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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

#131

Post by hashtag-til »

dep_b wrote: post #44
tyingq wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

booking.com is, I think, still a heavy Perl user. I don't know to what degree they give back.

It’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.

I 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.

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

#132

Post by robertlagrant »

anticorporate wrote: post #88
badsectoracula wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That'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 th…

I 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.

It's definitely not a red herring. Software is there to do something. Art isn't. If you're spending money on software, it's to do something, and if it's the wrong thing it's a waste of people's money.

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

#133

Post by robertlagrant »

anticorporate wrote: post #118
creato wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 lamen…

Grants don't need to be given on the basis of usage alone. Generally speaking, the people on a grants committee would be knowledgeable industry experts who make allocation based on a number of factors like impact, ability of the organization receiving the funds the utilize them well, the sustainability of the project as a whole, the success of previous grant projects, etc.

This just creates a cottage industry of people who are good at writing OSS grant applications and demonstrating "progress". It also keeps incumbents in place. Central funding is the worst idea unless there really is no alternative.

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

#134

Post by robertlagrant »

leejo wrote: post #113
gspencley wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 abou…

I don't disagree with anything you've said either, in fact I've blogged about this at length: http://leejo.github.io/2017/12/17/tpc_and_the_end_of_languag... My main issue is that "People still use Perl?" has essentially become a meme at this point. I'm relatively sure that any sufficiently commented on or upvoted thread on HN gets that statement in it somewhere. Yes, Perl is still used. Extensively. People and compa…

> People and companies just don't talk about it.

Why not?

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

#135

Post by IshKebab »

philistine wrote: post #117
that_guy_iain wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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.

I guess with C++ you either work for a bank or you do video games. Guess which one people prefer?

Definitely banks! Much better pay (at least in investment banks) and way less stressful.

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

#136

Post by turbojet1321 »

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.

Marketplace is literally the only reason I still have a facebook account. Unfortunately the alternatives here get nowhere near the same number of buyers.

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

#137

Post by bruce511 »

miroljub wrote: post #30
esaym wrote: post #21

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 don…

And 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.

I think it's fair to point out that there are two distinct open source models in play here;

There's the "old school" open source, which releases product for the common good. Think Linux, Gnu, Emacs etc. This group would object to the term "business model" since they are explicitly not "businesses".

The second group are commercial products, from commercial companies who wish to leverage some aspect of Open Source to further their commercial ambitions. Think (pretty much) any VC funded "Open source" product. I 100% agree with you in this context.

The latter group (sooner or later) discover that cloud providers will happily offer their product as a service, exactly how their OSS license permits. They are well positioned to extract value from the offering, and thus charge for it.

So yeah, you'll see these companies pivot to a proprietary license - but honestly I don't mind when they do - for them, being OSS was transactional in the first place do it was never going to last forever.

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

#138

Post by dep_b »

hashtag-til wrote: post #131
dep_b wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’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.

I 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.

Haha well I use to interview people while working there, I hope it wasn't for a mobile position?

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

#139

Post by hashtag-til »

dep_b wrote: post #138
hashtag-til wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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.

Haha well I use to interview people while working there, I hope it wasn't for a mobile position?

No, just web stuff, not mobile. That’s sort of 2015 timeline, ancient history now :)

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

#140

Post by mardifoufs »

robertlagrant wrote: post #130
mardifoufs wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, though I have sympathies for single devs or projects like perl that are obviously non profit. Like, I get the frustrations for actual volunteers and people who survive on building OSS at a small scale. What really annoys me is when someone decides to build a corporation around an open source project, and then you get the usual blog post around users not paying or OSS not being sustainable. Yes, using OSS as you…

The problem is, if their software had cost what it needed to from the start then that would've put it in a totally different competition with other companies. Bypassing that competition doesn't mean they can suddenly start complaining about how many customers they have vs how much they get.

Yeah I completely agree and that's exactly why the most annoying part of the OSS sustainability conversation. Most of the big OSS players (not individual devs, I'm referring more to the open core type of corporations) would just not exist at all, much less make more money, without OSS. No matter how much money elastic search lost to Amazon for example, they would've made basically nothing without OSS.
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