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SUSE Donates USD 11,500 to the Perl and Raku Foundation
- ModernMech 1y agoIt'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_zhang 1y agoThere 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 1y agoIdeally big tech money enables people to retire early and they'd maintain open source projects in their spare time
- SoftTalker 1y agoMaybe. When I retired my plan is to de-tech my life as much as I possibly can.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ModernMech 1y agoCertainly 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.
- markus_zhang 1y agoBut this is not realistic. Big companies pocket more politicians than all HN commenters ever know.
- _mlbt 1y agoThese companies are not doing anything amoral here. If the developers of these open source projects expect to be paid for their work by any means other than voluntary donations they should use different licenses.
- ModernMech 1y agoI'm saying this is a dumb way to fund critical tech infrastructure. And since the tech industry has proven they can't self regulate themselves into a sensible funding model, then we should use our representative democracy and create legislation that sees it done.
- dismalaf 1y agoOSS 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...
- pjmlp 1y agoMost programming languages have a commercial history related to them, either developed by corporations, or authors have been employed by major universities or corporations. Linux was largely irrelevant until 1998, what happened then specifically? > Many major companies such as IBM, Compaq and Oracle announce their support for Linux. The Cathedral and the Bazaar is first published as an essay (later as a book), resulting in Netscape publicly releasing the source code to its Netscape -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux Rails happened because Basecamp made it possible.
- dismalaf 1y agoAll those examples prove my point.
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoIIRC, 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 1y agoIf 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.
- pjmlp 1y agoNot 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 1y 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
- monkeyelite 1y agoThe 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 1y agoReminds 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."
- petdance 1y agoNo matter what you do, at least one person will be unhappy about it.
- pacifika 1y agoActually it’s very large compared to the typical company donation of 0.
- dralley 1y agoDepends, 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.
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- tingletech 1y agoIf 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.
- librasteve 1y agokudos to SUSE
- librasteve 1y agoubuntu, debian are you in?