[HN Gopher] DuckDuckGo donates $25k to the Perl and Raku Foundation
___________________________________________________________________
DuckDuckGo donates $25k to the Perl and Raku Foundation
Author : oalders
Score : 223 points
Date : 2024-12-03 15:34 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.perl.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.perl.com)
| jmclnx wrote:
| As a duckduckgo user, I think this is great. FWIW, Perl is still
| on my list to learn :)
|
| edit: fixed spelling
| pjmlp wrote:
| Regardless of its fame, it is a worthy tool on UNIX
| environments, even nowadays.
| imglorp wrote:
| Last I heard, DDG used it in production.
| pjmlp wrote:
| As does Booking.com, and plenty of sysadmins.
| gtirloni wrote:
| It's an absolute technical liability to build anything new in
| Perl these days.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Or not.
|
| I could assert the same about C since Morris Worm, and here
| we are.
| rurban wrote:
| It's more of a technical liability to write anything new in
| Python. All of my old perl code still runs fine, all of my
| python code went unusable since. It's also extremely
| bloated.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| 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.
| thwd wrote:
| It's a write-only language.
| knowitnone wrote:
| Write Once Read Never(WORN)
| speed_spread wrote:
| Programming is an individual activity; developing software is
| a social activity. Current tools and teaching are still
| biased in favor of the former, resulting in most of our
| troubles in the latter.
| shagie wrote:
| As a perl programmer from decades past (I transitioned to
| Java during the perl 6 winter), I've been finding that groovy
| and even more recently scala are really nice tools for what
| I'd have traditionally done in perl.
|
| When doing this year's advent of code, some of the terseness
| of symbols reminded me of perl.
|
| Perl lost me and I transitioned too far away from its
| ecosystem professionally to return for more than a dalliance
| or occasional debugging (
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16219876 ).
| gregw2 wrote:
| One of my impressions as a Scala newbie coming from a perl
| background years ago was that Scala practitioners' culture
| in a corporate setting tended to end up with code bases
| that reminded me of corporate perl code bases - suffering
| from "theres more than one way to do it" disease. A bit too
| easy to be obscure for me to use/recommend it since then
| despite the nice typing, actors, lazy evaluation, etc. Not
| sure if this TMTOWTDI Scala resonates with others knowing
| both or not...
| shagie wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6959326
|
| > Scala feels like the Perl of the modern era: there is
| more than one way to do it. There is value in that mode
| of thinking, and Perl is a better language than people
| give it credit for.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2603425
|
| > This actually is one of my frustrations with Scala, too
| many right ways to do the same thing. Makes it easier to
| write but harder to read especially when people have
| drastically differing styles. One of the advantages of
| Java is how easy it is to read and use someone else's
| code since the base language is so limited.
|
| ---
|
| The question of company dialects for various languages
| comes up occasionally. You can see it with people talking
| about having to learn a new LISP (or Scheme) each time
| they switch to a different company.
|
| I suspect that flexibility is similar to what is seen in
| perl, ruby, scala, and groovy.
|
| The TMTOWTDI Scala exists... but I want to say that it is
| more a reflection of the power of the language (drawing
| from their LISP heritage). It becomes then a question of
| how much does the company impose a _consistent_ way of
| doing it within the company (compare the different
| company dialects).
| saalweachter wrote:
| 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.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| This observation is spot on and 100% of the reason why
| dealing with other people's code is insufferable. After 20
| years of coding I can confidently say I'd rather clean out
| crawlspaces for a living than deal with another "clever"
| codebase.
| cafard wrote:
| Most of the someone else's I have read has been in stuff from
| CPAN, and I recall it as pretty good. I have written some
| pretty bad Perl, and wish that I had encountered the O'Reilly
| _Perl Best Practices_ long before I did.
| miohtama wrote:
| That's why it is called write-only language. Single job
| scripts, yes. Team work, no.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| > I'm forced to read someone else's code
|
| Which is 85% of the time my own code!
| dweekly wrote:
| 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.
| autarch wrote:
| Here's some details about the foundation's financials -
| https://blogs.perl.org/users/makoto_nozaki/2024/10/understan...
| verelo wrote:
| 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.
