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Perl Programming

Perl Community To Buy Damian Conway? 82

Posted by Hemos from the good-for-perl-6 dept.
jbc writes: "As discussed over at use Perl, the Perl community is attempting to raise US$55K in donations to support Perl überhacker Damian Conway for a year so he can devote himself to worthwhile pursuits related to Perl development. Thanks to a large donation from an as-yet-unnamed corporate donor, they're apparently already more than halfway there." Update: 10/15 11:31 PM by H : To actually give, go to the YAPC site.
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Perl Community to Buy Damian Conway? More

Perl Community to Buy Damian Conway?

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  • Maybe the Street Performer Protocol would do well here. But I have this vision of hundreds of people standing around listening to a musician and the jar next to his guitar has 5 quarters, a dollar bill, and a couple of pennies in it!

    In reality, more than one "paradigm" is probably useful. Not that one is better than the other, but that each has its place.

    A "Street Performer" is an ongoing effort, while a telethon is a concentrated effort for a short period of time (thus leaving you alone for the majority of time!). Also, a telthon can employ famous personalities, so called "matching funds", and donated "premiums" to give to contributors.

    Anyway, something to reflect upon...

    Phill
  • The price is definately a good one for the community. But then for him it should be great, I mean being able to dedicate you efforts and energies to what you really want to do, without worrying about making a buck doing something else to pay the bills. Sorta like a Professorial hiatus from University to research in his field. Usually the results are quite worth the money from the university, and the "work" produced on hiatus is more focused. I hope this comes to pass, and would be interested to see how it works out....stay tuned ?
  • Much the same way there are "telethons" to raise money for justifiable causes (Jerry Lewis-muscular dystrophy), there needs to be fundraisers for worhtwhile causes (eff.org)/open source projects.

    For the same reasons public radio/TV raises money (how many listen to NPR??), open source projects need to raise funds. The applications are not neccesarily "commercially glamorous", but they are used and appreciated (let alone needed!) by a large number of people. And they don't have the commercial "entanglements" that for-profit entities are going to have.

    The paralells that can be drawn from this are striking.
  • The problem with rich guys funding the "learned arts and sciences" is that when rich guys do it, they tend to focus on things that rich guys value, like getting even richer and extravagant and sometimes ethically questionable ways to spend the extra money they're earning.

    Not that this doesn't go on now -- there's little shortage of "luxury" items, investment schemes, and so on, but I think that generic capitalism's choices for investment are probably better, albeit imperfect, for the society as a whole than the whims of rich guys.

    It'd be interesting to see an "Open Source Development Fund" that you could donate to which would hand out funds to various projects. I'm sure that the FSF and others work this way, but it'd be nice to have one that could feel good about donating to a BSD project without getting lost in the licensing issues.

  • What Damian has to say about this... (Score:5)

    by acm ( 107375 ) on Sunday October 15, 2000 @10:39AM (#704627) Homepage
    taken from Use Perl [perl.org]:

    --

    That's an astonishingly generous offer, Elaine. Thank-you.

    I thought perhaps I should take the opportunity to explain the nature of -- and reason for -- the rush.

    YAS has not been able to accept donations for this project until its tax status was confirmed. But my department at Monash University has now gone into the planning phase for next year, and needs to know within the next week or two whether they'll have my teaching/admin services for 2001 (which they most decidedly won't if the Perl community wants me).

    So my department needs a clear indication of what I'm doing next year, which means YAS needs a clear indication of whether the community thinks "buying me out" is a worthwhile thing, and something they would actually fund (I'm not nearly egoistical enough to simply assume that the weird stuff I do is worth real money :-)

    That's what's required by next week: pledges of support. Actual cash could come (a little) later.

    Meanwhile, I've already been overwhelmed by the support that people have privately expressed for this. Whether or not the project comes together, I am deeply honoured and grateful that so many people seem to believe I would be worth "buying".

  • Damian is from Victoria, Australia. Not Arkansas. $55K USD buys a lot of Australian pesos right now.
  • Larry Wall once said [techtv.com] "I believe a person's worth is measured more by what they can give to the world than by what they can acquire from the world."

    Perhaps Damian is altruistic enough to share that view. I'm sure anyone as qualified as Damian (or Larry) would have no problems finding a higher-paying job if that's what they wanted.


    ---
  • The concept of patron is ancient. There was a time (awhile ago) when artists and scientists were supported by rich patrons so that they could focus on their creative work.

    The modern world would be much different if it were not for the discoveries and art of these men. (if someone could reply to this message with some names of these artists and scientists, it would be much appreciated. I cannot remember any at the moment...)

