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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

#21

Post by esaym »

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 donate nothing. A good case in point is AT&t in the 1980s was broken up into 20 plus different companies. They were then remerged back in the 1990s. But when they merged, they had 20 different computer systems and perl was actually used to glue all those systems together and handle data sanitation and ETL pipelines. Yet AT&t never donated anything to perl.

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

#23

Post by saalweachter »

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.

My impression of Perl, as someone who wrote two scripts in it twenty years ago and has been on the Internet since the middle-old days, is that it is a language suited to being clever.

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

#24

Post by captn3m0 »

Relevant: Zerodha's Floss.fund is giving $1M this year for FOSS projects, and haven't got enough applications. Please apply and share: https://floss.fund/

> FLOSS/fund is dedicated to supporting critical, impactful, and valuable Free/Libre and Open Source projects globally. We give up to $1 million per year to support developers and communities that create and maintain projects, big and small.

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

#25

Post by knowitnone »

portaouflop wrote: post #17
verelo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So yeah, they’re doing rough… Not sure what the path out here is? Seems like either finding deep pockets that care about their work or some new revenue stream, but without the cash to fund it I’m not sure how.

Stop doing it for free it the only way, OSS projects that rely on donations almost always do badly economically

ok. say they charge every user or business $100 a year. that would certainly kill off Perl

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

#26

Post by knowitnone »

thwd wrote: post #13
forgetfreeman wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a write-only language.

Write Once Read Never(WORN)

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

#27

Post by lizknope »

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…

Most of my coworkers above age 45 still use Perl.

I am constantly parsing reports and then generating commands to run from that. I learned Perl in the 90's and it still works great for that.

I have to code in Tcl for most of our EDA tools (chip design) but I still parse reports in Perl. The younger engineers use Python and I've learned enough but I really don't care. I'm not writing big systems or anything in Perl or Python. It's the Tcl code that has tens of thousands of lines because that is what the tools require.

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

#28

Post by dtquad »

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.

Plenty of talented developers in Eastern Europe who are $25k or cheaper.

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

#29

Post by tyingq »

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…

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

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

#30

Post by miroljub »

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.

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