I want people to use Perl. I want to be a positive ingredient of the world and make my American history. So, whatever it takes to give away my software and get it used, that's great.
There is no schedule. We are all volunteers, so we get it done when we get it done. Perl 5 still works fine, and we plan to take the right amount of time on Perl 6.
The world has become a larger place. The universe has been expanding, and Perl's been expanding along with the universe.
Perl was designed to work more like a natural language. It's a little more complicated but there are more shortcuts, and once you learned the language, it's more expressive.
If you're a large corporation, you can afford to pay the money to register patents, but if you're an individual like me, you can't.
I think software patents are a bad idea. Many patents are given for trivial inventions.