Someone from Perl commented last time that he wants multiple sponsors at 10k a year instead of one big sponsor that drops Perl at 100k then causing the hurdle of having to find a new big fish. 10 grand a year to any org is insignificant enough he might be able to find enough sponsors to carry them over a while.
This is 100% correct. My current strategy is to locate 10-15 sponsors at 10k per year so that we can secure the Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund. Donors can, of course, always commit to more.
For anyone who may have a contact, I'm quite happy to be CCed on introductory emails or I can send you a message that you can forward on to decision makers, if you feel that's a lower pressure scenario. Both of these approaches have worked out for us. There is more than one way to do it.
As a SUSE employee myself, I want to add that it is also part of our company culture for employees to contribute code upstream whenever possible. That's how many of my own Open Source contributions happened in the past few years. Most recently building an MCP Perl SDK (https://github.com/mojolicious/mojo-mcp). SUSE is giving a lot more than just money to the Perl community.
The psychology of donation is very strange. The other person resents your ability to give and resents that you don’t give more. But also hates that others don’t give any.
I would assume they benefit from Perl code (not sure how much at this point in time), and want Perl to continue to be maintained, therefore, they benefit from this donation.
OBS is a service that SUSE provides to the greater open source community free of charge for everyone’s benefit. It’s not a great example of greedy corporations taking more than they give back.
Package hosting, security updates, gradual improvements after perl 7 didn't pan out (?), Raku is an ongoing language in continuing development, grants, events, etc
perl 5 specifically has had ~15 releases so far this year. (not counting release candidates)
For a couple of years Red Hat employed the only developer contributing full-time to Python - the rest (including Guido) only worked on it part-time. Microsoft got more involved later on so I don't think that's still the case.
I once donated $300 to the language I like (Crystal), it was like 2-3% of my monthly salary before tax and expenses. Not bragging, and $11,5k is good money, but the donation is similar to my $5 contribution, maybe even smaller.
If they passed an envelope around the SUSE offices and everyone put in $5, they would have been able to donate more money than they did.
I'm not saying this and my other comment to dog on Suse, because I love them, but my point is to put into perspective how little the industry cares to fund what they admit are fundamental technologies. This is little league, girl scouts level funding. I bet girl scouts bring in more actually, open source projects could learn a thing or two and start having bake sales. I'm only half joking.
If you want to donate with something like Fidelity Charitable Giving, you have to look up "Yet Another Society" -- "The Perl And Raku Foundation" is a d.b.a.
It's feast or famine out there. Pretty crazy to see this after reading OpenAI is giving each employee a $1.5M bonus. 99% of that money will go into real estate and the stock market, leaving open source like Perl / Raku scraping by with $11k from SUSE, who call it "a fundamental component". Building a fundamental technology gets you scraps, but riding on the hype train that's causing more problems than it solves gets you flush with cash.
And then people wonder why programming languages only come from big corporations these days.
If there's a couple of hard lessons I had to learn as an adult, it's that justice and morality are something you quite literally have to pay a premium for, and public opinion doesn't matter nearly as much as most of us were raised to think.
Amoral optimization for money is the only way past upper middle class outside of sheer luck.
There is not much people can do to force big companies to donate $$ to open source communities.
I really don’t think OSS is a valid business venue. It could work, but most of the time it doesn’t. So either do it for the love and happiness, or just don’t do it for free.
Certainly there is! Raise taxes on big tech profits and use those revenues to fund open source. We shouldn't depend on love and happiness to build the technologies that are foundational to our largest companies, while they get rich.
These companies are not doing anything amoral here. If the developers of these open source projects expect to be paid for their work by any means other than voluntary donations they should use different licenses.
I'm saying this is a dumb way to fund critical tech infrastructure. And since the tech industry has proven they can't self regulate themselves into a sensible funding model, then we should use our representative democracy and create legislation that sees it done.
IIRC, a dev of a famous python package, was begging for food on Twitter a few weeks ago.
It doesn't matter how smart you are or how useful to society you are, if you're not working for big monopolistic companies, you're not making real money.
> At SUSE, Perl is a fundamental component and member of our ecosystem > $11 500
Something doesn't compute, the donation looks very small for a 3000 people company
Someone from Perl commented last time that he wants multiple sponsors at 10k a year instead of one big sponsor that drops Perl at 100k then causing the hurdle of having to find a new big fish. 10 grand a year to any org is insignificant enough he might be able to find enough sponsors to carry them over a while.
This is 100% correct. My current strategy is to locate 10-15 sponsors at 10k per year so that we can secure the Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund. Donors can, of course, always commit to more.
