SUSE Donates USD 11,500 to the Perl and Raku Foundation

https://www.perl.com/article/suse-donates-to-tprf/

by oalders • 12 months ago

109 40 12 months ago

ModernMech4• 12 months 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". 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_zhang2• 12 months 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• 12 months ago

Ideally big tech money enables people to retire early and they'd maintain open source projects in their spare time

ModernMech4• 12 months 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.

dismalaf2• 12 months ago

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...

FirmwareBurner• 12 months 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.

scottLobster• 12 months ago

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.

pjmlp2• 12 months ago

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.

zihotki• 12 months 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

pacifika• 12 months ago

Actually it’s very large compared to the typical company donation of 0.

dralley• 12 months 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.

giancarlostoro• 12 months 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.

oalders2• 12 months 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.

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.

RomanPushkin• 12 months 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.

ModernMech4• 12 months 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.

Alupis• 12 months ago

Never look a gift horse in the mouth, as the saying goes.

SUSE owes $0 to Perl and Raku. Most companies donate $0.

rbanffy• 12 months ago

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.

monkeyelite• 12 months ago

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.

geodel• 12 months ago

Reminds me story

Once a little boy, old man and their donkey traveling on feet.

First passerby "What morons, they have donkey and no one is riding on it. So boy sits on donkey.

Second passerby "Look, what a shame, young lad sitting on donkey and poor old man is forced to walk on feet. So they swap.

Third passerby "Wow, this grownup adult is riding donkey while little kid is walks in hot sun. So they both sit on donkey.

Fourth passerby "Amazing, just amazing, two able bodied people riding on this poor animal. Can't they at least take turns like a decent human."

kraih• 12 months ago

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.

justin66• 12 months ago

It's almost exactly $11,500 more than other 3000 person companies are donating, on average.

VVertigo• 12 months ago

$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”.

tingletech• 12 months ago

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.

librasteve2• 12 months ago

kudos to SUSE

librasteve2• 12 months ago

ubuntu, debian are you in?

SUSE Donates USD 11,500 to the Perl and Raku Foundation

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