[HN Gopher] Proxmox Donates EUR10k to the Perl and Raku Foundation
___________________________________________________________________
Proxmox Donates EUR10k to the Perl and Raku Foundation
Author : oalders
Score : 263 points
Date : 2025-07-23 14:48 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.perl.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.perl.com)
| LetMeLogin wrote:
| While I appreciate the gesture, it seems a bit low based on the
| fact that they're using it as their "core" technology, every
| single day.
| dewey wrote:
| Maybe, but it's also 100% higher than what 99% of companies
| built on open source software give back.
| johng wrote:
| I don't think Proxmox is a huge company making lots of money
| though either... I've used it for free for years. I imagine
| most people use it for free. I'm sure there are companies
| paying for it, but I don't think it's some monster money maker?
| gmuslera wrote:
| I bet that they grew a lot with VMWare/Broadcom changes, even
| the somewhat paid subscriptions. But they are not yet one of
| the (commercial/enterprise) big names. I suppose that this
| donation is part of their "now that I have a positive budget,
| what I do with it?" plan, and finance growing up both as
| company/support as in adding features.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| They are based in Austria, my assumption has been that most
| of their business/enterprise customers are in the EU.
| hda111 wrote:
| Resellers exists in most parts of the world.
| applied_heat wrote:
| Proxmox is based on perl? Can you expand on that? Web front
| end, vm automation...?
| npteljes wrote:
| Proxmox is written in perl, among other things like HTML and
| JS, on top of the other free software that they are using
| like QEMU. They also use Rust at places.
|
| This is their repo: https://git.proxmox.com/?p=pve-
| manager.git;a=tree
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| This happens every time. Company does good thing. "But, why
| didn't they do 2X good thing?!"
|
| Working for a F500 company, I have tried to use budget surplus
| to reward open source projects we use. Management looked at me
| like I had grown an additional head.
| naikrovek wrote:
| > Management looked at me like I had grown an additional
| head.
|
| this is my experience, too. they'll gladly take, take, take,
| take, take, and take some more, but when it comes time to
| give just a little bit, they balk.
| npteljes wrote:
| Same for normal people, for example with any paid internet
| service. They watch 2 hours of youtube every day, but to
| pay a pittance for YouTube Premium? Unimaginable, how dare
| they ask for anything for the service. In every thread
| where it comes up, people act like it's pulling teeth. And
| also, microtransactions work because of the same reason.
| People's relationship with paying for things is
| complicated.
| petdance wrote:
| > I have tried to use budget surplus to reward open source
| projects we use.
|
| "We've never heard of that happening, so no."
| npteljes wrote:
| But they also publish their work for free!
| neuroelectron wrote:
| I was thinking about matching it since I'm retired and my early
| and mid career was built on perl but I also feel a bit
| unqualified as I'm not really a great programmer or really
| understand deep problems like language design and
| compilers/interpreters.
| ValtteriL wrote:
| Doing the God's work. Love both.
| Bluestein wrote:
| TIMTOWTDI!
| lordofgibbons wrote:
| Are people still using Perl for new software?
|
| I remember at a former company, we had a major migration away
| from Perl 12 years ago. The Perl code base was considered
| extremely ancient even back then.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Yes, it's still well-maintained and highly backwards-
| compatible, avoiding breaking changes between releases.
| walterbell wrote:
| We need an ROI metric to quantify the backward compatibility
| and low churn of Perl relative to languages like Python,
| Ruby, golang.
| lordofgibbons wrote:
| Golang declared a perfect backwards compatibility guarantee
| way back when version 1 was released. So in this regard,
| Perl isn't unique.
| naikrovek wrote:
| well, Go has broken that backwards compatibility when it
| was deemed important enough to break things. So it's not
| "perfect" and I imagine Perl's isn't either.
| drysart wrote:
| Perl as a language is pretty mature and rarely sees
| breaking changes (and what breaking changes exist are in
| corners of the language that are extremely esoteric even
| for Perl). You can take a Perl script written 25 years
| ago and it'll still run just fine.
|
| New language features and things that might alter
| existing behavior are usually locked behind a version
| declaration opt-in at the top of your script. You need to
| do something similar to `use v5.39;` to unlock new
| behaviors from that version of Perl -- which _may_
| contain breaking changes but those are also generally
| backward compatible too.
|
| But that's for the base language and standard library.
| Individual third-party packages may vary in their
| backward compatibility.
| dcassett wrote:
| I remember a breaking change that was not esoteric: "keys
| %hash" started producing a different result each time the
| script was run. It required replacing the construct with
| "sort keys %hash" to get reproducible results.
| librasteve wrote:
| Perhaps, but code that inadvertently depends on the Hash
| implementation returning keys in a particular order is
| arguably incorrect.
| jcynix wrote:
| I can't remember a time where "keys %hash" returned the
| keys in a defined order. And I've been using Perl for
| over 30 years now.
|
| I've just consulted my first issue of "Programming Perl"
| (printed in 1990l and it says:
|
| keys (assoc ARRAY) this function returns a normal array
| consisting of all the keys of the named associative
| array. The keys are returned in an apparently random
| order, but it is the same order as either the values() or
| each() function produces (given that the associative
| array has not been modified)
| dcassett wrote:
| Agreed, but prior to the change the "apparently random"
| as described in the documentation was similar to using
| random(fixed_seed), rather than the new behavior of
| random(system_time), which made the output of the script
| non-reproducible given the same inputs. The change to
| Perl's behavior was made for security reasons.
|
| (Edited for clarity)
| ether_at_cpan wrote:
| > I can't remember a time where "keys %hash" returned the
| keys in a defined order.
