Yup, I'd have to say I'm glad to see that Alex has built a hell of a business from himself.
Long, long ago, I was amongst the first people using Links. I remember being in the support forum and helping people fix a bug while installation, becuase the links.cfg file in 1.0 beta was missing a quote and semicolon at the end of a line, thus causing a Perl error. That was I think around xmas 1996 (ages ago in Internet time
).
I had been realativly new to Perl at that time (though have a long background in programming), and was excited to see Alex's work, as I could tell it was far better programming than a lot of the other Perl scripts I had been working with.
Working with Links was easy and made for simple customization, which led to my doing custom Links work for people as I was hanging out in the forums helping with installs, answering questions and doing cool little hacks (hardcoded categories in the Add a Link form comes to mind...such a little thing that people went nuts over).
So, knowing how my Perl career took off (I'm a full time programmer, as opposed to always working freelance previously), and owing a lot to learning GOOD Perl from Alex's work early on, I'm happy to see that he's built his company up, made a great reputation for himself and his staff, and is still producing first rate work.
It's funny too, some people may know that I have a very long standing relationship with Infopop (UBB) also. I've been hanging around there since approximately the same time that I started hanging around GT. It was actually a Links user that I was helping troubleshoot a 1.0 beta installation with that said "hey check out this cool bulletin board" program. It's amazing to sometimes think back on what paths got you to where you are!
--mark