Chapter 1

an interview and having the programmer across the table suddenly realize he's 

been using your code for the past two months.

As software reaches higher levels of maturity and complexity, it is less and less 

realistic for a programmers to  go it alone.  Today, conscientious and talented 

programmers first look to CPAN to provide a shortcut in their development process 

and the best programmers contribute their work to CPAN, so that others may 

benefit. Tomorrow, it may even be considered a lack of professionalism to not start 

your software development efforts with a search through the CPAN repository.

By writing code for CPAN, you'll come into contact with other highly talented 

Perl programmers. This has been a great help to me personally the many bug 

reports and suggestions I've received over the years have helped me improve my 

skills. With Perl, there's always more than one way to do it, and the more of them 

you master, the better.

The Business Incentive

Just as contributing to CPAN enhances a programmer's resume, so can a business 

benefit by association with popular Perl modules. Contributing your modules to 

CPAN can have the effect of establishing a standard around your practices. This 

makes answering the perennial question  Why aren't you using [Java, C++, ASP, 

PHP]?  much easier.

Some of the world's best programmers are open source programmers. By 

actively supporting CPAN, you improve your hiring ability in the competitive 

market for Perl experts.

The Idealist's Incentive

For the idealist, contributing to CPAN is a good way to help save the world. CPAN 

is open to everyone multinational corporations and tiny nonprofits eat at the 

same table. When you donate your work to CPAN, you ensure that your work will 

be available to anyone who needs it. Furthermore, by putting your work under a 

free software

1

 license you can help convince others to do the same; when they 

make changes to your code, they'll have to release them as free software.

2

1. See http://www.fsf.org for more information about free software.

2. With some notable exceptions see the  Choosing a License  section of Chapter 4 for 

more details.

2