|
| It was never a _defined_ order, but before version 5.17.6
| (November 2012), each hash returned its list of keys and
| values in a _consistent_ order between runtimes, so some
| code ended up getting written that depended on this
| ordering (say in a unit test, or a list that would get
| assigned into a database). The change was to make the
| ordering random/inconsistent/unpredictable every time the
| list was fetched, which as I recall did break some number
| of tests in CPAN modules and required new releases.
| martinflack wrote:
| And the last release was three weeks ago! Perl 5.42.0 was
| released July 3, 2025.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| > avoiding breaking changes
|
| Perl 6?
|
| It was so breaking they don't even call it Perl anymore.
| kstrauser wrote:
| In fairness to Perl, that's a good reason not to consider
| it a breaking change.
| em-bee wrote:
| perl 6/raku was a redesign. as far as i remember,
| upgradeability from perl 5 without code changes was never
| the goal.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Isn't that the definition of a breaking change?
| em-bee wrote:
| yeah, in the same sense that D is a breaking change for
| C, or wayland for X11. the point is that as far as i know
| it was never intended that existing perl 5 code would be
| rewritten. unlike the python 2 to 3 change where the
| intention was that people would convert using 2to3 and
| later using compatibility modules that allowed writing
| code that works with both. python 2 development stopped
| after 12 years, much later than they expected.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| If Ford makes a 4-door passenger car, and then comes out
| with a 2-door sports car, and keeps producing both cars,
| that's not a breaking change. It's just a new car.
|
| Perl 5 is still supported, Perl 6 (Raku) continues
| independently.
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| It's unfortunate that that wasn't clear to people who
| weren't closely involved with Perl at the time. So many
| people got the impression that Perl 5 was outdated as
| soon as 6 was in development, so they thought they had to
| move on from it. It's too bad Raku didn't have a
| different name from the start.
| petdance wrote:
| > It's too bad Raku didn't have a different name from the
| start.
|
| We thought that it would take a year or two, not decades.
|
| Also, the intent was to have a Perl 5 compatibility mode.
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| Looks like the last time I tried out Perl 6 was almost 10
| years ago. Even wrote a few blog posts about it before
| giving up on it again. Might be time to take another
| look.
| lizmat wrote:
| There _is_ a Perl 5 compatibility mode: it 's called
| Inline::Perl5.
|
| Maybe not the one that was originally planned. But that
| was only a real possibility if Perl 5 would be able to
| get rid of its XS addiction.
|
| Ask yourself: how many of the up river Perl modules are
| Perl only?
| oofbey wrote:
| Agreed. Probably why they renamed it. I think everybody
| probably wishes they'd taken a new name from the start.
| 6031769 wrote:
| Yes, we mostly use Perl for new software.
|
| If you let your codebase get into an "ancient" state then
| that's a problem of your own creation rather than that of the
| language or system in which it is written.
| kosolam wrote:
| I'm very curious to hear your experience building greenfield
| projects with perl today. And what are the main advantages
| you feel that you get from it?
| doublerabbit wrote:
| For my company, it's cross-platform and just works. It's
| file & data capabilities are powerful enough to deal with
| lots of miniature sized files from the renderer.
|
| Perl just hovers them up and does whatever processing. We
| did test Python but it just felt clunky in it's habits and
| felt lacking in terms of performance such as stalling in
| building a dictionary list of files to work with. Perl may
| be one of the older languages, but it still holds strong.
|
| If Perl is supported for your $OS your script is guaranteed
| to execute. Sure, adjustments may have to be made if you're
| targeting the underside of the rainbow such as Windows but
| it's trivial for *nix hosts. Migrating from Ubuntu to
| Debian, BSD? -- 99.9% chance your script will run.
|
| I am bias, in that their isn't anything majority wrong with
| perl. It was used as the main language back in the 80's for
| a reason and Perl's ecosystem (cpan) is still pretty
| comprehensive and still holding weight.
|
| As it's not taught anymore due to newer trends this is
| causing it's shine to dull and it's overall presence
| dropping away. I wouldn't disagree that new languages boast
| optimism in to the future of programming technologies but
| with perl it has been battle tested and just works.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| > Sure, adjustments may have to be made if you're
| targeting the underside of the rainbow such as Windows
| but it's non-trivial for *nix hosts.
|
| The rest of your comment makes me think the "non-trivial"
| was a typo and meant to be something else.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| My bad, I got the two mixed. I meant trivial where by
| it's dead simple to switch over. Thanks for the pointer.
| 6031769 wrote:
| The experience is all good. The toolchain, the speed of
| both development and execution, the breadth of CPAN and the
| famous backwards-compatibility all make for a happy
| development team.
|
| The advantages are the same as they have been for years:
| cross-platform compatibility, one system to run all aspects
| of a large project, the flexibility to get the job done in
| the simplest, most efficient and most maintainable manner.
|
| One caveat: we don't do any MSWin32 development at all. I'm
| vaguely aware that there are some extra considerations on
| that O/S but it isn't something which we have to deal with.
| kosolam wrote:
| Sounds good, thanks. I suppose ai models are really good
| at generating perl?
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| I'd run from a place that wants to use Perl for new software.
| Run and never look back.
| macintux wrote:
| Whereas I'd run _to_ such a place. I miss it.
| daneel_w wrote:
| I maintain and develop the back-end of a telecom services
| provider. It's almost 100% Perl, and once in a blue moon when
| we add something entirely new we usually stick with Perl.
| polytely wrote:
| I've actually started using raku for hobby projects recently
| (my day job is C#) and it is actually really fun to write.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| How good are LLMs at writing Perl? I've tried to use Perl a few
| times, even being pretty conversant with shell scripting, sed,
| awk, etc. I found Perl to be difficult because it's so full of
| idioms that you "just have to know" and (to me anyway)
| TIMDOWTDI actually makes things harder for a new/learning perl
| developer.
|
| What I want is TITBWTDI (this is the best way to do it).