| portaouflop wrote:
| Stop doing it for free it the only way, OSS projects that
| rely on donations almost always do badly economically
| knowitnone wrote:
| ok. say they charge every user or business $100 a year.
| that would certainly kill off Perl
| portaouflop wrote:
| I'm not saying it's practical right now, but yea the
| death of Perl is the only thing that can make it
| profitable.
| stevenally wrote:
| Maybe programmers at companies using Perl get together and
| raise the issue with management? It is a bargain. Imagine
| the cost of having to rewrite all that Perl.
| riffraff wrote:
| I don't understand why grant expenses surged in 2023 if
| revenue was going down.
|
| I wish the Perl foundation good luck.
| infecto wrote:
| I don't know the dynamics of this board but does anyone else
| find it strange that the secretary is digging through public
| documents to generate a post outlining finances? Is that not
| what the treasurer should be helping with? Then the treasurer
| makes a public comment to the post? Feels very strange to me.
| autarch wrote:
| Just to clarify, Dan Wright is the former treasurer. He
| retired from the TPRF board back in 2020 (https://news.perl
| foundation.org/post/board_update_tpf_treasu...).
|
| But to answer the bigger question, yes, I think this was a
| bit weird. I was also on the board for a while, and I think
| we did not do a good job of reporting on and monitoring
| financials. This was one of my frustrations with the
| organization, and part of the reason I stepped down from
| the board (though there were other, bigger, reasons not
| related to the board as well).
|
| In fact, I had made the same points as Makoto does in his
| blog post maybe 1-2 years earlier in a board meeting. We
| were running a constant deficit and we didn't seem to have
| a clear plan for what we would do if that continued.
| caseyy wrote:
| Perhaps it was not meant to be a flashy donation but a medium-
| sized one. It is still an act of good.
| myrmidon wrote:
| Regarding B: This tracks with what I've observed in this
| regard, namely that sponsoring by companies just doesn't work
| well as business model even for projects where you would assume
| that it should. The incentives are just not working out, and it
| seems impossible to mobilize even a fraction of the sums for
| OSS-donations than what companies _burn_ for much less critical
| aspects of their operation than OSS tools /libraries/components
| (or waste outright).
|
| Open source is largely a thing because lots of people
| voluntarily invest (valuable!) time on their own in my opinion
| (with corporate sponsorship being almost negligible by
| comparison).
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| Most big open-source projects are a thing because a companies
| invest in it. When we rely on people doing it in their free
| time what we see is unmaintained software.
|
| The entire idea that open source is volunteer work is largely
| a myth when it comes to popular open source. Even the ones
| where you think it's volunteer work they do so much during
| their working hours that either they're lying to their
| employer or it's sponsored by their employer.
| gspencley wrote:
| 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 have to worry about
| maintenance costs we'd probably reach for python.
|
| TIL that there is a non-profit foundation that focuses, in
| part, on supporting Perl. That surprises me to the same extent
| that I would be surprised to learn that there is a foundation
| aimed at supporting VB6 (though now watch someone is going to
| share that there is).
| lizknope wrote:
| 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.
| cafard wrote:
| I was about to say, Hey, I use Perl, but then I saw this
| posting with the over 45 qualification. Yep, that's me (way
| over).
|
| Honestly, I write about a script a quarter in Perl, but it
| definitely is handy now and then.
| gertlex wrote:
| Curious: do you also do script-writing in other
| languages? And just pull out perl for a subset of
| problems? Or are most things at the "bigger than a
| script" level for you?
|
| I'm not here to judge. I still prefer to write my python
| scripts like it's the 2.7 days... (more effort goes to
| python "code")
| cafard wrote:
| Generally, if the script is more than a one-off, I will
| write in Python, since all the young seem to know Python,
| and very few seem to know Perl. There are two recurring
| jobs that I have not rewritten from Perl, one because
| "pack" is so handy.
|
| The only other language I use much for scripting is
| Javascript, or rather Jscript, for our accounting
| department sometimes needs files munged for integration
| into Great Plains, and I can count on cscript being on
| the machine and running such scripts.
| leejo wrote:
| > I'm surprised to learn that Perl is still used.
