Perl for Web Site Management

Advocacy

“Advocacy” seems like an odd thing to be talking about in a book about web development and programming, but I wanted to make a brief plea before wishing you good luck and sending you on your way. The many tools and technologies I’ve talked about in this book, including Perl, Apache, Linux, and the various GNU utilities available in the shell, as well as the Web and the Internet itself, grew out of a certain culture. It is a culture that values openness and sharing. It fosters a sense of community, of contributing to the collective store of tools and information in a way that recognizes the contributions of those who came before, and builds a foundation that can be built upon by those who come after.

On many fronts, this traditional Internet culture is under attack. Get-rich-quick artists, or worse, legitimate but misguided businesses, pour millions of unsolicited commercial emails into the network each day, straining mail servers and stealing from individual Net users their most valuable commodity: their time. Companies take advantage of an antiquated patent system to obtain government-sanctioned monopolies for trivially obvious “innovations” like one-click ordering and name-your-price reverse auctions, then put teams of lawyers to work stopping others from using these techniques unless they are willing to pay license fees. Lobbyists for the film and music industries obtain passage of laws that restrict traditionally protected rights like free speech and fair use, treating ...