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Not bad. At my last gig we had a modernization project where
| we were converting Perl to Python and the company invested in
| their own self-hosted co-pilot. (Bank)
|
| It would hiccup where it would write the existing perl
| codebase in to a hallucinated python syntax but this was two
| years ago.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Claude seems to fare well. I have used it for a couple of
| existing and new projects written entirely in Perl. LOC was
| below 2k per project.
| cestith wrote:
| Check out Modern Perl. It won't limit you to one best way for
| everything. It will give you one best way to do many things,
| and a smaller set of good ways to do others.
| https://isbn.nu/9781680500882
|
| Keep in mind though that the current state of Perl includes
| being in the process of getting a native object model baked
| into the language core. So that's still in some flux but
| it'll be better than choosing among eight different external
| object model libraries. It's also more performant. The docs
| for that I'm not sure are in a bound paper book anywhere yet,
| but I'd happily be corrected.
| G3rn0ti wrote:
| I am working for a company maintaining an enterprise grade
| software system that is primarily driven by Perl 5 and
| Postgres. It generates about EUR 50 million in revenue every
| year.
|
| To avoid creating new Perl code from scratch we created a REST
| API many years ok which new frontends and middlewares use
| instead of interacting with the core itself. That has been
| successful to some extent as we can have frontend teams coding
| in JS/TypeScript without them needing to interact with Perl.
| But re-writing the API's implementation is risky and the
| company has shied away from that.
|
| Fixing API bugs still require to dive into a Perl system.
| However, I found it easier turning Python or JS devs into Perl
| devs than into DB engineers. So, usually, the DB subsystem
| bears the greater risk and requires more expensive personnel.
| autoexec wrote:
| Perl is still what I reach for when I have a regex heavy task.
| At my job there's a near 50/50 split between python and perl
| scripts. I've re-written some of the perl used for general
| sysadmin tasks in python too, but I haven't seen enough benefit
| to justify doing more. It works. Plus, in my opinion, perl is
| more fun to write.
| nailer wrote:
| > Perl is still what I reach for when I have a regex heavy
| task.
|
| That's the point of PCRE though - you get Perl's excellent
| regex implementation in more places.
| autoexec wrote:
| It's not usually that there are features I need which
| python doesn't support, it's just much more cumbersome to
| use in python compared to perl where it's part of the
| language and can be used just about anywhere without even
| adding another import.
| macintux wrote:
| The friction difference between "part of the syntax of
| the language" and "have to use this library" is enormous.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| Enormous like "import re"? It is still part of core
| python.
| macintux wrote:
| Yes.
|
| When writing a Perl script, there's literally zero
| friction to using regular expressions because they're
| baked in. I just type what I want to run.
|
| When writing a Python script, I realize I want a regular
| expression, and I have to stop the code I'm writing, jump
| to the top of the file, import re, go back to where I
| was.
|
| Now, maybe I'm writing a quick script and I don't care
| about tidiness, and I only have to stop what I'm doing,
| put "import re", and then write the code I want, but
| still, I'm stopping.
|
| Or I'll wait until I've written the code I want, and go
| back and put it in. If I remember. If not, I'll find out
| when I run it that I forgot it.
|
| Or my IDE will show me in red ugly squigglies that I need
| to right click or hover, and there'll be a recommended
| solution to import it.
|
| This is all friction that isn't there with Perl.
| fragmede wrote:
| > stop the code I'm writing, jump to the top of the file,
| import re, go back to where I was.
|
| If you're just shitting out a one off script and that's
| really a problem for you, you can just "import re" where
| you are, there's nothing other than convention and scope
| that forces you to import everything at the top. Given
| thats also a problem with sys and os, importing all the
| commonly used libraries and carrying that around as a
| template (from print import pprint, anyone?) also seems
| reasonable, if that's really a problem for you.
| rjh29 wrote:
| With perl you just run $foo =~ /regex/ anywhere, you can
| also put that into an if condition or assign the results
| to a variable, you can use variables like $1 and $2 (the
| captures) immediately after, as they are global. You can
| use any choice of delimiter for the regex to improve
| readability (i.e. you don't have to use quotes, if your
| regex contains a lot of quotes).
|
| So you can do while ($foo =~ /bar/) or even ($result) =
| $foo =~ /bar/.
|
| Python has only raw strings and until recently you
| couldn't even do if ($regex) { ... } you had to assign
| the match to a variable and check it, causing lots of
| nested if/then blocks. It's just clunkier.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Python is only 3 years younger than Perl, should we throw
| Python away? (actually, I'm on board...)
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Perl is outstanding, I wish more things used it!
| weare138 wrote:
| Yes. I do. Just in case anyone doesn't know Perl has been in
| active development and has been adding new features the entire
| time. It was never 'dead'. This is Perl's new OO interface that
| was recently added as a stable feature in 5.40:
|
| https://github.com/Perl-Apollo/Corinna
| petesergeant wrote:
| Generally only places that have a large amount of existing Perl
| and Perl developers. It's a fine language with a strong
| ecosystem but even most Perl shops have a second backend
| language these days. I would happily use it again, but the only
| compelling reason to write new stuff in Perl is if most of your
| existing stuff is.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| Well, I assume this is for Perl 6 that never really caught on.
| oofbey wrote:
| The TIOBE index says Perl is currently the #11 most popular
| programming language (up from #30 a year ago). ref:
| https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
|
| Now, I don't actually believe this, because that puts Perl way
| ahead of Rust (currently at #18). So the big thing I'm taking
| away from this little research post is that I no longer trust
| the Tiobe index. Too bad - it felt pretty reliable for a long
| time.