|
| For this year's London Perl & Raku workshop I shortlisted 70
| companies to look for sponsorship. That was with minimal
| research and effort. These ranged from long term ("legacy")
| users of Perl to startups. From small companies to very large
| and profitable fintechs. I cover this briefly in the talk I
| gave at the end of the workshop:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el7qHRpEDeE
|
| Yes, there is far less Perl than there was 20 years ago. But
| Perl was _everywhere_ at one point, and the halflife of
| programming languages is long so it 's still in a lot of
| places. Programming languages don't die, they just stop being
| talked about in favour of the shiny new ones.
| gspencley wrote:
| > Programming languages don't die, they just stop being
| talked about in favour of the shiny new ones.
|
| You're largely preaching to the choir, I don't disagree
| with anything you said.
|
| As a web application developer who got started
| professionally in the 1990s, I not only vividly remember
| Perl being everywhere, I actively wrote a lot of it.
|
| However, in my more recent experience, it is more likely to
| hear people talk about COBOL, FORTRAN or C++ than it is to
| discuss Perl. All of those languages predate Perl.
|
| Java also still gets a ton of discussion and it's not shiny
| and new anymore.
|
| Most of us who spent time writing and maintaining Perl in
| the 1990s were all too willing to abandon it in favour of
| other languages with similar features, not because they
| were shiny and new but because of major pain points with
| Perl (it earned the meme that it's a write-only language).
| In my opinion, Perl's greatest contribution and staying
| power was it's regex engine and syntax which persists.
|
| I don't even like python, for what it's worth, but it's
| popular for more reasons than it just being "shiny and new"
| (to the extent that you can even say that about python
| these days).
| leejo wrote:
| I don't disagree with anything you've said either, in
| fact I've blogged about this at length: http://leejo.gith
| ub.io/2017/12/17/tpc_and_the_end_of_languag...
|
| My main issue is that "People still use Perl?" has
| essentially become a meme at this point. I'm relatively
| sure that any sufficiently commented on or upvoted thread
| on HN gets that statement in it somewhere.
|
| Yes, Perl is still used. Extensively. People and
| companies just don't talk about it. _That 's_ the problem
| with Perl these days.
|
| (Personally I think TAP and CPAN were Perl's greatest
| contributions, as I was never a heavy user of regexp).
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > People and companies just don't talk about it.
|
| Why not?
| whiplash451 wrote:
| You'd be surprised to see how much COBOL is still used as
| well then.
| kqr wrote:
| In contrast to other people, I'm fairly young (low 30s) and I
| use Perl a lot. I've outlined my reasoning before[1] but it
| boils down to (a) very quick to get going, (b) runs everwhere
| I care about, (c) great compatibility story, and (d) can
| scale up to large applications in a pinch.
|
| [1]: https://entropicthoughts.com/why-perl
| worik wrote:
| > these days I can't even remember the last time Perl was
| mentioned in casual conversation amongst my peers
|
| You need better peers
| markstos wrote:
| DuckDuckGo is written in Perl. As a business decision, it's
| cheaper to keep Perl working then replace it.
| dtquad wrote:
| Plenty of talented developers in Eastern Europe who are $25k or
| cheaper.
| miroljub wrote:
| Good luck finding just one talented developer in Eastern
| Europe willing to work for 25k or cheaper.
|
| Thanks to globalisation, those times are long gone. Any
| mediocre developer can find a local employer that pays at
| least that much.
| rglullis wrote:
| 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.
| miohtama wrote:
| This is correct and sad.
|
| Open source would be much better with sustainable funding
| models. But hard to see how this could happen in SaaS
| dominated modern world.
| rglullis wrote:
| We "just" need to flip the narrative. Let's stop talking
| about "services" that people need to pay for and make FOSS
| something that people invest so they can (collectively) own
| later.
|
| People love to shit on crypto, but no other industry got so
| many small-scale, open source projects that got funded when
| people have high hopes of making bank from it.
|
| I wonder if we could get people to invest in open source
| projects that were tied to a short position on the
| proprietary counterpart.
| soygem wrote:
| It would be better off if people stopped using cuckold
| licenses like MIT, instead of GPL and its various strains.
