One of the common arguments against Open Source and Linux is that much of it is all too new and unproven. A key part of the Open Source market is the Perl programming language, and yesterday Perl celebrated its 18th birthday. At 18, Perl predates Windows (but admittedly not DOS) - even when wider adoption of Perl occurred at Perl 4 (21/3/1991), and Linux (1992). Even Linux is 13. As to maturity of the products, would companies like Amazon and Bank of Canada use Perl ? (check out MasonHQ's pages on users of the HTML::Mason module for a complete listof users of just one module.