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.
zihotki · 44m ago
> At SUSE, Perl is a fundamental component and member of our ecosystem
> $11 500
Something doesn't compute, the donation looks very small for a 3000 people company
giancarlostoro · 24m ago
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.
oalders · 13m ago
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.
Alupis · 14m ago
Never look a gift horse in the mouth, as the saying goes.
SUSE owes $0 to Perl and Raku. Most companies donate $0.
pacifika · 40m ago
Actually it’s very large compared to the typical company donation of 0.
dralley · 37m ago
Depends, do they also sponsor developers?
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.
RomanPushkin · 23m ago
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.
ModernMech · 2m ago
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.
ModernMech · 48m ago
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". The problem with tech today is that 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.
markus_zhang · 30m ago
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.
Perz1val · 13m ago
Ideally big tech money enables people to retire early and they'd maintain open source projects in their spare time
ModernMech · 6m ago
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.
FirmwareBurner · 25m ago
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.
Something doesn't compute, the donation looks very small for a 3000 people company
I can be reached via olaf@perlfoundation.org and also at https://www.linkedin.com/in/olafalders/
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.
SUSE owes $0 to Perl and Raku. Most companies donate $0.
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'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.
And then people wonder why programming languages only come from big corporations these days.
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.
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.