    Okay, the most famous patronees are probably Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo (check the local art gallery for some others). Sir Francis Bacon supported himself (born to an aristocratic family, so he could afford to get interested in things such as alchemy and physics). Sir Joseph Banks (who financed Cook's expedition to the south Pacific to watch the transit of Venus) was another wealthy man who was interested in the sciences.

    Generally, an interest in the arts and the sciences has been the purview of the rich and wealthy throughout the centuries. The greatest and most famous of the patrons was probably Lorenzo de Medici, who financed whole academies of alchemists and scientists back at the beginning of the Renaissance.

    These are just the ones I can remember off-hand. I'm sure there's lots more to be found through perusal of the history books.

    Meg Thornton.
  • Would these be australian W2 forms? Hell, if he wanted to pay no taxes, use perl could take the donations, put them into an account, and give him a credit card that he could use on whatever he wanted, which would be paid monthy from that account. He'd have no income... Be just like having a sugar-daddy with $55k. look rather suspicious, but hey, who minds being audited by the government under suspicion for money laundring every year when all you have to do is hack perl (your #1 hobby anyway) and get paid for it...

  • More Info (Score:3)

    by pudge ( 3605 ) <slashdotNO@SPAMpudge.net> on Monday October 16, 2000 @01:44AM (#704632) Homepage Journal
    YAS has more info, see the story on use Perl [perl.org].
  • And since Harry Browne can't win, vote Bush! As Dennis Miller said after telling his audience to not be afraid to vote for third parties: "And let me know how that goes, because I am going to vote for whoever's gonna take less of my fucking money, OK?"
  • I'd suggest as an alternative that you consider the option of not making the contribution tax exempt, but rather giving it away as a pure "gift."

    This has the demerit that it doesn't buy you a tax deduction, but it may have the corresponding merit of allowing the gift to remain a gift, and NOT be taxable in the recipient's hands.

    The point here is that there is little net difference between:

    • Giving developer a gift of $100, with no involvement of tax authorities after that, and
    • Donating $140, which, after tax deductibility, costs you $100, and which, being taxable in the recipient's hands, nets them $100, or perhaps less!, and involves greater administrative costs...

    See Free Software (Gift) Exchange Registry - FSEX [hex.net] for a likely-more-coherent presentation.

  • Things like PayPal and Kagi [kagi.com] offer another option, namely for individuals to make "micropayments" to other individuals.

    This is arguably better than having the FSF and others manage funds, from several perspectives:

    • You get to deploy your money to the efforts you favor.

      Multiply this 100,000 ways to have 100,000 agents acting in favor of their interests and you should get some interesting outcomes.

    • Having a centralized fund means adding in considerable bureaucracy as the managers will be legally responsible for the disposition of funds.
    • Having a centralized fund manager means that the results are likely to be affected by the manager's own biases.

      Thus, while you might want to see some of your money go to (oh, say) KDE, a FSF fund is likely to "bias" in favor of GNOME.

      In contrast, if you send $5 to KDE yourself, or perhaps to a specific KDE developer, nobody else gets to gainsay you on that.

      Other issues like "licensing biases" also get resolved by this.

    • Big organizations wind up having to add further bureaucracy to deal with the tax deductibility of contributions.

      If you decide to send some developer $5, you may get no tax deduction, but that may be offset if the developer doesn't need to declare it as income for tax purposes because it's a gift...

  • And since Harry Browne can't win, vote Bush!

    That's what people were saying about the Republican party circa 1850; "they can't win, vote Whig!".

    Heard from any Whig party members lately?

    The Republican party won the 1860 Presidential election because people stopped falling for that and started leaving the Whigs for the Republicans.

    Sort of like the influx of Libertarians defecting from the Republicans in recent years, or the similar defection (on a smaller scale) of Democrats to the Reform party.

    And, of course, a few Democrats joining the Libertarians, and Republicans joining the Reform party.

    Bottom line; it only takes a couple of elections to turn things around, *IF* people stop falling for this "two party system" bullshit and start voting their conscience.

    Your vote won't determine the outcome of this election, but a massive groundswell of third-party voting this time could result in a change in the 2008 elections, and that's a very important thing to remember before you go condone and endorse a party who doesn't represent your beliefs in any meaningful way.

    -
  • Interesting. This is the way music used to be developed. Some aristocrat would put you on the payroll, and you'd produce your operas or whatever. If this caught on, I wonder if it might result in some software 'masterpieces'?
  • You BUY things, you HIRE people (at least these days you don't buy people)
  • I'm not a big perl weenie, but it takes alot for people to try to buy you out of your employer.

