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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

#141

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#142

Post by koito17 »

gspencley wrote: post #16
dweekly wrote: post #6

A: This is great! Perl is much maligned but a fantastic Swiss army chainsaw and still runs so much critical infrastructure. B: I find it concerning that $25k is a notable donation; is the Foundation doing that poorly? I would have hoped this number to have two more digits in it for it to be a front page worthy item.

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…

Practically all Japanese BBS in use today are written in Perl. They are either proprietary CGI scripts or a proprietary fork of an open-source software like WebPatio[0] and Zero-channel Plus[1].

[0] https://www.kent-web.com/bbs/patio.html

[1] https://ja.osdn.net/projects/zerochplus/

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

#143

Post by akira2501 »

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.

Open source is not a business model.

Perl was created by someone in their spare time away from their day job.

When he needed money he just wrote books and charged for those. Ironically the publisher of those books hired him to continue working on the _language_, and of course, write more books.

Makes total sense.

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

#144

Post by oefrha »

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.

I knew someone whose company put out $$$ senior job ads when they had a problem they couldn’t solve in house, then picked interviewees’ brains without hiring them.

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

#146

Post by renewiltord »

samus wrote: post #84
jefftk wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been an open source maintainer (and still am to a smaller degree) and I think sneak is right. I'm happy for people to use things I create and release, and their use doesn't impose costs on me.

Their use doesn't, but from time to time they send in bug reports and feature requests, don't they? Where do you draw the line between extending your project and providing free labor to a for-profit company? Fixing bugs is less controversial, while finding solutions to issues arising in bespoke production environments, with short deadlines, is grueling work for which companies are usually gladly purchasing support co…

Bug reports are other people doing work for me. I’m fine with that. These are free interactions between people. If you want to charge for bug reports then you can put that in your repo text and just auto-close any issue from non-approved authors.

If you want to bountysource a solution do that. If you don’t want to fix an issue don’t.

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

#147

Post by singingfish »

akira2501 wrote: post #143
miroljub wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Open source is not a business model. Perl was created by someone in their spare time away from their day job. When he needed money he just wrote books and charged for those. Ironically the publisher of those books hired him to continue working on the _language_, and of course, write more books. Makes total sense.

nah, it was created for their day job in order to provide reliable quick to write code under difficult conditions

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

#148

Post by singingfish »

gspencley wrote: post #107
leejo wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 abou…

I think the lack of discussion of perl is in part because from a bird's eye view, python and perl do exactly the same stuff in exactly the same way, but python has the mindshare. Because of perl's depth and flexibility, for the average developer team it can be really hard to manage.

There's a similar story around javascript - note how es6(?) introduced `"use strict"`. Old school javascript always struck me as a bit like crippled perl with really good vendor support.

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

#149

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

rurban wrote: post #129
gtirloni wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an absolute technical liability to build anything new in Perl these days.

It's more of a technical liability to write anything new in Python. All of my old perl code still runs fine, all of my python code went unusable since. It's also extremely bloated.

I upgraded to Debian 12 and all of a sudden my Python 3 code is destroyed and I have to jump through hoops to make pip work correctly again for libraries that were already on my machine. I'm leaving for greener pastures as the webdevs have ruined another good scripting language.

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

#150

Post by akira2501 »

singingfish wrote: post #147
akira2501 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open source is not a business model. Perl was created by someone in their spare time away from their day job. When he needed money he just wrote books and charged for those. Ironically the publisher of those books hired him to continue working on the _language_, and of course, write more books. Makes total sense.

nah, it was created for their day job in order to provide reliable quick to write code under difficult conditions

I meant the company did not participate in it's creation nor did they fund it in any way. If they had they certainly would not have approved of it being released under an open source license. Also Perl 1.0 was released using Larry's NASA email address and not any other corporate one.
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