| cardanome wrote:
| They kind of suck at asking for donations.
|
| Look at Wikipedia. They are grossly OVER-funded, they have
| more money they could ever need in fact And they run purely
| on donations.
|
| I always wanted to donate for Firefox but they don't offer me
| an option to do so.
|
| Or look at Gimp: https://www.gimp.org/donating/
|
| Not clear call to action. Lot's of confusion options. Not the
| best marketing.
| elevation wrote:
| My sense is that perl deployment is declining as it's replaced
| with better tools. What infrastructure is perl running?
|
| I started playing with Ubuntu in 2006. Exploring the system,
| I'd come across system scripts in perl here and there, but
| Lennart Poettering has gradually displaced these with unit
| files that are much easier to read.
|
| These days I may invoke perl occasionally. A few years back I
| used checkconfig.pl to build a slimmed-down kernel config for
| an embedded board. I expect it will eventually be phased out of
| these peripheral utilities.
| dale_glass wrote:
| Perl used to, but I'd say not anymore at this point.
|
| Many of the big Perl names long moved on; CPAN is full of
| abandoned modules. And the world doesn't sit still.
|
| So as time goes by, there's more and more risk of you finding
| out that some Perl module you're using no longer works. It may
| not build because of API changes in the C library, or the API
| of some web service changed, or there isn't an API at all for
| some pretty big thing that showed up 3 years ago.
|
| That didn't use to be the case.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| OT: Craigslist is also built on Perl and hired Larry Wall
| (creator) years ago.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14345022
| esaym wrote:
| 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.
| tyingq wrote:
| booking.com is, I think, still a heavy Perl user. I don't know
| to what degree they give back.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| At least for a while they had quite a bunch of core perl
| people on their payroll
| dep_b wrote:
| 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.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| I think a lot of companies are kind of realising the tech
| stack they use has a bigger impact on hiring than salaries.
| I believe banks are encountering this issue with no one
| wanting to do C++ anymore.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| You'd find a lot of talented C++ engineers for the right
| mission and culture.
|
| The problem you describe has little to do with C++ and a
| lot to do with banking.
| Onavo wrote:
| The banks just don't pay enough. Quant finance firms in
| Chicago and wall street don't have this problem.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| I am not sure you understand the problem. Your first
| sentence hints that you know that there needs to be other
| things than tech stack and salary to find talented C++
| programmers. But the second sentence pretends like you
| didn't write the first sentence.
|
| I said tech stack affects hiring more than salary. I
| didn't say there is a lack of C++ programmers. I was very
| explicit about my statement.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| The next 15-20 years are going to be entertaining as the
| world finally runs out of COBOL developers.
| Philadelphia wrote:
| It's not really that hard to make new ones.
| philistine wrote:
| I guess with C++ you either work for a bank or you do
| video games. Guess which one people prefer?
| IshKebab wrote:
| Definitely banks! Much better pay (at least in investment
| banks) and way less stressful.
| hashtag-til wrote:
| I interviewed with them once. The worst ever interview with
| incapable rude interviewers, who didn't even know the
| answer to their questions. They came p with some bizarre
| offer which I'm glad I declined.
| rmoriz wrote:
| The founder of Fastly was a Perl release maintainer and core
| author as well iirc.
| miroljub wrote:
| 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.
| rglullis wrote:
| Free software is more than just a business model.
| throitallaway wrote:
| 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 that for
| various projects; it's something that I enjoy doing.
| rglullis wrote:
| It is not "compulsory", but not doing it is extremely
| short-sighted, like the equivalent of failing the
| marshmallow test in a collective scale.
| Ologn wrote:
| 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.
| beernet wrote:
| Exactly true. This comment being downvoted is a symptom of
| the unconscious privilege within most of this pink bubble
| called HN.
| mtmail wrote:
| Short "Exactly true", "Yes", "I agree" or "+1" comments add
| little to a discussion and I see those regularly downvoted.
| beernet wrote:
| I was referring to the comment I replied to being
| downvoted. That being said, I agree with you, my point
| still stands though.
| rubyfan wrote:
| 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.
