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DuckDuckGo donates $25k to the Perl and Raku Foundation

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Re: DuckDuckGo donates $25k to the Perl and Raku Foundation

#101

Post by rglullis »

miohtama wrote: post #79
rglullis wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It 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.

This 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.

We "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.

Re: DuckDuckGo donates $25k to the Perl and Raku Foundation

#102

Post by graemep »

nu11ptr wrote: post #68
sneak wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gifts 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.

100%. This new trend of maintaining or starting an open source project and then getting upset when people don't send you money is seriously weird. If you want compensation, start a company, otherwise consider anything you receive a gift.

You can also do things like dual licensing.

GPL or Affero GPL plus proprietary license. Of course this puts off outside contributors so not if you want a "bazaar" development mode—but people complaining about this are usually not doing so.

Re: DuckDuckGo donates $25k to the Perl and Raku Foundation

#103

Post by cruffle_duffle »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #11
jmclnx wrote: post #4

As a duckduckgo user, I think this is great. FWIW, Perl is still on my list to learn :) edit: fixed spelling

Perl is maybe the most enjoyable language I've ever coded in up until I'm forced to read someone else's code which is always hellish.

> I'm forced to read someone else's code

Which is 85% of the time my own code!

Re: DuckDuckGo donates $25k to the Perl and Raku Foundation

#104

Post by creato »

anticorporate wrote: post #55
sneak wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gifts 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.

Do 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.

> There's no reason

There definitely is a reason, and it's the same reason this problem exists in the first place: it's hard to measure the value a library or tool generates, whether it's open source or not. How are you going to allocate this tax to projects at scale?

Companies already can barely solve this problem internally, and often fail completely at it. Just imagine how many times you read a comment on HN lamenting the lack of investment in IT infrastructure. The idea that you'll solve it at society scale as a government, for things much more nebulous than even IT infrastructure, is laughable.

Re: DuckDuckGo donates $25k to the Perl and Raku Foundation

#105

Post by autarch »

infecto wrote: post #72
autarch wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's some details about the foundation's financials - https://blogs.perl.org/users/makoto_nozaki/2024/10/understan...

I 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.

Just 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_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.

Re: DuckDuckGo donates $25k to the Perl and Raku Foundation

#106

Post by oalders »

shrubble wrote: post #64

Another post in the thread mentions ATT; I can confirm that at another large telecom, Perl is still used in quite a few places, and is still being used for some new projects as well.

If you don't mind sharing this info, I'd love to hear about it. :) I'm olaf@perlfoundation.org

Re: DuckDuckGo donates $25k to the Perl and Raku Foundation

#107

Post by gspencley »

leejo wrote: post #87
gspencley wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'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…

> I'm surprised to learn that Perl is still used. For this year's London Perl & Raku workshop I shortlisted 70 companies to look for sponsorship. That was with minimal research and effort. These ranged from long term ("legacy") users of Perl to startups. From small companies to very large and profitable fintechs. I cover this briefly in the talk I gave at the end of the workshop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el7qH…

> Programming languages don't die, they just stop being talked about in favour of the shiny new ones.

You're largely preaching to the choir, I don't disagree with anything you said.

As a web application developer who got started professionally in the 1990s, I not only vividly remember Perl being everywhere, I actively wrote a lot of it.

However, in my more recent experience, it is more likely to hear people talk about COBOL, FORTRAN or C++ than it is to discuss Perl. All of those languages predate Perl.

Java also still gets a ton of discussion and it's not shiny and new anymore.

Most of us who spent time writing and maintaining Perl in the 1990s were all too willing to abandon it in favour of other languages with similar features, not because they were shiny and new but because of major pain points with Perl (it earned the meme that it's a write-only language). In my opinion, Perl's greatest contribution and staying power was it's regex engine and syntax which persists.

I don't even like python, for what it's worth, but it's popular for more reasons than it just being "shiny and new" (to the extent that you can even say that about python these days).

Re: DuckDuckGo donates $25k to the Perl and Raku Foundation

#108

Post by benatkin »

orev wrote: post #57
benatkin wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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.

If 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.

Not a good enough reason for me to go back to using Facebook regularly. For others, sure.

Re: DuckDuckGo donates $25k to the Perl and Raku Foundation

#109

Post by SushiHippie »

_swfb wrote: post #83
SushiHippie wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] asking why they used Perl, and he responded back, which was nice of him. Do you still know what the reason was?

I actually still have the email. Here's what I sent: Hello! I don't have a lot to say to you, but I just wanted to say that about a month ago, I started the transition away from Google, and the most obvious thing to switch was search. DuckDuckGo has improved substantially since the last time I used it (around 2012), and it's to a point where the results are comparable, and sometimes even better than Google, so changi…

Amazing, thanks for sharing!

What year was this? (I'm Curious, as you mentioned 2012 was the last year you used at the time of the E-Mail)

Re: DuckDuckGo donates $25k to the Perl and Raku Foundation

#110

Post by _swfb »

SushiHippie wrote: post #109
_swfb wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually still have the email. Here's what I sent: Hello! I don't have a lot to say to you, but I just wanted to say that about a month ago, I started the transition away from Google, and the most obvious thing to switch was search. DuckDuckGo has improved substantially since the last time I used it (around 2012), and it's to a point where the results are comparable, and sometimes even better than Google, so changi…

Amazing, thanks for sharing! What year was this? (I'm Curious, as you mentioned 2012 was the last year you used at the time of the E-Mail)

It's actually more recent than I thought, looks like it was 2018. I would have sworn it was earlier but I can see the "sent" timestamp on ProtonMail.
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