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A: This is great! Perl is much maligned but a fantastic Swiss army chainsaw and still runs so much critical infrastructure. B: I find it concerning that $25k i
by dweekly 2y ago
A: This is great! Perl is much maligned but a fantastic Swiss army chainsaw and still runs so much critical infrastructure.
B: I find it concerning that $25k is a notable donation; is the Foundation doing that poorly? I would have hoped this number to have two more digits in it for it to be a front page worthy item.
- autarch 2y agoHere's some details about the foundation's financials - https://blogs.perl.org/users/makoto_nozaki/2024/10/understanding-the-financials-of-the-perl-and-raku-foundation-tprf.html https://blogs.perl.org/users/makoto_nozaki/2024/10/understan...
- verelo 2y agoSo yeah, they’re doing rough… Not sure what the path out here is? Seems like either finding deep pockets that care about their work or some new revenue stream, but without the cash to fund it I’m not sure how.
- portaouflop 2y agoStop doing it for free it the only way, OSS projects that rely on donations almost always do badly economically
- knowitnone 2y agook. say they charge every user or business $100 a year. that would certainly kill off Perl
- portaouflop 2y agoI’m not saying it’s practical right now, but yea the death of Perl is the only thing that can make it profitable.
- _hcuq 2y agoMaybe programmers at companies using Perl get together and raise the issue with management? It is a bargain. Imagine the cost of having to rewrite all that Perl.
- riffraff 2y agoI don't understand why grant expenses surged in 2023 if revenue was going down. I wish the Perl foundation good luck.
- infecto 2y agoI don't know the dynamics of this board but does anyone else find it strange that the secretary is digging through public documents to generate a post outlining finances? Is that not what the treasurer should be helping with? Then the treasurer makes a public comment to the post? Feels very strange to me.
- autarch 2y agoJust to clarify, Dan Wright is the former treasurer. He retired from the TPRF board back in 2020 (https://news.perlfoundation.org/post/board_update_tpf_treasurer https://news.perlfoundation.org/post/board_update_tpf_treasu...). But to answer the bigger question, yes, I think this was a bit weird. I was also on the board for a while, and I think we did not do a good job of reporting on and monitoring financials. This was one of my frustrations with the organization, and part of the reason I stepped down from the board (though there were other, bigger, reasons not related to the board as well). In fact, I had made the same points as Makoto does in his blog post maybe 1-2 years earlier in a board meeting. We were running a constant deficit and we didn't seem to have a clear plan for what we would do if that continued.
- caseyy 2y agoPerhaps it was not meant to be a flashy donation but a medium-sized one. It is still an act of good.
- myrmidon 2y agoRegarding B: This tracks with what I've observed in this regard, namely that sponsoring by companies just doesn't work well as business model even for projects where you would assume that it should. The incentives are just not working out, and it seems impossible to mobilize even a fraction of the sums for OSS-donations than what companies burn for much less critical aspects of their operation than OSS tools/libraries/components (or waste outright). Open source is largely a thing because lots of people voluntarily invest (valuable!) time on their own in my opinion (with corporate sponsorship being almost negligible by comparison).
- that_guy_iain 2y agoMost big open-source projects are a thing because a companies invest in it. When we rely on people doing it in their free time what we see is unmaintained software. The entire idea that open source is volunteer work is largely a myth when it comes to popular open source. Even the ones where you think it's volunteer work they do so much during their working hours that either they're lying to their employer or it's sponsored by their employer.
- creer 2y agoIsn't it both? In particular dependent on the size of the project? And it's still easy for individuals to at least contribute detailed problem reports even to very large projects. And these are useful. Even when ignored by the lead mafia.
- gspencley 2y agoI'm surprised to learn that Perl is still used. Obviously there will always be legacy code to maintain but these days I can't even remember the last time Perl was mentioned in casual conversation amongst my peers unless we're sharing war stories from the 90s. These days when we find ourselves needing to write a script our first go-to would be bash, and if we need more features or if it's going to be complex enough to have to worry about maintenance costs we'd probably reach for python. TIL that there is a non-profit foundation that focuses, in part, on supporting Perl. That surprises me to the same extent that I would be surprised to learn that there is a foundation aimed at supporting VB6 (though now watch someone is going to share that there is).
