Someone from Perl commented last time that he wants multiple sponsors at 10k a year instead of one big sponsor that drops Perl at 100k then causing the hurdle of having to find a new big fish. 10 grand a year to any org is insignificant enough he might be able to find enough sponsors to carry them over a while.
This is 100% correct. My current strategy is to locate 10-15 sponsors at 10k per year so that we can secure the Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund. Donors can, of course, always commit to more.
For anyone who may have a contact, I'm quite happy to be CCed on introductory emails or I can send you a message that you can forward on to decision makers, if you feel that's a lower pressure scenario. Both of these approaches have worked out for us. There is more than one way to do it.
:) Working on the fundraising has been a fun and challenging project. Perl is still quite useful and it's often somewhere in the stack, even if organizations don't openly talk about it. Finding these orgs is part of the fun.
As a SUSE employee myself, I want to add that it is also part of our company culture for employees to contribute code upstream whenever possible. That's how many of my own Open Source contributions happened in the past few years. Most recently building an MCP Perl SDK (https://github.com/mojolicious/mojo-mcp). SUSE is giving a lot more than just money to the Perl community.
The psychology of donation is very strange. The other person resents your ability to give and resents that you don’t give more. But also hates that others don’t give any.
For a couple of years Red Hat employed the only developer contributing full-time to Python - the rest (including Guido) only worked on it part-time. Microsoft got more involved later on so I don't think that's still the case.
I would assume they benefit from Perl code (not sure how much at this point in time), and want Perl to continue to be maintained, therefore, they benefit from this donation.
OBS is a service that SUSE provides to the greater open source community free of charge for everyone’s benefit. It’s not a great example of greedy corporations taking more than they give back.
Package hosting, security updates, gradual improvements after perl 7 didn't pan out (?), Raku is an ongoing language in continuing development, grants, events, etc
perl 5 specifically has had ~15 releases so far this year. (not counting release candidates)
$10K seems like a generous donation to me: good on them for making one.
You can’t complain about the amount because you don't know what other donations they make. I would rather see $10K donations made to a bunch of different projects than a single big donation to one project. That way if one company has a bad year (or goes out of business) projects are not left scrambling to replace their sponsor. As the saying goes, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”.
I once donated $300 to the language I like (Crystal), it was like 2-3% of my monthly salary before tax and expenses. Not bragging, and $11,5k is good money, but the donation is similar to my $5 contribution, maybe even smaller.
If they passed an envelope around the SUSE offices and everyone put in $5, they would have been able to donate more money than they did.
I'm not saying this and my other comment to dog on Suse, because I love them, but my point is to put into perspective how little the industry cares to fund what they admit are fundamental technologies. This is little league, girl scouts level funding. I bet girl scouts bring in more actually, open source projects could learn a thing or two and start having bake sales. I'm only half joking.
It's feast or famine out there. Pretty crazy to see this after reading OpenAI is giving each employee a $1.5M bonus. 99% of that money will go into real estate and the stock market, leaving open source like Perl / Raku scraping by with $11k from SUSE, who call it "a fundamental component". Building a fundamental technology gets you scraps, but riding on the hype train that's causing more problems than it solves gets you flush with cash.
And then people wonder why programming languages only come from big corporations these days.
If there's a couple of hard lessons I had to learn as an adult, it's that justice and morality are something you quite literally have to pay a premium for, and public opinion doesn't matter nearly as much as most of us were raised to think.
Amoral optimization for money is the only way past upper middle class outside of sheer luck.
There is not much people can do to force big companies to donate $$ to open source communities.
I really don’t think OSS is a valid business venue. It could work, but most of the time it doesn’t. So either do it for the love and happiness, or just don’t do it for free.
Certainly there is! Raise taxes on big tech profits and use those revenues to fund open source. We shouldn't depend on love and happiness to build the technologies that are foundational to our largest companies, while they get rich.
These companies are not doing anything amoral here. If the developers of these open source projects expect to be paid for their work by any means other than voluntary donations they should use different licenses.
I'm saying this is a dumb way to fund critical tech infrastructure. And since the tech industry has proven they can't self regulate themselves into a sensible funding model, then we should use our representative democracy and create legislation that sees it done.
OSS isn't a business model. The most successful projects I've seen is when someone has a business, releases a tool they use, then others iterate on said tool that the business uses. Then everyone gets a better tool.
Think Linux, Rails, most programming languages, etc...
OSS as a business model usually means a rug-pull, and I've never seen it going that well...
Most programming languages have a commercial history related to them, either developed by corporations, or authors have been employed by major universities or corporations.
Linux was largely irrelevant until 1998, what happened then specifically?
> Many major companies such as IBM, Compaq and Oracle announce their support for Linux. The Cathedral and the Bazaar is first published as an essay (later as a book), resulting in Netscape publicly releasing the source code to its Netscape
Not only these days, all major programming languages did in fact come from either big corporations, or their authors worked either at big corporations, or big universities.
As an example, people routinely forget that C and C++ came from AT&T, and they only get UNIX freebies, because initially AT&T was forbidden to profit from UNIX, the moment they were allowed to, Lion's book became underground culture, and the BSD lawsuit took place.
IIRC, a dev of a famous python package, was begging for food on Twitter a few weeks ago.
It doesn't matter how smart you are or how useful to society you are, if you're not working for big monopolistic companies, you're not making real money.
If you want to donate with something like Fidelity Charitable Giving, you have to look up "Yet Another Society" -- "The Perl And Raku Foundation" is a d.b.a.
Something doesn't compute, the donation looks very small for a 3000 people company