Craigslist Donates $100,000 To the Perl Foundation 99
mikejuk writes "The craigslist Charitable Fund has donated $100,000 to the Perl community for Perl5 maintenance and general use by the Perl Foundation. Craigslist gets more than 30 billion views per month and it is mostly written in Perl. The entire architecture of the system is open source — a proxy array based on Perl and memcache and a backend provided by Apache, memcache, MySQL and, of course, Perl. This is a successful enterprise giving something back to open source — which is how it should be."
Good on them (Score:5, Interesting)
Nice from the Craigslist folks. Aren't they eBay-owned though? Anyway, good to see perl getting some loving for a change.
Kudos to Craigslist (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Good on them (Score:5, Interesting)
In 2004, eBay bought a 25% share of Craigslist and is one of three major board members. Newmark is believed to own the largest share.
In 2008, eBay sued Craigslist for "diluting its financial investment" - Craigslist countersued a month later.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist#Financials_and_ownership [wikipedia.org]
As far as I'm concerned, Craigslist is doing everything right compared to eBay. Site is simple, fast and easy to use. Craigslist doesn't try to take a cut from the little guy. They have enough oversight to keep it from becoming spammy and to avoid legal hassles, but otherwise leaves it up to the Users.
Is the Craigslist Charitable Fund that donated to the Perl Foundation the same as the Craigslist Foundation?
Not so altrusitic... (Score:3, Interesting)
Is PERL still active (Score:4, Interesting)
But has there really been that much real effort in the PERL community? In its hay days during the Late 90's and Early 2000's there was a lot of PERL Development, but it seems it has dropped off and PERL lost its shine. I am asking because I am more of a Python Fan and I haven't been really involved in PERL apps. But back in the day every time you tried to find an open source program to do something it required PERL... Not so much of this any more, is it because I have changed how I look for software or is it because PERL is no longer as popular as it was before.
Re:Successful ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not so altrusitic... (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure, but IMO the point of open source software isn't necessarily altruism. The idea is voluntarily contributing to necessary software infrastructure.
I like to ponder sometimes what would happen if businesses stopped purchasing MS Office licenses and instead donated 10% of the cost of an MS Office license to a development fund for an open source office package. Or the same thing with Windows, or Autocad, or pick any number of software packages. I would like to think that with 10% of the revenue you could create some fairly impressive software (and yes I am aware of many reasons why practical implementation would be difficult).
Re:Kudos to Craigslist (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, that's my excuse, as a freelance Perl programmer. Still, each time I check Fund Drive Details [perlfoundation.org] I cry a little. Is that all some of the companies that nearly run on Perl can do? The last time this amount was donated, if I recall correctly, was a few years (!) ago by a Dutch company (not 100% sure if it was Dutch).
Anyway, a big thanks to Craigslist. But there are plenty of companies out there that could follow. If you donate over 5K you get a nice mention on the Sponsors page. Peanuts for some, I would say.
Re:Not so altrusitic... (Score:4, Interesting)