- lizknope 2y agoMost of my coworkers above age 45 still use Perl. I am constantly parsing reports and then generating commands to run from that. I learned Perl in the 90's and it still works great for that. I have to code in Tcl for most of our EDA tools (chip design) but I still parse reports in Perl. The younger engineers use Python and I've learned enough but I really don't care. I'm not writing big systems or anything in Perl or Python. It's the Tcl code that has tens of thousands of lines because that is what the tools require.
- cafard 2y agoI was about to say, Hey, I use Perl, but then I saw this posting with the over 45 qualification. Yep, that's me (way over). Honestly, I write about a script a quarter in Perl, but it definitely is handy now and then.
- gertlex 2y agoCurious: do you also do script-writing in other languages? And just pull out perl for a subset of problems? Or are most things at the "bigger than a script" level for you? I'm not here to judge. I still prefer to write my python scripts like it's the 2.7 days... (more effort goes to python "code")
- dtquad 2y agoPlenty of talented developers in Eastern Europe who are $25k or cheaper.
- miroljub 2y agoGood luck finding just one talented developer in Eastern Europe willing to work for 25k or cheaper. Thanks to globalisation, those times are long gone. Any mediocre developer can find a local employer that pays at least that much.
- creer 2y agoProjects don't often demand full time work. A quarter-time work from an effective developper is a lot of work.
- rglullis 2y agoIt is mind boggling how much funding there would be for the Gimp/Krita/Inkscape/Penpot developers if every designer gave them 5% of what they give to Adobe.
- miohtama 2y agoThis is correct and sad. Open source would be much better with sustainable funding models. But hard to see how this could happen in SaaS dominated modern world.
- rglullis 2y agoWe "just" need to flip the narrative. Let's stop talking about "services" that people need to pay for and make FOSS something that people invest so they can (collectively) own later. People love to shit on crypto, but no other industry got so many small-scale, open source projects that got funded when people have high hopes of making bank from it. I wonder if we could get people to invest in open source projects that were tied to a short position on the proprietary counterpart.
- soygem 2y agoIt would be better off if people stopped using cuckold licenses like MIT, instead of GPL and its various strains.
- cardanome 2y agoThey kind of suck at asking for donations. Look at Wikipedia. They are grossly OVER-funded, they have more money they could ever need in fact And they run purely on donations. I always wanted to donate for Firefox but they don't offer me an option to do so. Or look at Gimp: https://www.gimp.org/donating/ https://www.gimp.org/donating/ Not clear call to action. Lot's of confusion options. Not the best marketing.
- whiplash451 2y agoYou are welcome to propose more efficient ways of funding OSS.
- elevation 2y agoMy sense is that perl deployment is declining as it's replaced with better tools. What infrastructure is perl running? I started playing with Ubuntu in 2006. Exploring the system, I'd come across system scripts in perl here and there, but Lennart Poettering has gradually displaced these with unit files that are much easier to read. These days I may invoke perl occasionally. A few years back I used checkconfig.pl to build a slimmed-down kernel config for an embedded board. I expect it will eventually be phased out of these peripheral utilities.
- dale_glass 2y agoPerl used to, but I'd say not anymore at this point. Many of the big Perl names long moved on; CPAN is full of abandoned modules. And the world doesn't sit still. So as time goes by, there's more and more risk of you finding out that some Perl module you're using no longer works. It may not build because of API changes in the C library, or the API of some web service changed, or there isn't an API at all for some pretty big thing that showed up 3 years ago. That didn't use to be the case.
- whiplash451 2y agoGiven the number of private companies that rely on Perl, $25K is in the ballpark of what _each_ of these companies should contribute to the Perl community. DDG is not responsible for the greed of companies that contribute zero. I applaude DDG's decision. Their move is pragmatic and a lot more inspiring to the companies out there than day-dreaming of a single company donating 7- or 8-digit to the Perl community (which, frankly, would not be sane either).
- DanielHB 2y ago> A: This is great! Perl is much maligned but a fantastic Swiss army chainsaw and still runs so much critical infrastructure. You know, I hear this a lot (especially earlier in my career) but I _never_ ran into any system made in perl, ever. I started my professional career in early ~2010 and have been programming since ~2005. Maybe they are just very black box-y and I don't even know that the underlying stack is perl?
- dazed_confused 2y agotake a look under the hood for any Linux distro