    It doesn't take as much as you'd think. Sure he's making less money. But he'll start his new job with a lego desk and several AT-AT fighters.
  • Yes, that could be a real boost for expansion of open-source products. Get some master software artists working on them. (I realize that there already are, but I suspect the number would expand greatly if really good ones actually got paid for it.)
  • Please, contribute to the fund that will help feed and clothe me and hire people to do my homeowrk for me for a year so that I can help this Elven mage Ascend.

    Well, I think it's worthy.... ;)

    Actually, I kind of worry. Does this mean he'll sepnd a year doing nothing but Perl? Just working on this one program day in and day out? Maybe I'm not fanatic enough, but that's kind of scary... I mean, some variety would probably be healthy.
    -J
  • I think the idea behind this is great, especially since he is willing to take much less than market value and will be doing work that benefits all users of Perl.

    I'm curious, though, how his work will be determined. The information at the link is fairly light, but it seems as if he will have free reign, making this is a beautiful thing. On the other hand, if the "sponsors" are simply paying to have their own agenda pushed, this doesn't feel so pure any more.
  • And here in lies one of the major problems with GPL. Funding. I understand GPL dosnt mean NON-PROFIT.. so dont refer me to gnu.org. It would be nice if the GPL said something like "Free for non-profit purposes, but small donation required by greedy-corporate-bastards who will enourage the 'adoption' of Free software and who will expect that a the OS Community does all the work for them.".

    Seeing the 'communitiy' give and give and give while BigComputer Co. talks about how open source is the future - and then we have to wonder where to get a stinking $55K to pay someone as renouned as this involved full time - and still compensate him.

    Maybe GPL could involve some kind of registration - a minor fee - like 'Donation Ware' - where for-profit users are enouraged to donate to GNU.

  • Shouldn't Larry Wall be the one to work on Perl full time? (He works for a book publisher) What about Tom Christiansen? There are lots of people in the same situation as Damian Conway. There are many Perl geniouses, who would all like to code full time, who would all like to travel abroad for conferences, training, and speaking engagements. Surely everyone has a best friend who would give his left testacle to work on Perl full time. This is beginning to sound like the Mercury 7: Who will be the first one to write software full time?
  • The Perl 6 project is underway now, and Damian has played a huge role already in the upcoming language (re)-design, as you can tell by looking through his contribution to the Perl 6 language RFCs [perl.org]. If he had his way and he most certainly should (in my opinion), Perl 6 would gain higher-order functions, a far more useful function/method definition syntax, a ton of cool object-oriented goodies that actually fit in with the perl spirit, and so on.

    I truly believe that if Damian Conway can be given a year to work on Perl 6 things and Perl in general, the community will be far better off. Now, please excuse me while I fork over my $50. :-)

  • You guys are really missing the key piece of info...he lives in .au where the exchange rate makes US$55k into ~ AUS$90K, which I hear is quite livable.

    Tom
  • Perligata is quite interesting indeed. For more information on Perligata, see Damian's paper, Conway, D. Lingua::Romana::Perligata -- Perl for the XXI-imus Century, Proc. Perl Conference 4.0, O'Reilly, 2000, pp. 1-16. [monash.edu.au], freely available online. Here's the description from his papers [monash.edu.au] page:
    "This paper describes a Perl module -- Lingua::Romana::Perligata -- that makes it possible to write Perl programs in Latin. A plausible rationale for wanting to do such a thing is provided, along with a comprehensive overview of the syntax and semantics of Latinized Perl. The paper also explains the special source filtering and parsing techniques required to efficiently interpret a programming language in which the syntax is (largely) non-positional."
  • Just take a look at his homepage [monash.edu.au].
  • And who cares.

    you've gotta be wasted to write perl, but it works anyway...

    Next you'll be after Keroak (sic) and ruben carter.

    but you won't take perl, you might have the speed, but we have the numbers.

    There's got to be something left for those of us for whome the 'box' is an abstract concept....

  • He may be a great lecturer, but he's failing somewhat in his task if his students still can't distinguish between "their" and "there".

    -- Michael Chermside

  • Easy. You get perl modules.

    Thad

  • I don't know whether I'm going to be sick, or if I'm going to go learn Latin. That is some awesome programming!

  • Further, one of the classic "criticisms" of the free software movement (and more importantly the anti IP ideal) is that without the protection of IP why would anyone invest in solving problems.

    You are absolutely correct to say that patronage is a viable vehicle for implementing an alternative method of funding the sustainance of those whole would be the artisans of the new age. (BTW, Mozart, Beethoven would be classic examples [excuse the pun] of artists funded by patrons). However we could also use technology to help us out here.

