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Proxmox Donates €10k to the Perl and Raku Foundation
- LetMeLogin 1y agoWhile I appreciate the gesture, it seems a bit low based on the fact that they're using it as their "core" technology, every single day.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dewey 1y agoMaybe, but it’s also 100% higher than what 99% of companies built on open source software give back.
- johng 1y agoI don't think Proxmox is a huge company making lots of money though either... I've used it for free for years. I imagine most people use it for free. I'm sure there are companies paying for it, but I don't think it's some monster money maker?
- gmuslera 1y agoI bet that they grew a lot with VMWare/Broadcom changes, even the somewhat paid subscriptions. But they are not yet one of the (commercial/enterprise) big names. I suppose that this donation is part of their "now that I have a positive budget, what I do with it?" plan, and finance growing up both as company/support as in adding features.
- SoftTalker 1y agoThey are based in Austria, my assumption has been that most of their business/enterprise customers are in the EU.
- hda111 1y agoResellers exists in most parts of the world.
- applied_heat 1y agoProxmox is based on perl? Can you expand on that? Web front end, vm automation…?
- npteljes 1y agoProxmox is written in perl, among other things like HTML and JS, on top of the other free software that they are using like QEMU. They also use Rust at places. This is their repo: https://git.proxmox.com/?p=pve-manager.git;a=tree https://git.proxmox.com/?p=pve-manager.git;a=tree
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y agoThis happens every time. Company does good thing. “But, why didn’t they do 2X good thing?!” Working for a F500 company, I have tried to use budget surplus to reward open source projects we use. Management looked at me like I had grown an additional head.
- naikrovek 1y ago> Management looked at me like I had grown an additional head. this is my experience, too. they'll gladly take, take, take, take, take, and take some more, but when it comes time to give just a little bit, they balk.
- npteljes 1y agoSame for normal people, for example with any paid internet service. They watch 2 hours of youtube every day, but to pay a pittance for YouTube Premium? Unimaginable, how dare they ask for anything for the service. In every thread where it comes up, people act like it's pulling teeth. And also, microtransactions work because of the same reason. People's relationship with paying for things is complicated.
- petdance 1y ago> I have tried to use budget surplus to reward open source projects we use. "We've never heard of that happening, so no."
- npteljes 1y agoBut they also publish their work for free!
- neuroelectron 1y agoI was thinking about matching it since I'm retired and my early and mid career was built on perl but I also feel a bit unqualified as I'm not really a great programmer or really understand deep problems like language design and compilers/interpreters.
- Paradigm2020 1y agoThe problem with this world is that 80% of people think they are above average and from the remaining 20% most are above average and thinking they are below average (~bastardized quote from some famous guy) I'm almost willing to bet that you did more than good enough work and if you still want to become a (n even) great(er) programmer I'm sure there's quite a few OSS projects you could contribute to as well if you wanted to :)) Re:matching it you could also spread it amongst a couple of projects. Anyway have a great day
- ValtteriL 1y agoDoing the God's work. Love both.
- Bluestein 1y agoTIMTOWTDI!
- lordofgibbons 1y agoAre people still using Perl for new software? I remember at a former company, we had a major migration away from Perl 12 years ago. The Perl code base was considered extremely ancient even back then.
- forgotmypw17 1y agoYes, it's still well-maintained and highly backwards-compatible, avoiding breaking changes between releases.
- walterbell 1y agoWe need an ROI metric to quantify the backward compatibility and low churn of Perl relative to languages like Python, Ruby, golang.
- lordofgibbons 1y agoGolang declared a perfect backwards compatibility guarantee way back when version 1 was released. So in this regard, Perl isn't unique.
- naikrovek 1y agowell, Go has broken that backwards compatibility when it was deemed important enough to break things. So it's not "perfect" and I imagine Perl's isn't either.