| leejo wrote:
| Which is more believable or surprising:
|
| a) there is probably several orders of magnitude more Perl
| code running out there in the wild than Rust?
|
| b) the TIOBE index was ever meaningful?
| oofbey wrote:
| I'm sure (a) is true. But TIOBE is supposed to be some
| balance between "total mass of existing code" and "current
| interest in new code".
| petdance wrote:
| I suggest that there are no meaningful conclusions to be
| gleaned from the TIOBE rankings.
| kblissett wrote:
| I wish more companies would do this. EUR10k is a cheap price to
| pay for some great exposure and goodwill!
| walterbell wrote:
| Also sponsorship of community conferences/meetups for OSS
| software.
| uncertainrhymes wrote:
| Even though Varnish may not be in fashion any more, there were
| many companies happily using it for free and still demanding
| security updates.
|
| I like their transparency about who actually supports them, and
| what the whole community gets for it. I wish other projects
| would do that, if for no other reason than to make it obvious
| that FOSS isn't just something that happens.
|
| https://phk.freebsd.dk/VML/2025/
| AgentMatrixAI wrote:
| Been using proxmox for a home lab and I still can't believe how
| much value they provide for free.
|
| I use it with Cursor and create vm templates and clone them with
| a proxmox MCP server I've been adding features to and it's been
| incredibly satisfying to just prompt "create template from vm 552
| and clone a full VM with it".
|
| https://github.com/agentify-sh/cursor-proxmox-mcp
| trallnag wrote:
| What do you use all these VMs for in your homelab? I've dabbled
| with Proxmox in the past but settled on plain Ubuntu for my
| home server that I now treat as a pet managed with Ansible.
| AgentMatrixAI wrote:
| it gives me a direct bridge from cursor -> VM, for local dev
| & test out open source projects
|
| I like having a local server I can carry with me and control
| using just Cursor to manage it.
|
| So basically the freedom that comes with a homelab without
| using proxmox UI and ssh.
| SparkyMcUnicorn wrote:
| Take your pick. Everyone wants different things. This
| site/repo is pretty great.
|
| https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts
| npteljes wrote:
| I personally self-host a bunch of stuff for myself and my
| household. Nextcloud for my phone, mattermost for in-house
| communication, private wordpress as a multimedia diary, a
| bunch of experiments, wekan for organization, network
| storage, network printer.
|
| I found Turnkey Linux pretty nice. They provide ready to use
| Linux images for different services. Proxmox integrates with
| them, so for example to install Nextcloud, all I needed to do
| is to click around a bunch on the Proxmox interface, and I'm
| good to go. They have around 80-90 images to choose from.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| immich, n8n, openwebui, metube, hoarder, gethomepage,
| freshrss, tailscale, reverse proxy, on and on it goes.
| trallnag wrote:
| I do that with containers running on a single-node
| Kubernetes cluster (k3s). Doing it via the Proxmox UI feels
| like I'm giving up "control". Maybe that's just because
| doing it with Kubernetes etc. is closer to how I'd do it at
| work.
| zamadatix wrote:
| For me Proxmox is mainly a means to be able to have more than
| 1 pet (partially for simplicity's sake of not having to make
| everything play well together in the same install, partially
| because I have some things which require Windows and some
| things which require Ubuntu).
|
| I guess I do also sometimes use it for ephemeral things
| without having to worry about cleaning up after too. E.g. I
| can dork around with some project I saw on GitHub for an
| afternoon then hit "revert to snapshot" without having to
| worry about what that means for the permanent stuff running
| at the same time.
| pphysch wrote:
| To be fair, Proxmox is essentially a UX wrapper around
| QEMU/KVM, which is free software and the true kernel of value.
| If you are going the MCP route I wonder if a direct QEMU or
| libvirt MCP server would be much more powerful and precise.
| SparkyMcUnicorn wrote:
| Proxmox has a UI and a bunch of APIs so I don't need to
| rebuild them myself, and maintains everything quite well (all
| major upgrades I've done have been pretty seamless). Proxmox
| is definitely an easy path, and you still have root access
| for drawing outside the lines.
| tlamponi wrote:
| While UI/UX is-as probably everywhere-a huge topic, we
| actually have spent most engineering power in the whole
| management stack. And of that managing QEMU/KVM-while surely
| significant-is by far not the biggest part of our also 100%
| free and open source code bases. I'd invite you to try our
| full feature set, from clustering, to SDN to integrated Ceph
| management, to containers, backups including third party and
| our own backup server, and many more, all accessible through
| a REST API with full permission management and modern access
| control.
|
| And we naturally try to contribute to every project we use
| however possible, be it in the form of patches, QA, detailed
| bug reports, ... and especially for QEMU et al. we're pretty
| content with our impact, at least compared to resources of
| other companies leveraging it, I think.
|
| If all it'd take is being "just" a simple UI wrapper, it
| would make lots of things way easier for us :-)
| pphysch wrote:
| > I'd invite you to try our full feature set, from
| clustering, to SDN to integrated Ceph management, to
| containers, backups including third party and our own
| backup server, and many more, all accessible through a REST
| API with full permission management and modern access
| control.
|
| This would be appealing in a world where Kubernetes doesn't
| exist as a mature option.
|
| Don't the vast majority of Proxmox users use it for small
| VM labs, without all the bells and whistles?
| phil21 wrote:
| > Don't the vast majority of Proxmox users use it for
| small VM labs, without all the bells and whistles?
|
| In my little world this largely was true until Broadcom
| bought VMware and proceeded to blow it up.