I can be reached via olaf@perlfoundation.org and also at https://www.linkedin.com/in/olafalders/
For anyone who may have a contact, I'm quite happy to be CCed on introductory emails or I can send you a message that you can forward on to decision makers, if you feel that's a lower pressure scenario. Both of these approaches have worked out for us. There is more than one way to do it.
As a SUSE employee myself, I want to add that it is also part of our company culture for employees to contribute code upstream whenever possible. That's how many of my own Open Source contributions happened in the past few years. Most recently building an MCP Perl SDK (https://github.com/mojolicious/mojo-mcp). SUSE is giving a lot more than just money to the Perl community.
The psychology of donation is very strange. The other person resents your ability to give and resents that you don’t give more. But also hates that others don’t give any.
Reminds me story
Once a little boy, old man and their donkey traveling on feet.
First passerby "What morons, they have donkey and no one is riding on it. So boy sits on donkey.
Second passerby "Look, what a shame, young lad sitting on donkey and poor old man is forced to walk on feet. So they swap.
Third passerby "Wow, this grownup adult is riding donkey while little kid is walks in hot sun. So they both sit on donkey.
Fourth passerby "Amazing, just amazing, two able bodied people riding on this poor animal. Can't they at least take turns like a decent human."
Never look a gift horse in the mouth, as the saying goes.
SUSE owes $0 to Perl and Raku. Most companies donate $0.
I would assume they benefit from Perl code (not sure how much at this point in time), and want Perl to continue to be maintained, therefore, they benefit from this donation.
OBS (the build system running build.opensuse.org) has quite a bit of perl at its core.
OBS is a service that SUSE provides to the greater open source community free of charge for everyone’s benefit. It’s not a great example of greedy corporations taking more than they give back.
Just how much maintenance does the Perl interpreter realistically need in 2025.
Package hosting, security updates, gradual improvements after perl 7 didn't pan out (?), Raku is an ongoing language in continuing development, grants, events, etc
perl 5 specifically has had ~15 releases so far this year. (not counting release candidates)
it all costs time and or money
Depends, do they also sponsor developers?
For a couple of years Red Hat employed the only developer contributing full-time to Python - the rest (including Guido) only worked on it part-time. Microsoft got more involved later on so I don't think that's still the case.
Actually it’s very large compared to the typical company donation of 0.
I once donated $300 to the language I like (Crystal), it was like 2-3% of my monthly salary before tax and expenses. Not bragging, and $11,5k is good money, but the donation is similar to my $5 contribution, maybe even smaller.
If they passed an envelope around the SUSE offices and everyone put in $5, they would have been able to donate more money than they did.
I'm not saying this and my other comment to dog on Suse, because I love them, but my point is to put into perspective how little the industry cares to fund what they admit are fundamental technologies. This is little league, girl scouts level funding. I bet girl scouts bring in more actually, open source projects could learn a thing or two and start having bake sales. I'm only half joking.
If you want to donate with something like Fidelity Charitable Giving, you have to look up "Yet Another Society" -- "The Perl And Raku Foundation" is a d.b.a.
It's feast or famine out there. Pretty crazy to see this after reading OpenAI is giving each employee a $1.5M bonus. 99% of that money will go into real estate and the stock market, leaving open source like Perl / Raku scraping by with $11k from SUSE, who call it "a fundamental component". Building a fundamental technology gets you scraps, but riding on the hype train that's causing more problems than it solves gets you flush with cash.
And then people wonder why programming languages only come from big corporations these days.
If there's a couple of hard lessons I had to learn as an adult, it's that justice and morality are something you quite literally have to pay a premium for, and public opinion doesn't matter nearly as much as most of us were raised to think.
Amoral optimization for money is the only way past upper middle class outside of sheer luck.
There is not much people can do to force big companies to donate $$ to open source communities.
I really don’t think OSS is a valid business venue. It could work, but most of the time it doesn’t. So either do it for the love and happiness, or just don’t do it for free.
Ideally big tech money enables people to retire early and they'd maintain open source projects in their spare time
Maybe. When I retired my plan is to de-tech my life as much as I possibly can.
Certainly there is! Raise taxes on big tech profits and use those revenues to fund open source. We shouldn't depend on love and happiness to build the technologies that are foundational to our largest companies, while they get rich.
These companies are not doing anything amoral here. If the developers of these open source projects expect to be paid for their work by any means other than voluntary donations they should use different licenses.
I'm saying this is a dumb way to fund critical tech infrastructure. And since the tech industry has proven they can't self regulate themselves into a sensible funding model, then we should use our representative democracy and create legislation that sees it done.
But this is not realistic. Big companies pocket more politicians than all HN commenters ever know.
IIRC, a dev of a famous python package, was begging for food on Twitter a few weeks ago.
It doesn't matter how smart you are or how useful to society you are, if you're not working for big monopolistic companies, you're not making real money.