    Imagine a web site, RFPheaven.org (or whatever) where people can submit their problems and the amount of money they are willing to spend on solving them (including time frames etc) for the freelancers to bid on taking them. People could join on both sides of the bid (ie more money or more developers). Clearly the logistics of deliveries and acceptance (et al) must be resolved and agreed to by the parties, but that is detail (albeit tricky).

    Using this kind of approach even someone with $10.00 can help get their problems solved. Ie everyone can become a patron.

  • Yeah, it's certainly my fault that, while teaching one semester of introductory programming in C, I was unable to simultaneously overcome the collective failure of 12 years of English teachers.

    I am ashamed to admit that I also failed to correct their poor dress sense, their ignorance of medieval history, and their inability to juggle.

    ;-)

    Damian

  • Since Perl development is a bit "questionable", I'm guessing $55K usd will buy a ton of LSD and cocaine. I can't wait to see if the poor guy even lives after ingesting so many drugs, but what features he adds.

  • I've seen many of Damian's RFCs and although they describe a very interesting and clever language, they don't describe Perl. Perl is the anti-language. When an MIT-trained programmer can look at Perl and say, "Hmm, this looks pretty good," that won't be Perl any more. I want more intuitively utilitarian junk in Perl. I don't want logic, orthogonality, beauty, and especially not an architecture befitting a "real" programming language.

    At the same time, giving Damian money to go forth and do clever things with Perl 5 seems like a great idea to me. He's one of the cleverest and most engaging speakers I've ever encountered, in the programming arena anyway. I think I like the idea of him struggling with Perl 5 (and winning, mostly) better than the idea of him exerting any significant effect on the direction of Perl 6.

    Things change, I know, but I'm hopeful that when "they" replace Perl with something completely different, it's not still called Perl. Maybe people could pay Damian to help write NuPerl and then there could be annual bakeoffs with Scheme and C++ and Eiffel. Which no doubt NuPerl would win due to its shameless built-in regex operators and hashes.

    But please leave the heart of my anachronistic, idiosyncratic, ugly, yet proletarian and immensely useful, language alone.

  • Can they hire me? I'm cheaper (22 dollars and fifty-eight cents a year)...
  • We (O'Reilly [oreilly.com]) already pay Larry to work on Perl full time.

    -Jon

  • The fact that he gets to do what he loves to do most (probably) and getting paid for that and getting to be famous (sort-of) is part of this price I guess. Money isn't that important anyway if your work is your hobby.

    People only work to make money to spend this in their free time doing what they like to do most. Or that should be the case off course ...
  • umm... i think the point is that he's doing it as a labor of love, not for the money, but also he'd rather not, you know, be poor for that year. Just my two cents - it'd be nice if we could give him more but i think he himself chose $55K so it wasn't that bad, and he could devote his time to open source work (the only problem with open source is that it's so hard for some of these great coders to make any money off of their work).
  • Perhaps not so much a fundraiser design - but wouldn't an instance of the Street Performer Protocol do well here? Rather than a book, or artistic fait accompli, someone like this guy can put a year of their time on the line and say "When I am paid $55k, I will deliver one year of dedicated services". Let people paypal that sum closer and closer. It's the fundraiser/telethon/charity paradigm of the 21st century!

    Cheers,

    Johnath
  • I'm not a big perl weenie, but it takes alot for people to try to buy you out of your employer. Anyone have any pointers to show what this dude has done?

    Btw, is use Perl using the slashdot code directly or is it a damn good copy?

    --

  • Worth the price (Score:4)

    by weezel ( 6011 ) on Sunday October 15, 2000 @10:07AM (#704663)
    I've been to a couple of his talks and $55k USD is easily worth it to get this guy writing perl full time.

    Who else is going to write Lingua::Romana: :Pe rligata [monash.edu.au], Quantum::Superpositions, Class:: Mul timethods [cpan.org] and Coy [cpan.org].

    This guy write the funniest, most intriguing perl modules around. And he gives really funny presentations. If you ever get a chance to see him give a lecture in person be sure not to miss it.

  • Re:Wow (Score:4)

    by gizmo_mathboy ( 43426 ) on Sunday October 15, 2000 @10:07AM (#704664)
    Dr. Conway is a coding fiend. A quick look through CPAN [cpan.org] will reveal:

    Parse::RecDescent
    Coy
    Text::Balanced
    Lingua::EN::Inflect
    Quantum::Superpositions

    Just to name a few. He has also created a yet to be published module to write Perl programs in Latin (Lingua::Romana::Perligata)! On top of that he is a tireless lecturer.

    He has also written a very good book concerning OO and Perl: Object Oriented Perl [manning.com].

