ok, people said, i have to write a report about the CeBIT 2010, blogging is important, or not? ;) So, its really 2 months after CeBIT now, but i think its ok to give some later report, better then nothing and also i dont talk about the technology and the companies, i want to talk about the social aspects, the socialising of the open source communities at the CeBIT, the dialog of open source with the companies. But also i want to talk about the historical change of the CeBIT, cause i had more then 10 years ago also the chance to participate at the CeBIT as exhibitor, but CeBIT has changed, in some points, but in some points it seems to never change....

I think its important to introduce at first my experience in the past about CeBIT. When i was young i worked at a company on holiday which was using premium isdn services to offer education material about novell and usage of dos and windows in general. I just worked for them to produce there first videos about installing and configure applications under unix, like for example apache and other hype software that was required at that time. The company thought their services were making the market, but actually when i was in office, never one of the paid line LEDs was blinking and showing that someone gives money. Good that the company also offered direct training ;).

This company had the thought to invest half a million Deutsche Mark (around 1/4 Mio. EUR these days). The result was being the smallest stand at the CeBIT, with certificate of the CeBIT organizators. It was really amazing. The boss was totally not prepared and we had actually 5-6 clients at the stand, that was all, so it was a big flop. But out of this i had TONS of time to experience myself the CeBIT and checkout what is going on. At first, in the past, you had anything for free on CeBIT. Tobit was giving french fries and sausages and non-alcoholik drinking for free, unlimited. So the fooding theme was cleared. Digital (the company behind altavista) was making a huge action next to our stand, dropping out hundreds of playsets where you was able to build a 20 sided dice out of keywords of digital marketing. We took several of those packages and made a huge over-ownage dice, which they also presented at their stand later (and gave us an invitation to their private party). Also we had enough time after the main audience time, to play a bit of Doom at the AOL location, cause the night protection of them was only checking that we dont took the hardware, what we was doing with the software, doesnt seemed to care for them. Hehe, whatever funny time.

This time on CeBIT was a bit difference experience, but i must say a much better experience. It was just not that rich ;). The locations didnt offered that much of free stuff. Even the party situation was very limited, in the past there was at every hall a party, now you must have know the secret mailinglist (thanks to ads hehe) to get all the informations you need. Also the parties are very... crowded, and not much of the good stuff for free, just beer beer beer..... So that theme was bad, but on the other side, there were so many cool dudes, it was just awesome. Many companies earn their money with open source, so the acceptance of open source was a totally different level. I had the awesome opportunity to go into the "marketing war" with the best weapon ever: Perl.

The people of Linux-Magazin offerd this chance in their regular new concept to offer every year other open source projects a chance to promote themself, this year Perl had the chance todo this, next to many other projects, like KDE, BIND10, PostgreSQL and more. It was an awesome combination of people, and it was a pleasure to live with them these days at the CeBIT. It was also interesting seeing projects like JDownloader presenting themself with a kind of t-shirt only crew. They dont had the money for a stand, but they put some guys of their crew to the CeBIT to run around and show the presence of it. And it worked, i actually switched cause of a small talk from CryptLoad to JDownloader. Marketing works ;).

So finally i could start coming to the real impressive impressions. The experience i had around talking with people about Perl. At first, i must say about myself, that i was a Perl-ignore dude over 15 years. I knew it and i also knew CPAN, and i still thought Perl is a cryptic voodoo, and ignored anything about it. Also noone ever in that 15 years really brought me to Perl, told that i should use it. I was happy with ignoring it. But when i was actually forced to dive more into Perl, and then saw Moose, POE and all the other new shiny stuff, i realized that Perl actually isnt cryptic, its just the language that makes it most easy to be cryptic, but that is your own decision and the modules on CPAN and all the professional written stuff isn't in any way cryptic. So, i dont want to dive too much into why Perl is so cool, i think that is another post, but the point here is that i was the same dude like all the others people running around and ignore that Perl is a language to choice from.

The mission now was bringing Perl into the dialog. It was not about really saying "hey dude, take Perl", it was more like "Hey, talk with us, why you dont use Perl? What can we do for you?". On that behave i startup up the talk with everybody around, not only the guests of the CeBIT, also the other people with own stand at the CeBIT. I talked with lots of small and big companies, and beside setting up the dialog to realize the stuff, i also tried to make impressions on Perl, i tried to bring people to take a look, trying to bring them to get "a'round" to checkout Perl ;). It was very impressive seeing Java, Python and PHP dudes falling step by step in love with Perl after they know what it is about, and what they get for free, and what problems of their language are long time solved in Perl. It was very rare that people kicked in with problems Perl actually doesnt solve that good. I must underline here that all those problems that appeared are already solved in the Perl6 concept, so this again, for another post.

Now beside the talk with people of other languages, or people without any big overview, there was a much bigger impression by the people who already know Perl. I found actually a dude, who uses Perl since 10 years, and had actually no idea that CPAN exist. It was a shock and i had to verify that really, and he said that he never downloaded any package, he just searched for specific solutions in the web and found always solutions... which rarly involve CPAN, which is again a problem of the bad marketing of Perl. The wrong dudes made so much posts about Perl which are just wrong or not effective. Other Perl dudes missed much of the next generation modules like Moose and POE. Some people said they avoid CPAN cause of bad Modules, which was also a bit of a shock, cause they most really had hit some bad eggs on some bad platform. But after showing them CPAN-Testers that theme was already fixed.

So under the line, i can just say the same thing that we had printed on our flyers we gave out to the people: "Perl - we suck at marketing". Perl itself is an awesome language. The concept invented by Larry Wall is really making the snap. Its really sad that other languages often dont take a peek or try to see what is so good about being so flexible. But what can i say, i ignored it myself for 14 years..... :)

So thanks for reading all my output :-).