- drysart 1y agoPerl as a language is pretty mature and rarely sees breaking changes (and what breaking changes exist are in corners of the language that are extremely esoteric even for Perl). You can take a Perl script written 25 years ago and it'll still run just fine. New language features and things that might alter existing behavior are usually locked behind a version declaration opt-in at the top of your script. You need to do something similar to `use v5.39;` to unlock new behaviors from that version of Perl -- which may contain breaking changes but those are also generally backward compatible too. But that's for the base language and standard library. Individual third-party packages may vary in their backward compatibility.
- kblissett 1y agoI wish more companies would do this. €10k is a cheap price to pay for some great exposure and goodwill!
- walterbell 1y agoAlso sponsorship of community conferences/meetups for OSS software.
- uncertainrhymes 1y agoEven though Varnish may not be in fashion any more, there were many companies happily using it for free and still demanding security updates. I like their transparency about who actually supports them, and what the whole community gets for it. I wish other projects would do that, if for no other reason than to make it obvious that FOSS isn't just something that happens. https://phk.freebsd.dk/VML/2025/ https://phk.freebsd.dk/VML/2025/
- AgentMatrixAI 1y agoBeen using proxmox for a home lab and I still can't believe how much value they provide for free. I use it with Cursor and create vm templates and clone them with a proxmox MCP server I've been adding features to and it's been incredibly satisfying to just prompt "create template from vm 552 and clone a full VM with it". https://github.com/agentify-sh/cursor-proxmox-mcp https://github.com/agentify-sh/cursor-proxmox-mcp
- trallnag 1y agoWhat do you use all these VMs for in your homelab? I've dabbled with Proxmox in the past but settled on plain Ubuntu for my home server that I now treat as a pet managed with Ansible.
- AgentMatrixAI 1y agoit gives me a direct bridge from cursor -> VM, for local dev & test out open source projects I like having a local server I can carry with me and control using just Cursor to manage it. So basically the freedom that comes with a homelab without using proxmox UI and ssh.
- SparkyMcUnicorn 1y agoTake your pick. Everyone wants different things. This site/repo is pretty great. https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts
- npteljes 1y agoI personally self-host a bunch of stuff for myself and my household. Nextcloud for my phone, mattermost for in-house communication, private wordpress as a multimedia diary, a bunch of experiments, wekan for organization, network storage, network printer. I found Turnkey Linux pretty nice. They provide ready to use Linux images for different services. Proxmox integrates with them, so for example to install Nextcloud, all I needed to do is to click around a bunch on the Proxmox interface, and I'm good to go. They have around 80-90 images to choose from.
- 1y ago
- kosolam 1y agoWay to go. Proxmox is one of the best open source free software out there for small businesses/lab use cases IMHO
- ZiiS 1y agoI am sure we are all grateful for Proxmox's generous donation; but if €10k is newsworthy for a Foundation with Perl's historic profile, I would be very worried.
- markoman 1y agoShouldn't their donation be weighed against the revenues they enjoy using the Foundation's labors? Is Proxmox enjoying particularly strong revenues, and doesn't their product involve much more than what Perl provides? I think the donation is pretty fair. Their success certainly owes more to things beyond Perl itself.
- rcxdude 1y agoI think the point is proxmox's donation is fair, but there's many more businesses getting much more value from perl which are not donating, if their fair donation is notable.
- whatevaa 1y agoDonations are donations. Can't expect them.
- axus 1y agoVMware has certainly extracted more dollars from me than ProxMox has. It's nice when companies contribute fixes and testing up-stream, even when it's not a monetary contribution.
- systemswizard 1y agoProxmox had made other donations like they were a platinum sponsor at debconf25 and that’s $20k
- bmn__ 1y agoThen be worried. That amount is a quarter of the foundation's yearly revenue.
- 1y ago
- ei8ths 1y agothanks proxmox!
