Can a Software House make its tools using

Can a Software House make its tools using Perl? The SANFACE Software experience sanface@sanface. com

Why Perl? • The initial Perl language selection was casual • With simple modifies our tools can become cgis – http: //www. sanface. com/createpdf. html – http: //www. sanface. com/flash 4/ferrari/ • Probably our tools are the only tools that can make PDFs on OS such as: Open. VMS, MPE, OS/390, EPOC, etc. in the same way on every OS • Perl Dev Kit by Active. State (http: //www. activestate. com) and perl 2 exe by Indigo. STAR (http: //www. indigostar. com)

Why perl? The future • A generic GUI using perl/Tk • Perl 6 news: – virtual machine – New ports? : we hope a possible support for PDA, smartphone, etc.

Why shareware? Four years ago the idea was innovative: Not a library, not a PS to PDF converter. A server tool that developers and project leaders can use like an external tool from every program on every OS. We thought correct to earn for our work.

The market • Our first customer was Alex project • We thought the market of txt 2 pdf was to convert Electronic texts into PDFs • Our real market: textual reports to PDFs: – The Halifax Herald Limited projects – The Hachette Filipacchi Media U. S. project – Other projects

Is it possible to sell tools, distributing the source code? • “You’re crazy!” (Italian friends : ) • License Agreement • Some data: – We estimate more than 100, 000 downloads – 600 customers – 95% located in US

A real open Perl comunity • A software house can use Perl to develop (and sell) commercial tools • A Perl software house can’t use Perl comunity to announce its products (Perl newsgroup, CPAN, etc. ) • We think that Perl comunity to grow up (like Linux comunity) needs a freeware core accepting commercial tools and parnerships • We’d like other companies can follow our track with the help of Perl comunity

A real open Perl comunity We hope this paper is just the first step!