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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

#41

Post by Ologn »

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.

Cygnus, Red Hat, MySQL, JBoss etc. all had successful business models.

Android, React and other projects come from companies with mixed business models, but they have had success as well - there are billions of active Android phones, and many web sites running React.

Some open source companies did not do well, but lots of closed source companies do not do well either.

Also, open source is not just a business model - sometimes people just give software they wrote away.

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

#42

Post by beernet »

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.

[flagged]

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

#43

Post by johannes1234321 »

tyingq wrote: post #29
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.

At least for a while they had quite a bunch of core perl people on their payroll

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

#44

Post by dep_b »

tyingq wrote: post #29
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.

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.

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

#45

Post by rmoriz »

tyingq wrote: post #29
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.

The founder of Fastly was a Perl release maintainer and core author as well iirc.

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

#46

Post by rglullis »

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.

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.

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

#47

Post by jimmaswell »

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…

I miss Craigslist, seems like everyone moved over to Facebook Marketplace a few years ago.

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

#48

Post by ricardo81 »

Good for them. They don't have to but they chose to.

What they have done (perform around 100M searches a day) is phenomenal. Testament to their marketing.

Unfortunately as a search engine, it's still just a skin of another one, with some additional small scale projects attached.

It's slightly surprising that DDG hasn't attempted to become a 'real' search engine, rather than being a meta. At the moment they make a subset of Bing's revenue per search, never mind what Google make.

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

#49

Post by rubyfan »

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.

If it was a business model then people would charge, but it’s not a business model it’s an ideal that leads to a common good.

There are parallels to funding education and scholarship programs in public universities. Corporations often rely on human resources around office locations and they spend in order to ensure a steady flow of talent development. Funding open source is not that different of an issue. One challenge here is IT/Tech departments are often cost centers that are strictly budget controlled and it’s harder to make a case for non-essential costs like funding open source.

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

#50

Post by rglullis »

throitallaway wrote: post #37
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.

Yeah, I've never thought it compulsory to reimburse for any open source software. Some projects are "lucky" enough to have large corporate contributors/stewards, and others are projects of passion. Maintenance activities (bug reports, feature additions, participation in community discussions, etc.) should be considered a form of "paying" for OSS - you're giving back and improving the ecosystem. I've done plenty of th…

It is not "compulsory", but not doing it is extremely short-sighted, like the equivalent of failing the marshmallow test in a collective scale.
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