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I 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.
by ZiiS 1y ago
I 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.
- oofbey 1y agoPart of me wants to go send Perl some money, because it was so important in my formative years. Another part of me is like "people still use perl?"
- systems 1y agoRaku is now a completely separate language from Perl and I think that while Perl still seem to be used, Raku usage is even smaller I am really impressed of how Raku developers keep their motivation to work on it And I am a bit curious to know if Proxmox is interested in Raku at all, or are they only using Perl
- m463 1y agoproxmox is heavily based on perl ...and when looking through the sources, I thought <the proxmox folks> "still use perl?" I guess proxmox IS 17 years old...
- 0xbadcafebee 1y agoOr, be inspired that it proves there's business value in supporting the foundation? They wouldn't spend thousands of euros if they thought it was going down the drain.
- oalders 1y agoFundraising is hard. There's a longer history around it that I don't have the space to fully explore here, but the quick version is that I'm currently looking for more sponsors in this 10k range rather than having to rely on 100k donations from very large orgs. Some companies immediately understand the value of this kind of support. Getting that news out will hopefully allow me to find more orgs who can/will donate in this range. So, if anyone has any leads, please do contact me: olaf@perlfoundation.org If you take a close look at your stack, you'll probably find Perl in there somewhere.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago>but if €10k is newsworthy Unpopular opinion that's gonna get downvoted/flagged soon based on my experience here: That just shows you how broke EU tech companies are that even 10k is newsworthy for them. For context, I only worked for average (not big-tech/unicorns) EU/French/Dutch/German tech companies my whole life and I was shocked to see how much more, the average US tech companies spend on frivolities(forget the wages) than the European companies I worked at. From what I saw, for US tech companies big or small, buying fully decked MacBooks and Herman Miler chairs for their SW devs was the norm, while I only saw the discount bin chairs and base spec HP/Dell/Lenovo laptops wherever I worked here. Even where I work now, SW engineers get the same crappy HP notebooks that HR uses to read emails, since beancounters love fleets of the same cheap laptops for everyone, so my manager needs to jump through hoops for the beancounters to let him order more powerful notebooks for the SW engineers in his team, cause ya' know, Docker and VMs eat more resources than Outlook and Excel. This is relatively unheard of for US SW engineers where little expense is spared on equipment. They even reduced costs related to facility management like AC runtime and cleaning services, so trash bins are emptied twice a week instead of daily, leading to some funny office aromas in summer, if you catch my drift. And of course, they blame Putin for this. I always naively assumed (mostly due to anti-US propaganda we get here in EU) that due to how expensive US labor and healthcare is, it would be the opposite that US companies would have to cost cut to the bone, but no, despite that, US companies still have way more money to spend than European ones. Crazy. My explanation is, European companies are just run the same way EU governments are run, on austerity and cost cutting, so instead of trying to make money by innovating and investing and splurging to get the best of everything, they instead try to increase the profits by cutting all possible costs from purchasing to labors' wages and offshoring, since I assume that's also what's taught in European MBA schools.
- NeutralForest 1y agoI don't think it's unpopular, I'm European and it's sad to see the tech scene and the kind of capital we have available, compared to the US.
- Perz1val 1y agoIs this an opinion or the actual state of things?
- baq 1y agowe live in a world where it's easier to burn $10M for a repackaged chatgpt than to have someone wire $10k for a core infrastructure project. sad reality, but reality still. if you're motivated to do OSS work, the best bet is to figure out how to take VC money to do that and don't end up on some blacklist.
- alecco 1y agoDonations are against "maximize shareholder value" and other directives by the high lords of BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street.
- eddythompson80 1y agoI don’t think you know what BlackRock, Vanguard, or State Street are.
- Analemma_ 1y agoThis isn't accidental, it's malicious enemy action. Overpaid fund managers are sick of seeing their business walk out the door in favor of funds with low/no fees, so there's a very active submarine campaign in progress to make BlackRock, Vanguard etc. seem like mustache-twirling villains, instead of "just a bunch of people owning shares". For example, note how all the stories about institutional investors buying up housing stock mention BlackRock, even though REITs and private equity firms are doing much, much more of this business.
- hylaride 1y agoAlso, Vanguard is run as a sort of cooperative where it is indirectly owned by the fundholders, which is why they were always incentivized to LOWER fees. The founder of Vanguard (Jack Bogle) probably left tens of billions of wealth on the table by creating that model (and he had no regrets, FWIW). There are concerns because by default they usually cast votes by board recommendations and since they have such a huge stewardship of the stock market it means others can have more direct influence, but Vanguard itself is otherwise as neutral a stock ownership intermediary as can pretty much exist.
- eddythompson80 1y agoIt’s especially sad when you read or listen to what Jack Bogle had to say. Such a thoughtful, kind and honest person who choose to help people invest rather than pocket their money. But the modern financial system is too complex for your average moron.
- MDGeist 1y agoKind of wondered if that was part of the rationale for making it news. Maybe another company will say "that's all!? we can do better" and help out.
- slavik81 1y agoProxmox were also a platinum sponsor at DebConf25 last week, which is at least €20K.
- regularjack 1y agoThis thread has more than 100 comments, so seems it is indeed newsworthy.
- exiguus 1y agoIn many projects you can get Silver Sponsor Status with 10k.