| sneak wrote:
| Gifts don't require repayment. Releasing free software is a
| gift to the world. Corporations don't owe free software
| maintainers a cent, because people using your software doesn't
| cost you anything.
| coldbrewed wrote:
| Open source is a gift within a gift economy. The software may
| be freely used but the labor needs to come from somewhere,
| and donations of either direct labor or compensation help
| ensure that the overall gift economy can continue to
| function.
| anticorporate wrote:
| Do they _owe_ anything today, in the sense of a legal
| obligation? No.
|
| But we've regulated the tragedy of the commons in all sorts
| of other instances. There's no reason, for example, that a
| small percentage of corporate income tax couldn't be
| allocated to a grant program for free and open source
| software projects.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| That's a good thought in isolation. The problem however is
| how are you going to ensure the money collected for that
| purpose go to the projects that actually need it and there
| wont be any corruption involved?
|
| It isn't hard to notice, for example, that in EU where
| gamedev companies often receive grants for various nebulous
| reasons tend to be companies that do not need the money in
| the first place (and yes, of course there are devs who
| received money that needed them, somehow people have to
| excuse the existence things they benefit from).
| anticorporate wrote:
| I don't think you're going to solve corruption perfectly
| in any system, but isn't that a bit of a red herring?
|
| We manage to do this within other fields of endeavor, at
| least in the United States, by using an intermediary.
| Examples: National Science Foundation, Corporation for
| Public Broadcasting, National Endowment for the Arts.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It's definitely not a red herring. Software is there to
| do something. Art isn't. If you're spending money on
| software, it's to do something, and if it's the wrong
| thing it's a waste of people's money.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| That's honestly the sneakiest suggestion for implementation
| of communism I've heard so far in my life. Give away low
| quality software for free, then later demand that the
| government force people who want nothing to do with you or
| your code to pay you for your efforts. It's parasitic on
| several different levels.
|
| Then all FOSS hackers will be like Khrushchev, wondering
| why Western industry always outproduced his own, even
| though the Soviets "where doing everything right".
| creato wrote:
| > There's no reason
|
| There definitely is a reason, and it's the same reason this
| problem exists in the first place: it's hard to measure the
| value a library or tool generates, whether it's open source
| or not. How are you going to allocate this tax to projects
| at scale?
|
| Companies already can barely solve this problem internally,
| and often fail completely at it. Just imagine how many
| times you read a comment on HN lamenting the lack of
| investment in IT infrastructure. The idea that you'll solve
| it at society scale as a government, for things much more
| nebulous than even IT infrastructure, is laughable.
| anticorporate wrote:
| Grants don't need to be given on the basis of usage
| alone. Generally speaking, the people on a grants
| committee would be knowledgeable industry experts who
| make allocation based on a number of factors like impact,
| ability of the organization receiving the funds the
| utilize them well, the sustainability of the project as a
| whole, the success of previous grant projects, etc.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| This just creates a cottage industry of people who are
| good at writing OSS grant applications and demonstrating
| "progress". It also keeps incumbents in place. Central
| funding is the worst idea unless there really is no
| alternative.
| munificent wrote:
| _> because people using your software doesn't cost you
| anything._
|
| Tell me you've never been an open source maintainer without
| telling me you've never been an open source maintainer. :)
| jefftk wrote:
| I've been an open source maintainer (and still am to a
| smaller degree) and I think sneak is right. I'm happy for
| people to use things I create and release, and their use
| doesn't impose costs on me.
| seam_carver wrote:
| Tech support still takes time.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| When you release an open source project you are not
| obligated to provide tech support.
|
| My project might be given to you for free but if you want
| my time you'll have to pay for it - and i get to decide
| if i'll sell it to you.
| layer8 wrote:
| Just seeing the issue submissions can have a cost in
| terms of emotional impact. Of course, you can shield
| yourself from any feedback, but that has its costs as
| well (e.g. not getting genuine high-quality error
| reports). One has to live with those trade-offs.
| jefftk wrote:
| Tech support is entirely optional, and I only do it to
| the extent that I enjoy it.
|
| (Or, when at one point I had a job as an open source
| developer, to the extent that I thought it would improve
| our software.)
| samus wrote:
| Their use doesn't, but from time to time they send in bug
| reports and feature requests, don't they?
