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Craigslist used to donate over $100,000 every single year. Not sure when that stopped. That is really what kept perl going between the years of 2010 and 2016 or
by esaym 2y ago
Craigslist used to donate over $100,000 every single year. Not sure when that stopped. That is really what kept perl going between the years of 2010 and 2016 or so. The board was actually paying a couple of people to do maintenance on the core repository and code. I believe they still do that but obviously due to deficits that is going to get difficult.
It's sad when so many companies are dependent upon perl, but donate nothing. A good case in point is AT&t in the 1980s was broken up into 20 plus different companies. They were then remerged back in the 1990s. But when they merged, they had 20 different computer systems and perl was actually used to glue all those systems together and handle data sanitation and ETL pipelines. Yet AT&t never donated anything to perl.
- tyingq 2y agobooking.com is, I think, still a heavy Perl user. I don't know to what degree they give back.
- johannes1234321 2y agoAt least for a while they had quite a bunch of core perl people on their payroll
- dep_b 2y agoIt’s being phased out quite aggressively there. Turned out they had such a bad reputation for tech debt thru couldn’t hire people despite paying +50% median Amsterdam developer salaries.
- that_guy_iain 2y agoI think a lot of companies are kind of realising the tech stack they use has a bigger impact on hiring than salaries. I believe banks are encountering this issue with no one wanting to do C++ anymore.
- whiplash451 2y agoYou'd find a lot of talented C++ engineers for the right mission and culture. The problem you describe has little to do with C++ and a lot to do with banking.
- Onavo 2y agoThe banks just don't pay enough. Quant finance firms in Chicago and wall street don't have this problem.
- that_guy_iain 2y agoI am not sure you understand the problem. Your first sentence hints that you know that there needs to be other things than tech stack and salary to find talented C++ programmers. But the second sentence pretends like you didn't write the first sentence. I said tech stack affects hiring more than salary. I didn't say there is a lack of C++ programmers. I was very explicit about my statement.
- pjmlp 2y agoHave done consulting with banks as customers, I definitly wouldn't want to work for one, regardless of the tech stack, and money being offered. This is what OP was hinting at.
- that_guy_iain 2y agoOP was ignoring the point and basically implied the reason banks have issues hiring these days is because they're banks. While in the past they didn't have these issues. Why? Because tech stack matters for a lot of people.
- pjmlp 2y agoThey always had these issues, I barely know anyone that freely replied to job interviews for a bank, given the work environment, as I am approaching 50y, have already seen quite a lot in consulting projects.
- hashtag-til 2y agoI interviewed with them once. The worst ever interview with incapable rude interviewers, who didn't even know the answer to their questions. They came p with some bizarre offer which I'm glad I declined.
- dep_b 2y agoHaha well I use to interview people while working there, I hope it wasn't for a mobile position?
- hashtag-til 2y agoNo, just web stuff, not mobile. That’s sort of 2015 timeline, ancient history now :)
- oefrha 2y agoI knew someone whose company put out $$$ senior job ads when they had a problem they couldn’t solve in house, then picked interviewees’ brains without hiring them.
- mdaniel 2y agoI would gladly take that experience over "yet another minesweeper something" or its more evil friend "reimplement some esoteric algorithm no one uses in their day job". I mean, sure, fake jobs are always evil but if you're gonna have a fake job at least make it produce something for humanity The back side of that coin is: how catastrophically dumb must they be to have a problem that a stranger can solve on a whiteboard in an hour but your whole organization can't in a sprint?
- krageon 2y agoThey don't pay very well. I can't imagine the median in amsterdam is very good if that really was 50% higher
- rmoriz 2y agoThe founder of Fastly was a Perl release maintainer and core author as well iirc.
- ricardobeat 2y agoThey used to donate something like 100k/year, had a handful of core and library developers on payroll, and hundreds of devs occasionally contributing code.
- miroljub 2y agoAnd that's the flaw of the open source business model. You develop something for free, make it available to everyone for free, allow them to modify use and misuse as they wish. Every single step is your conscious decision. And then, you beg for donations, and complain that people are not donating? Doesn't make sense. If you don't want to work for free, just charge for it.
