Clay shows us a slide of a Shinto shrine in Japan — it’s made of wood and is 1300 years old. Wood being a renewable resource, the shrine is torn down every once in a while and rebuilt out of the same kind of wood from the same forest it’s always come from.

Clay compares PERL — and Linux, Apache, and more — to this shrine, pointing out that they too are shrines, maintained by people who care about them, maintained out of love for them, and maintained by a community out of love for each other.

It’s a great and very simple metaphor. Think about the future, Clay advises, based on what people who love each other and what they are working can create. Bet on that.

He convinces me, and I do. What about you?