- lynx97 1y agoPeople are going to HATE me for this, but I genuinely think: This feels like beating a dead horse... I had my Perl phase. I even wrote the first piece of code for my employer in Perl. Well, it was a CGI script, so that was kind of natural back then. But really, since all the hollow Perl6 stuff I've seen, I've never really read or heard anything about the language in the past, what, 10 to 15 years? There are tons of languages out there, all with their own merits. But everything beyond Perl5 felt like someone was trying to piggyback on a legacy. If you invent a new language, thats fine, call it foobar and move on. But pretending to be the successor to Perl feels like a marketing stunt by now...
- cestith 1y agoPerl 5 got a development release within the last week, and the latest production release within the last month or so.
- librasteve 1y agonot sure I hate you :-) Raku has perl DNA running through it … both languages were authored by Larry Wall and the Raku (perl6 at the time) design process was to take RFAs from the perl community and to weave them together. I do wonder why you consider Raku to be hollow? Sure it has suffered from a general collapse of the user base and exodus to eg. Python. This has slowed the pace of development, but the language has been in full release since Oct 2015 and continues to have a very skilled core dev team developing and improving. There are several pretty unique features in Raku - built in Grammars, full on unicode grapheme support (in regexes), lazy evaluation, hyper operators, and so on that work well together. Maybe unpopular, true. But hollow?
- jcynix 1y agoNo reason to hate you, just because you didn't pay attention ;-) Maybe take a look at the search results from https://duckduckgo.com/?q=perl%20conference%202025 https://duckduckgo.com/?q=perl%20conference%202025 and you'll learn that there are ongoing events related to Perl and Raku.
- doublerabbit 1y agoIn future sight most of modern languages are coming from a C derivative. Perl isn't possible without C Python isn't possible without C Go isn't possible without C With those languages you can't get any more raw than C. Unlike a language like Pascal that is still modern today that as is based on ALGOL are forgotten about. Make's me wonder why such older languages were left behind. Just a ramble.
- neuroelectron 1y agoPerl? Wow. I'm a big fan of perl, but I gotta say I thought it was dead. Despite, the dynamic features of the language, I feel like it's much mote secure and mature than other modern convenience languages like JS/TS and Python. It certainly is much faster in general.
- petdance 1y agoWhat does "dead" mean?
- 77pt77 1y ago> It certainly is much faster in general. No. V8 killed that.
- neuroelectron 1y agoDepends on what you're doing with it. For shell script type of stuff where you're searching files, processing uploads or anything that goes through a pipe, it's just as fast as C++. For instance searching through tens of gigabytes of logs for certain patterns it will go as fast as the bus will send data.
- 77pt77 1y agoWow! Less than a month of compensation at FAANG is newsworhty.
- nickdothutton 1y agoMost management has no idea of the importance of the open source building blocks that their business rests upon. Similarly they cannot begin to conceive of the benefits of making a donation. Probably the most effective thing you could do is to somehow attempt to copy the "greenwashing" effect of companies being environmentally responsible, and having an environmental section to their annual reports. "The health of the open source ecosystem is essential to sustainable research, development, and operations at ACME Corp. This year we have sponsored the following...for our current and future benefit".
- bluGill 1y agoI've long tried to figure out how we can donate to projects. If we were to buy/license those tools it would cost thousands of dollars, but I don't know how to get any money for the free tools we use. When I ask half of management doesn't understand the question, and the rest don't know either.
- petdance 1y agoCan you dedicate employee time to help on the projects?
- bluGill 1y agoSometimes and I have done so. However they have plenty of work for me. Unless there is a new feature we need time doesn't exist.
- TristanBall 1y agoPerhaps look to your marketing folks rather than engineering. "Purchasing silver sponsership with [org] as a way to grow our brand awareness" is intrinsically understandable to pretty much any businesses manager. "Giving away money for something we already have", which is what most technical managers will hear regardless of your actual pitch, is completely inexplicable to many. It does require that sponsership is even possible, and recurring sponsership may be harder than recurring license fees of course, so its not a sure thing, just an option to try.
- tingletech 1y agoIf you use Fidelity Charitable giving, the perl foundation is listed under "Yet Another Society"