|
| Where do you draw the line between extending your project
| and providing free labor to a for-profit company?
|
| Fixing bugs is less controversial, while finding
| solutions to issues arising in bespoke production
| environments, with short deadlines, is grueling work for
| which companies are usually gladly purchasing support
| contract. Where is the line past which you ask for money,
| and are you really fine helping a company avoid lawsuits
| and brand damage after they neglect updates for years,
| with no gratitude from their side? Case in point:
| log4shell in late 2021
| jefftk wrote:
| _> Where do you draw the line between extending your
| project and providing free labor to a for-profit
| company?_
|
| I work on my various projects to the extent that it is
| fun. If it stops being fun, I don't do it. Making
| something broadly useful is generally more fun than
| helping someone with a one-off thing, though that is not
| my decision criteria.
|
| If someone wants me to do something that isn't fun, they
| can offer me money, though they will generally need to
| offer me enough more money than it isn't worth it.
| samus wrote:
| If you put in work only to the extend that it's fun, then
| it is probably something with very clearly delineated
| scope (kudos for sticking to that!) or not really one of
| the projects that are so critical that companies should
| be expected to chip in money for support.
| nu11ptr wrote:
| 100%. This new trend of maintaining or starting an open
| source project and then getting upset when people don't send
| you money is seriously weird. If you want compensation, start
| a company, otherwise consider anything you receive a gift.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Yeah, though I have sympathies for single devs or projects
| like perl that are obviously non profit. Like, I get the
| frustrations for actual volunteers and people who survive
| on building OSS at a small scale.
|
| What really annoys me is when someone decides to build a
| corporation around an open source project, and then you get
| the usual blog post around users not paying or OSS not
| being sustainable. Yes, using OSS as your marketing and
| adoption strategy is probably not very reliable and can
| cause users to use your OSS as if it was OSS, that is,
| without giving anything back. But usually those projects
| succeed because they are OSS, and would've had basically no
| users otherwise. Who would've used MongoDB, elastic search,
| or redis if they were proprietary and required a paid
| license from the get go?
|
| In a way, that's also true in this case (success came from
| being OSS) but again, I get why it seems unfair for some
| when it's a non profit not being able to sustain itself or
| get contributions for corporate users.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| The problem is, if their software had cost what it needed
| to from the start then that would've put it in a totally
| different competition with other companies. Bypassing
| that competition doesn't mean they can suddenly start
| complaining about how many customers they have vs how
| much they get.
| graemep wrote:
| You can also do things like dual licensing.
|
| GPL or Affero GPL plus proprietary license. Of course this
| puts off outside contributors so not if you want a "bazaar"
| development mode--but people complaining about this are
| usually not doing so.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| I miss Craigslist, seems like everyone moved over to Facebook
| Marketplace a few years ago.
| benatkin wrote:
| I still use craigslist and haven't actually done anything
| with facebook marketplace yet. That makes me want to delete
| my facebook account (something I've been considering anyway)
| just to nip that possibility in the bud.
| orev wrote:
| If you're trying to sell something, you need to be where
| the customers are. If they're on Marketplace, that's where
| you go. You can easily list in both places.
| benatkin wrote:
| Not a good enough reason for me to go back to using
| Facebook regularly. For others, sure.
| orev wrote:
| There's no requirement to be actively reading and posting
| to Facebook in order to use Marketplace.
| elashri wrote:
| I think a good chunk of people would be worried to
| buy/sell from/to an account with little to no activity at
| all. This is very strong signal of low effort spam
| already common on FB Marketplace.
| turbojet1321 wrote:
| Marketplace is literally the only reason I still have a
| facebook account. Unfortunately the alternatives here get
| nowhere near the same number of buyers.
| VTimofeenko wrote:
| Anecdata but as a buyer and seller I consistently have had a
| much better experience on CL. It might be region-specific.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| https://hakai.org uses quite a bit of perl in its various
| projects! The CTO is very adept with it (really nice guy, too).
| declan_roberts wrote:
| Craigslist was purchased by ebay in 2004, which is what
| happened.
| fragmede wrote:
| Ebay bought a 25% stake, which it later sold back to them, so
| only sort of.
