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Comment by zihotki | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

> There is more than one way to do it.

I see what you did there :)

Thank you for all you do! A lot of people are quick to dismiss Perl, but it’s still so important and does things that other languages don’t.

:) Working on the fundraising has been a fun and challenging project. Perl is still quite useful and it's often somewhere in the stack, even if organizations don't openly talk about it. Finding these orgs is part of the fun.

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."

No matter what you do, at least one person will be unhappy about it.

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.

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

Actually it’s very large compared to the typical company donation of 0.

$10K seems like a generous donation to me: good on them for making one.

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”.

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.

> I bet girl scouts bring in more actually

Yes. WAY more. Cookie sales are big business.

Annual profit is about $20MM according to the annual report.

It's almost exactly $11,500 more than other 3000 person companies are donating, on average.

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