn

[davorg]

Well, ActiveState also provide Perl distributions for Linux and Solaris. Not sure why anyone would use them in preference to building their own Perl from the source code tho'.

--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>

"Perl makes the fun jobs fun
and the boring jobs bearable" - me

[Fastolfe]

For you and me, it makes most sense to build our own Perl installations, but in cases where Management wants liability, a distribution like ActiveState, irrespective of OS, allows for support contracts and a sufficient level of accountability for when things go wrong. That's the only benefit, in my opinion. The product itself isn't necessarily superior to what you can get and build yourself, but the fact that they have people trained to help when problems arise makes that avenue the best (from a business point of view).