|
| I know of a handful of rather "large" (100s of physical
| servers at least) VMware based products that are as
| quickly as possible migrating to proxmox.
|
| Given how universal this is for my little slice of IT, I
| imagine this is quite pervasive for the "mid tier" VMware
| organization.
| tlamponi wrote:
| > This would be appealing in a world where Kubernetes
| doesn't exist as a mature option.
|
| The feature set of Kubernetes and Proxmox VE do not
| really overlap completely IMO, or would need much more
| hands-on approach and specialized in-house staff to set
| up and maintain, why go for that if you can do everything
| one need with much less headache.
|
| As the former needs much more dedicated management and
| maintenance resources and is often pulling in more
| complexity than most need, but there one needs also to
| differentiate from those developing and releasing their
| own applications and being fine with what e.g. kubernetes
| offers, quite possibly even wanting that, compared to
| those e.g. providing infrastructure for internal use or
| just favoring more monolithic applications, often boils
| down to taste and what one is comfortable with. Our
| enterprise customers are _very_ diverse, from small shops
| with two or three node clusters to host the office infra
| to five digit hosts and 6 digits VMs spread out. We even
| know a few setups using Proxmox VE as basis for their
| Kubernetes cluster.
|
| Finally, PVE is quite a bit older than Kubernetes, we
| still exist and see a lot of adoption (already before the
| Broadcom deal, albeit there was an uptick since then), so
| even without some technical comparison of features or use
| cases or the like it seems clear that Kubernetes isn't an
| alternative for all, just like Proxmox VE certainly isn't
| one.
|
| > Don't the vast majority of Proxmox users use it for
| small VM labs, without all the bells and whistles?
|
| One should not confuse being very popular in the home lab
| scene due to being very approachable, simple to set up,
| and most importantly 100% FLOSS, not just open core or
| the like, with it being the main or target audience, but
| we're really happy with the synergies it provides.
|
| And actually I'd not frame it as bad thing that Proxmox
| VE is used that way, we do not want to be a club that is
| hard to access, neither cost wise nor hindering scaling
| smaller VM labs to bigger setups, and certainly not from
| a complexity barrier.
| pphysch wrote:
| Kubernetes also has off-the-shelf distros that are more
| apples-to-apples with Proxmox VE.
|
| Let's not pretend that Proxmox or any of these are silver
| bullets that kill the (inherent) complexity demon.
| Anything touching SDN or clustered storage, in any
| ecosystem, will need dedicated in-house experts that know
| networking, storage, Linux and how Proxmox (or
| Kubernetes) approaches those domains.
|
| Unless you are just using Proxmox for small VM labs, in
| which case it ought to be compared with libvirt and
| standalone QEMU.
| tlamponi wrote:
| Kill? no, definitively not. But 1) not adding a lot of
| extra and 2) applying the Pareto principle here are a
| huge difference. I.e. making the essential parts
| approachable enough to get one started while not being
| blocked too much by upfront (steep) learning curve, while
| not blocking one later by limiting one to just the
| predefined path.
|
| > Anything touching SDN or clustered storage, in any
| ecosystem, will need dedicated in-house experts that know
| networking, storage, Linux and how Proxmox (or
| Kubernetes) approaches those domains.
|
| There are widely different level of expertise needed
| though, and the setups that often are managed by admins
| with not in-depth expertise in clustering or SDN can
| still get things done with Proxmox VE, and if they are
| out of idea we got our enterprise support and naturally
| also the very active and friendly community forum to
| help.
|
| > Unless you are just using Proxmox for small VM labs, in
| which case it ought to be compared with libvirt and
| standalone QEMU.
|
| Yeah, I really do not get that point, you basically
| invalidate 95% of Proxmox VE's feature set because it
| might not be fully leveraged by a specific user group and
| because there are some different solutions that also
| allow one to do similar things. That would also
| invalidate Kubernetes, it's not completely unpopular in
| small labs either after all.
|
| To be honest, to me, it feels a bit to me like a
| justification attempt for the initial post in this chain
| here that brushed off Proxmox VE as just some small UI/UX
| wrapper around QEMU/KVM and all the Real Work(tm) being
| done by others, possibly because you never actually used
| it, but I might read it the wrong way, and I'm certainly
| not offended in any way, just find it a bit odd.
| ahofmann wrote:
| Have you used proxmox? It makes stuff easy, that was
| really complicated before proxmox entered the stage.
| qualeed wrote:
| You started with saying it was " _essentially a UX
| wrapper_ ", it was explained that there is a lot more to
| it, so you immediately shift into (paraphrased) " _well
| there 's other options and most people don't use the
| other features anyways_".
|
| Would have been cool of you to just say "oh neat, I
| didn't realize that you did all that too".
| pphysch wrote:
| Do you really think people are using Proxmox MCP servers
| to administer mission-critical distributed computing
| systems that leverage SDN and clustered storage, rather
| than small VM labs? Because that was not my assumption.
| qualeed wrote:
| That's very much not the point I was making, at all.
|
| There could be tons! Or not many. It's completely
| irrelevant to my comment.
| AgentMatrixAI wrote:
| While you could do that, proxmox offers lot of value with its
| UI which I need to default to time to time. With just an API
| key I generate from proxmox I have a wide range of capability
| that I can hook up an MCP server to.
|
| The funny thing is with Cursor I can just generate a new
| capability, like the clone and template actions were created
| after asking Sonnet 4.
| Spivak wrote:
| Calling Proxmox a wrapper for KVM is hilarious, you're
| ignoring that Proxmox does all the work to make a functional
| cluster of VM servers including stuff like shared storage and
| live migrations and networking. If you only use Proxmox on a
| single server with local storage then I could see how you
| would say this but having a fleet of VMs on a cluster of
| servers where you can take down physical hosts to patch
| transparently is the "hard problem."