- rglullis 2y agoFree software is more than just a business model.
- throitallaway 2y agoYeah, I've never thought it compulsory to reimburse for any open source software. Some projects are "lucky" enough to have large corporate contributors/stewards, and others are projects of passion. Maintenance activities (bug reports, feature additions, participation in community discussions, etc.) should be considered a form of "paying" for OSS - you're giving back and improving the ecosystem. I've done plenty of that for various projects; it's something that I enjoy doing.
- rglullis 2y agoIt is not "compulsory", but not doing it is extremely short-sighted, like the equivalent of failing the marshmallow test in a collective scale.
- Ologn 2y agoCygnus, Red Hat, MySQL, JBoss etc. all had successful business models. Android, React and other projects come from companies with mixed business models, but they have had success as well - there are billions of active Android phones, and many web sites running React. Some open source companies did not do well, but lots of closed source companies do not do well either. Also, open source is not just a business model - sometimes people just give software they wrote away.
- beernet 2y ago[flagged]
- sneak 2y agoGifts don’t require repayment. Releasing free software is a gift to the world. Corporations don’t owe free software maintainers a cent, because people using your software doesn’t cost you anything.
- coldbrewed 2y agoOpen source is a gift within a gift economy. The software may be freely used but the labor needs to come from somewhere, and donations of either direct labor or compensation help ensure that the overall gift economy can continue to function.
- anticorporate 2y agoDo they owe anything today, in the sense of a legal obligation? No. But we've regulated the tragedy of the commons in all sorts of other instances. There's no reason, for example, that a small percentage of corporate income tax couldn't be allocated to a grant program for free and open source software projects.
- badsectoracula 2y agoThat's a good thought in isolation. The problem however is how are you going to ensure the money collected for that purpose go to the projects that actually need it and there wont be any corruption involved? It isn't hard to notice, for example, that in EU where gamedev companies often receive grants for various nebulous reasons tend to be companies that do not need the money in the first place (and yes, of course there are devs who received money that needed them, somehow people have to excuse the existence things they benefit from).
- anticorporate 2y agoI don't think you're going to solve corruption perfectly in any system, but isn't that a bit of a red herring? We manage to do this within other fields of endeavor, at least in the United States, by using an intermediary. Examples: National Science Foundation, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, National Endowment for the Arts.
- jimmaswell 2y agoI miss Craigslist, seems like everyone moved over to Facebook Marketplace a few years ago.
- benatkin 2y agoI still use craigslist and haven't actually done anything with facebook marketplace yet. That makes me want to delete my facebook account (something I've been considering anyway) just to nip that possibility in the bud.
- orev 2y agoIf you’re trying to sell something, you need to be where the customers are. If they’re on Marketplace, that’s where you go. You can easily list in both places.
- turbojet1321 2y agoMarketplace is literally the only reason I still have a facebook account. Unfortunately the alternatives here get nowhere near the same number of buyers.
- meta_x_ai 2y ago[dead]
- benatkin 2y agoNot a good enough reason for me to go back to using Facebook regularly. For others, sure.
- steve_adams_86 2y agohttps://hakai.org https://hakai.org uses quite a bit of perl in its various projects! The CTO is very adept with it (really nice guy, too).
- declan_roberts 2y agoCraigslist was purchased by ebay in 2004, which is what happened.
- fragmede 2y agoEbay bought a 25% stake, which it later sold back to them, so only sort of.
- altairprime 2y agoIt says a lot about how threatened these companies must be: AT&T claims to be profitable, but their infrastructure investment is focused entirely on obstructing competitors. Craigslist used to be a star, but they must be under severe pressure to avoid collapse to have withdrawn ecosystem donations. It says a lot about the fragility of DuckDuckGo that this is all they could commit to Perl, which is really unfortunate; they could have been excellent, but instead their star is apparently diminishing. Oh well.
- pjmlp 2y agoI am fully with you, although in AT&T's case they already offered UNIX, Plan 9, Inferno, C and C++ to the world, so maybe that excuses them at the FOSS crowd eyes? Lets forget about that lawsuit, and trying to take a certain book out of print. /s