| altairprime wrote:
| It says a lot about how threatened these companies must be:
| AT&T claims to be profitable, but their infrastructure
| investment is focused entirely on obstructing competitors.
| Craigslist used to be a star, but they must be under severe
| pressure to avoid collapse to have withdrawn ecosystem
| donations. It says a lot about the fragility of DuckDuckGo that
| this is all they could commit to Perl, which is really
| unfortunate; they could have been excellent, but instead their
| star is apparently diminishing. Oh well.
| revskill wrote:
| Do perl support typescript ?
| barryrandall wrote:
| All TypeScript is valid perl if you apply the right regex.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| 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.
| yawaramin wrote:
| This reminds me of Evan Czaplicki's great talk where he basically
| traces the funding of most modern programming languages to search
| engine revenues :-)
| https://youtu.be/XZ3w_jec1v8?si=zdL6v9P8LnT7Cbal
| tombert wrote:
| I always forget that DDG is written with Perl, even after I
| emailed yegg a million years ago asking why they used Perl, and
| he responded back, which was nice of him.
|
| I hear Raku is fun, I haven't used it, but I sort of swore a soft
| oath that I would never touch Perl again about a decade ago after
| having to debug some regex magic someone did. I'm assuming that
| once you get past the "hump", Perl becomes fun?
| orev wrote:
| Regex and is a separate language used by many tools, Perl just
| made it nicely integrated into the language, and also made some
| nice enhancements. Don't blame issues with regex on Perl.
| SushiHippie wrote:
| > [...] asking why they used Perl, and he responded back, which
| was nice of him.
|
| Do you still know what the reason was?
| tombert wrote:
| I actually still have the email.
|
| Here's what I sent: Hello! I
| don't have a lot to say to you, but I just wanted to say that
| about a month ago, I started the transition away from Google,
| and the most obvious thing to switch was search.
| DuckDuckGo has improved substantially since the last time I
| used it (around 2012), and it's to a point where the results
| are comparable, and sometimes even better than Google, so
| changing was pretty seamless. Now the only Google-thing I
| need to remove from my life is YouTube. As a
| somewhat technical person, I was curious about one thing; I
| saw that the primary language for DuckDuckGo is Perl.
| Without making any judgement here, was there a particular
| reason for that choice? Also, are you planning to move to
| Perl 6? Anyway, I appreciate you reading my
| email. DuckDuckGo is a great service, and I hope you guys
| keep up the good work! -Thomas Gebert.
|
| Here was his response: Yes, though, the
| primary language is Perl. It was out of convenience and
| interest since that was my primary language when I started
| the project. There was/are a lot of libraries useful for text
| processing / web crawling. Now Python and other libraries
| have been similarly built up.
| SushiHippie wrote:
| Amazing, thanks for sharing!
|
| What year was this? (I'm Curious, as you mentioned 2012 was
| the last year you used at the time of the E-Mail)
| tombert wrote:
| It's actually more recent than I thought, looks like it
| was 2018. I would have sworn it was earlier but I can see
| the "sent" timestamp on ProtonMail.
| SushiHippie wrote:
| 2018 is still a long time ago, so that's totally
| understandable haha
|
| Thank you!
| hnisoss wrote:
| It s just a lang like any other. Even ASM you can write fairly
| easily if you do it for years. Raku is quite damn cool, you
| should check it out a bit. As felix[1] said, it realy is
| something like bash and python having a cool cousin.
|
| [1] https://felix-knorr.net/posts/2023-06-24-raku-is-
| awesome.htm...
| sigzero wrote:
| Raku is Perl on steroids "basically". It is still pretty slow
| the last I read something on it. I always enjoyed Perl even as
| a beginner.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| 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.
| shrubble wrote:
| Another post in the thread mentions ATT; I can confirm that at
| another large telecom, Perl is still used in quite a few places,
| and is still being used for some new projects as well.
| oalders wrote:
| If you don't mind sharing this info, I'd love to hear about it.
| :) I'm olaf@perlfoundation.org
| handzhiev wrote:
| Genuine question: is someone starting projects in Perl/Raku? If
| yes, what made you choose it?
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