| mort96 wrote:
| It's an annoying thing common to a lot of technologists.
| They (we?) see a product which solves a problem, then
| imagine some hacky way to set up existing tools to half-way
| solve a similar problem in an easy but incomplete way, then
| make fun of the product for existing when the hacky
| solution exists. The Hacker News comment on Docker's
| announcement post comes to mind, where a person makes fun
| of the concept when you could "just" run rsync in a cron
| job.
| Melonai wrote:
| I think you might mean Dropbox, but your point still
| stands.
|
| For context, here's that classic thread:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 :)
| mort96 wrote:
| Haha, yeah I meant Dropbox. Derp
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I mean, that's actually not being fair... It's like saying
| Windows is just a UX wrapper around a microkernel. There is
| _quite a bit_ of functionality provided by that wrapper.
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| it's not. their SDN built on frr and vxlan is itself a
| complex piece that has been missing from the free space
| (integrated as a package).
| placardloop wrote:
| This is true for the act of launching VMs, but it's pretty
| reductive towards the entire suite of important features that
| Proxmox provides like clustering, high availability,
| integration with various storage backends, backups, and more
| that qemu doesn't.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| Yes, same here. Big shout-out to https://community-
| scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE as well.
| MomsAVoxell wrote:
| I use it for DevOps at work and it's just wonderful. The data
| center features alone are worth the license fees .. but what I
| like most of all is how easy it makes managing ZFS pools.
| kosolam wrote:
| Way to go. Proxmox is one of the best open source free software
| out there for small businesses/lab use cases IMHO
| ZiiS wrote:
| I am sure we are all grateful for Proxmox's generous donation;
| but if EUR10k is newsworthy for a Foundation with Perl's historic
| profile, I would be very worried.
| markoman wrote:
| Shouldn't their donation be weighed against the revenues they
| enjoy using the Foundation's labors? Is Proxmox enjoying
| particularly strong revenues, and doesn't their product involve
| much more than what Perl provides? I think the donation is
| pretty fair. Their success certainly owes more to things beyond
| Perl itself.
| rcxdude wrote:
| I think the point is proxmox's donation is fair, but there's
| many more businesses getting much more value from perl which
| are not donating, if their fair donation is notable.
| whatevaa wrote:
| Donations are donations. Can't expect them.
| axus wrote:
| VMware has certainly extracted more dollars from me than
| ProxMox has.
|
| It's nice when companies contribute fixes and testing up-
| stream, even when it's not a monetary contribution.
| systemswizard wrote:
| Proxmox had made other donations like they were a platinum
| sponsor at debconf25 and that's $20k
| bmn__ wrote:
| Then be worried. That amount is a quarter of the foundation's
| yearly revenue.
| oofbey wrote:
| Part of me wants to go send Perl some money, because it was
| so important in my formative years. Another part of me is
| like "people still use perl?"
| systems wrote:
| Raku is now a completely separate language from Perl and I
| think that while Perl still seem to be used, Raku usage is
| even smaller
|
| I am really impressed of how Raku developers keep their
| motivation to work on it
|
| And I am a bit curious to know if Proxmox is interested in
| Raku at all, or are they only using Perl
| m463 wrote:
| proxmox is heavily based on perl
|
| ...and when looking through the sources, I thought <the
| proxmox folks> "still use perl?"
|
| I guess proxmox IS 17 years old...
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Or, be inspired that it proves there's business value in
| supporting the foundation? They wouldn't spend thousands of
| euros if they thought it was going down the drain.
| oalders wrote:
| Fundraising is hard. There's a longer history around it that I
| don't have the space to fully explore here, but the quick
| version is that I'm currently looking for more sponsors in this
| 10k range rather than having to rely on 100k donations from
| very large orgs.
|
| Some companies immediately understand the value of this kind of
| support. Getting that news out will hopefully allow me to find
| more orgs who can/will donate in this range.
|
| So, if anyone has any leads, please do contact me:
| olaf@perlfoundation.org If you take a close look at your stack,
| you'll probably find Perl in there somewhere.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> but if EUR10k is newsworthy_
|
| Unpopular opinion that's gonna get downvoted/flagged soon based
| on my experience here: That just shows you how broke EU tech
| companies are that even 10k is newsworthy for them.
|
| For context, I only worked for average (not big-tech/unicorns)
| EU/French/Dutch/German tech companies my whole life and I was
| shocked to see how much more, the average US tech companies
| spend on frivolities(forget the wages) than the European
| companies I worked at.
|
| From what I saw, for US tech companies big or small, buying
| fully decked MacBooks and Herman Miler chairs for their SW devs
| was the norm, while I only saw the discount bin chairs and base
| spec HP/Dell/Lenovo laptops wherever I worked here.
|
| Even where I work now, SW engineers get the same crappy HP
| notebooks that HR uses to read emails, since beancounters love
| fleets of the same cheap laptops for everyone, so my manager
| needs to jump through hoops for the beancounters to let him
| order more powerful notebooks for the SW engineers in his team,
| cause ya' know, Docker and VMs eat more resources than Outlook
| and Excel. This is relatively unheard of for US SW engineers
| where little expense is spared on equipment.
|
| They even reduced costs related to facility management like AC
| runtime and cleaning services, so trash bins are emptied twice
| a week instead of daily, leading to some funny office aromas in
| summer, if you catch my drift. And of course, they blame Putin
| for this.
