Something doesn't compute, the donation looks very small for a 3000 people company
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.
I see what you did there :)
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."
You can’t complain about the amount because you don't know what other donations they make. I would rather see $10K donations made to a bunch of different projects than a single big donation to one project. That way if one company has a bad year (or goes out of business) projects are not left scrambling to replace their sponsor. As the saying goes, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”.
SUSE owes $0 to Perl and Raku. Most companies donate $0.
perl 5 specifically has had ~15 releases so far this year. (not counting release candidates)
it all costs time and or money
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'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.
Yes. WAY more. Cookie sales are big business.
Annual profit is about $20MM according to the annual report.
And then people wonder why programming languages only come from big corporations these days.
Amoral optimization for money is the only way past upper middle class outside of sheer luck.
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.
Think Linux, Rails, most programming languages, etc...
OSS as a business model usually means a rug-pull, and I've never seen it going that well...
Linux was largely irrelevant until 1998, what happened then specifically?
> Many major companies such as IBM, Compaq and Oracle announce their support for Linux. The Cathedral and the Bazaar is first published as an essay (later as a book), resulting in Netscape publicly releasing the source code to its Netscape
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux
Rails happened because Basecamp made it possible.
As an example, people routinely forget that C and C++ came from AT&T, and they only get UNIX freebies, because initially AT&T was forbidden to profit from UNIX, the moment they were allowed to, Lion's book became underground culture, and the BSD lawsuit took place.
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.