Life & Wisdom Quote by Larry Wall

There is a particular kind of delight in watching a giant learn humility, and Larry Wall’s line lands right in that sweet spot: surprised, pleased, and still a little skeptical. IBM isn’t just any company here; it’s the buttoned-up avatar of proprietary computing, the sort of institution that once treated software like crown jewels. So when Wall calls IBM’s embrace of open source “astonishing,” he’s not doing corporate praise. He’s signaling a cultural reversal: the cathedral has started borrowing the language of the bazaar.

The subtext is a mix of validation and caution. Open source, for Wall, is not a marketing strategy; it’s an ethos built on messy collaboration, transparent iteration, and a kind of anti-heroic authorship. When a legacy behemoth adopts that ethos, it can look like conversion or conquest. “Gratifying” implies a long wait to be taken seriously by the establishment, a sense that the outsiders’ rules have finally become the rules. But the follow-up - “I hope they’ll do very well with it” - is pointedly conditional. Hope, not certainty. It’s almost a blessing with an eyebrow raised.

Context matters: Wall, as Perl’s creator, comes from a world where practical tools and community norms outpaced corporate permission. IBM’s open source era (Linux investments, standards talk, “open” branding) was partly idealism, partly strategy against competitors. Wall’s sentence captures that tension: celebrating the spread of the philosophy while quietly asking whether the philosophy can survive being adopted by the very power structures it once routed around.