|
| I always naively assumed (mostly due to anti-US propaganda we
| get here in EU) that due to how expensive US labor and
| healthcare is, it would be the opposite that US companies would
| have to cost cut to the bone, but no, despite that, US
| companies still have way more money to spend than European
| ones. Crazy.
|
| My explanation is, European companies are just run the same way
| EU governments are run, on austerity and cost cutting, so
| instead of trying to make money by innovating and investing and
| splurging to get the best of everything, they instead try to
| increase the profits by cutting all possible costs from
| purchasing to labors' wages and offshoring, since I assume
| that's also what's taught in European MBA schools.
| NeutralForest wrote:
| I don't think it's unpopular, I'm European and it's sad to
| see the tech scene and the kind of capital we have available,
| compared to the US.
| Perz1val wrote:
| Is this an opinion or the actual state of things?
| poisonborz wrote:
| I can attest that this is the case, worked in a number of
| countries there.
| CJefferson wrote:
| How many US companies are donating more than 10k to perl? Or
| even that much?
|
| If your anti-EU rant is right, open source projects should
| just naturally come into a whole bunch of donations this size
| from these rich US companies. Does that happen? Especially
| once we get past the big 3?
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> your anti-EU rant_
|
| How is it anti-EU? I was explaining what I observed,
| nothing what I said has to do with the EU political union,
| but with the way EU companies operate. Criticizing the way
| European companies choose to do business doesn't make you
| "anti-EU".
|
| What's with this hyper-partisan George-Bush-style "You're
| either with us or against us" type of arguments, where you
| can't criticize something without someone accusing you of
| being a hater?
|
| Can't we just debate things reasonably and assuming good
| faith as per HN rules, instead of resorting to attacks and
| accusations of partisan?
| tlamponi wrote:
| Note that Proxmox did not put out any news, the Perl
| foundation did, and that is based in the USA, so not sure if
| it really shows what you try to suggest.
| tristor wrote:
| > I always naively assumed (mostly due to anti-US propaganda
| we get here in EU) that due to how expensive US labor and
| healthcare is, it would be the opposite that US companies
| would have to cost cut to the bone, but no, despite that, US
| companies still have way more money to spend than European
| ones. Crazy.
|
| It's actually almost the opposite here in the US. Because
| labor is expensive, especially engineering labor, it doesn't
| make sense to scrimp on expenses like computer equipment or
| office chairs that support that labor, as you want to reduce
| development costs. If a faster laptop costs $500/unit more
| but reduces toil/wasted time for a $300k/yr developer of 30
| minutes a day, it is easily justified that it's worth the
| cost since labor cost is so much higher.
| baq wrote:
| we live in a world where it's easier to burn $10M for a
| repackaged chatgpt than to have someone wire $10k for a core
| infrastructure project. sad reality, but reality still.
|
| if you're motivated to do OSS work, the best bet is to figure
| out how to take VC money to do that and don't end up on some
| blacklist.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| Just look at OpenSSL.
|
| How important it is, how much it's used and the money they
| get.
| alecco wrote:
| Donations are against "maximize shareholder value" and other
| directives by the high lords of BlackRock, Vanguard, and State
| Street.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| I don't think you know what BlackRock, Vanguard, or State
| Street are.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| This isn't accidental, it's malicious enemy action.
| Overpaid fund managers are sick of seeing their business
| walk out the door in favor of funds with low/no fees, so
| there's a very active submarine campaign in progress to
| make BlackRock, Vanguard etc. seem like mustache-twirling
| villains, instead of "just a bunch of people owning
| shares".
|
| For example, note how all the stories about institutional
| investors buying up housing stock mention BlackRock, even
| though REITs and private equity firms are doing much, much
| more of this business.
| hylaride wrote:
| Also, Vanguard is run as a sort of cooperative where it
| is indirectly owned by the fundholders, which is why they
| were always incentivized to LOWER fees. The founder of
| Vanguard (Jack Bogle) probably left tens of billions of
| wealth on the table by creating that model (and he had no
| regrets, FWIW).
|
| There are concerns because by default they usually cast
| votes by board recommendations and since they have such a
| huge stewardship of the stock market it means others can
| have more direct influence, but Vanguard itself is
| otherwise as neutral a stock ownership intermediary as
| can pretty much exist.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| It's especially sad when you read or listen to what Jack
| Bogle had to say. Such a thoughtful, kind and honest
| person who choose to help people invest rather than
| pocket their money. But the modern financial system is
| too complex for your average moron.
| ChosenEnd wrote:
| What are they?
| rcxdude wrote:
| They hold shared on behalf of other people, i.e. if
| someone buys one of their index funds they buy the
| corresponding shares. They are the on-paper owner of a
| very large fraction of shares in public companies, but
| they are a) not the ultimate owners, just agents of the
| real investors, and b) as a consequence very hands-off in
| the operation of the businessness. They in general just
| go along with what the company executives and other, more
| direct investors want. They have a general stated goal of
| 'encouraging long-term value for their stockholders', but
| the most activist thing they've done was contribute to a
| shuffle in exxonmobile which pushed them to pay a little
| bit more attention to the environment and climate change,
| which is if anything the opposite of what people tend to
| assume they do.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| I mean they also send me an email to vote with my
| fractional S&P 500 shares whenever a shareholder vote
| comes up, so even if they're the on-paper owner of the
| shares they seem to pass through the voting rights every
| bit as much as the direct value and dividends.
| bluGill wrote:
| You are probably voting for the ownership of the fund,
| and not the companies the fund owns. Unless you get
| around 500 different share holder vote forms every year
| you are not voting for the companies in question you are
| just voting for the leaders of your funds. (around 500
| because S&P 500 funds often buy companies like what is in
| the S&P500, but not always exactly the same companies.
