There's not much specific to Perl in this post. Open source in general tends to give you multiple options to any common problem. The proprietary world tends to be the opposite. I thank my lucky stars I get to work with open source software almost exclusively and the flexibility it provides is probably the biggest reason.
Seems a bit pointless to complain that a language based on the notion that "There Is More Than One Way To Do It" offers too many choices on what to use.