| Even if they want to be exactly the same companies they
| take time to buy and sell anytime the S&P500 changes just
| because the market could not handle them buying/selling
| everything the minute the S&P list changes)
| 0x457 wrote:
| I can't say much about State Street, but lumping BlackRock
| and Vanguard into the same category tells me that you don't
| know much.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| BlackRock and State Street biggest funds are all passive
| and are indistinguishable from Vanguard. All 3 offer
| active investments, but their passive portfolio dwarfs
| the active ones.
|
| BlackRock != BlackStone, if that's what you were thinking
| of.
| 0x457 wrote:
| Well, no. I was talking about BlackRock and Vanguard
| passive funds.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| Then enlighten me about the, presumably, massive
| difference between BlackRock and Vanguard passive funds.
| It must be something so huge that they are both in the
| index fund/passive fund category and yet "can't be lumped
| together"
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| that's literally every corporation's job. hate to break it to
| you.
|
| also proxmox is German.
| grantla wrote:
| > also proxmox is German.
|
| Austrian, please.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Only in very high-level, abstract terms. Company executives
| have, especially of publically owned companies, a very
| large degree of leeway in how they can operate, and most
| corporations do have some idea of a mission beyond 'make
| money'.
| MDGeist wrote:
| Kind of wondered if that was part of the rationale for making
| it news. Maybe another company will say "that's all!? we can do
| better" and help out.
| slavik81 wrote:
| Proxmox were also a platinum sponsor at DebConf25 last week,
| which is at least EUR20K.
| regularjack wrote:
| This thread has more than 100 comments, so seems it is indeed
| newsworthy.
| exiguus wrote:
| In many projects you can get Silver Sponsor Status with 10k.
| ei8ths wrote:
| thanks proxmox!
| lynx97 wrote:
| People are going to _HATE_ me for this, but I genuinely think:
| This feels like beating a dead horse...
|
| I had my Perl phase. I even wrote the first piece of code for my
| employer in Perl. Well, it was a CGI script, so that was kind of
| natural back then.
|
| But really, since all the hollow Perl6 stuff I've seen, I've
| never really read or heard anything about the language in the
| past, what, 10 to 15 years?
|
| There are tons of languages out there, all with their own merits.
| But everything beyond Perl5 felt like someone was trying to
| piggyback on a legacy. If you invent a new language, thats fine,
| call it foobar and move on. But pretending to be the successor to
| Perl feels like a marketing stunt by now...
| cestith wrote:
| Perl 5 got a development release within the last week, and the
| latest production release within the last month or so.
| librasteve wrote:
| not sure I hate you :-)
|
| Raku has perl DNA running through it ... both languages were
| authored by Larry Wall and the Raku (perl6 at the time) design
| process was to take RFAs from the perl community and to weave
| them together.
|
| I do wonder why you consider Raku to be hollow? Sure it has
| suffered from a general collapse of the user base and exodus to
| eg. Python. This has slowed the pace of development, but the
| language has been in full release since Oct 2015 and continues
| to have a very skilled core dev team developing and improving.
|
| There are several pretty unique features in Raku - built in
| Grammars, full on unicode grapheme support (in regexes), lazy
| evaluation, hyper operators, and so on that work well together.
|
| Maybe unpopular, true. But hollow?
| jcynix wrote:
| No reason to hate you, just because you didn't pay attention
| ;-)
|
| Maybe take a look at the search results from
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=perl%20conference%202025
|
| and you'll learn that there are ongoing events related to Perl
| and Raku.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| In future sight most of modern languages are coming from a C
| derivative.
|
| Perl isn't possible without C
|
| Python isn't possible without C
|
| Go isn't possible without C
|
| With those languages you can't get any more raw than C.
|
| Unlike a language like Pascal that is still modern today that
| as is based on ALGOL are forgotten about. Make's me wonder why
| such older languages were left behind.
| neuroelectron wrote:
| Perl? Wow. I'm a big fan of perl, but I gotta say I thought it
| was dead. Despite, the dynamic features of the language, I feel
| like it's much mote secure and mature than other modern
| convenience languages like JS/TS and Python. It certainly is much
| faster in general.
| petdance wrote:
| What does "dead" mean?
| 77pt77 wrote:
| Wow!
|
| Less than a month of compensation at FAANG is newsworhty.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| Most management has no idea of the importance of the open source
| building blocks that their business rests upon. Similarly they
| cannot begin to conceive of the benefits of making a donation.
| Probably the most effective thing you could do is to somehow
| attempt to copy the "greenwashing" effect of companies being
| environmentally responsible, and having an environmental section
| to their annual reports. "The health of the open source ecosystem
| is essential to sustainable research, development, and operations
| at ACME Corp. This year we have sponsored the following...for our
| current and future benefit".
| bluGill wrote:
| I've long tried to figure out how we can donate to projects. If
| we were to buy/license those tools it would cost thousands of
| dollars, but I don't know how to get any money for the free
| tools we use. When I ask half of management doesn't understand
| the question, and the rest don't know either.
| petdance wrote:
| Can you dedicate employee time to help on the projects?
| TristanBall wrote:
| Perhaps look to your marketing folks rather than engineering.
|
| "Purchasing silver sponsership with [org] as a way to grow
| our brand awareness" is intrinsically understandable to
| pretty much any businesses manager.
|
| "Giving away money for something we already have", which is
| what most technical managers will hear regardless of your
| actual pitch, is completely inexplicable to many.
|
| It does require that sponsership is even possible, and
| recurring sponsership may be harder than recurring license
| fees of course, so its not a sure thing, just an option to
| try.
| tingletech wrote:
| If you use Fidelity Charitable giving, the perl foundation is
| listed under "Yet Another Society"
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