    In fact, during this year's Perl Conference his series of talks was jokingly referred to as "Damian TV, all Damian, all the time." It would be very helpful to have Damian devote even just 1 year full time to Perl.

    I hope this is enough to show you his value to the Perl Community.
  • Thing is he probably gets to live where he wants with his 55K, move right far away from any major city and watch the cost of living drop drop drop! :)

    Jeremy
  • Not just that, but use Perl is run by pudge, one of the project admins [sourceforge.net] for Slashcode.

    ------

  • I think it's a good idea. I hope people will talk to their legislators and have them support the National Science Foundation and other groups designed to do this kind of thing two. Certainly solves alot of problems with intellectual property to give smart people a stipend to produce work for the public domain. It is ironic however that the model of selecting a few stellar performers for patronage is in tension with the notion that "open source" often purports to rely on, a community of contributors. Do we need people selected and paid to be source maintainers and build engineers as well?

  • Brief Bio (Score:5)

    by bguilliams ( 68934 ) on Sunday October 15, 2000 @10:13AM (#704668)
    Taken from the Perl.com website...

    Dr. Damian Conway is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science and Software Engineering at Monash University (Melbourne, Australia), where he teaches object-oriented software engineering. He is an effective teacher, an accomplished writer, and the author of several popular Perl modules. He is also a semi-regular contributor to the Perl Journal. In 1998 he was the winner of the Larry Wall Award for Practical Utility for two modules (Getopt::Declare and Lingua::EN::Inflect) and in 1999 he won his second "Larry" for his Coy.pm haiku-generation module. He has just published "Object-Oriented Perl" (Manning, 1999).

  • Yes you do (Score:3)

    by Anne Marie ( 239347 ) on Sunday October 15, 2000 @10:13AM (#704669)
    You BUY politicians, and politicians are people like you and me who share in humanity's common hopes and dreams. At least until they fuck it over royally through legislation or executive edict.
  • It's his choice. If he thinks it's a joke he would probably not accept this offer. If he does then I guess he prefers to be the loser that you like to call him (or other people for that matter who do what they really like for (relatively) little money)
  • Yeah, but can he -cook-?
    I don't think so.
  • Larry works for O'Reilly, and Tom has his own perl consultancy.

    If you check the perl6 mail list logs, you can see that both are quite active, and at least in Tom's case, his entire business rests upon the continued success of perl.

  • How much would it take to get Slashdot to buy Natalie Portman for a year? Surely the buying power of frustrated geeks everywhere would be enough to woo her from the set of Episode 2 to spend a year hanging out behind a terminal, submitting articles and moderating comments.
  • No no, you don't BUY politicians anymore, didn't you know it's much cheaper to RENT them on an issue by issue basis!

  • Take note however, that for the most part Open-Source projects do not pay the developers. $0 to $55 is a reasonable jump IMO.
  • 55k US is quite a bit.... wait I only make 14k CAN... doh! Then again I spend all my time studying and pissing off people that call me for help... what do they think I am tech support??? oh wait... I am ... still... what do you expect for what I'm making (University sucks... you pay to go and you have to pay to live....dammit mc'donalds is expensive at my wage!) :P
  • Just what the fuck are you saying!

    *shakes you*

    make sense before replying to me son.

  • I had the pleasure of taking a couple of Damians classes in my time at Monash and he is probably the best lecturer their.

    While I still think he should let the Perl community buy out his teaching duties it will be a shame for the students who miss out on taking his classes.

  • I saw Damian present Text::Autoformat at the Perl Conference. Briefly, it's a module that reformats emails with deeply nested replies (with several levels of ">" or ":" or "FOO>" prefixes), even to the point of aligning and outdenting bullet lists, and aligning and, if necessary, renumbering numbered lists, making intelligent guesses about whether the list is numbered in numerically, alphabetically, or with Roman numerals! Then he showed how he had mapped it to a "reformat this paragraph" key in vi ...

    As I watched the lecture unfold, and I understood just what a clever and puissant hack this was, I had the urge to get up and do the Wayne's World "I'm not worthy!" chant. There's nothing like the presence of greatness to make you feel like a rank amateur.

    Later, he did his Quantum::Superposition talk, which was impressive whether you look at it as physics, programming, or stand-up comedy.

    Now think about this: he came up with all these neat hacks literally in his spare time, between teaching C to freshmen and writing material for publication in "real" CompSci literature.

    $55,000 for a year of Damian's full attention? Worth every penny IMHO (especially since that year coincides with gestation and early maturation of Perl 6).

  • You must remember that Prof. Conway lives in Australia where the standard of living is much cheaper. 55K US dollars is worth much more in Oz than you can imagine.

    --weenie NT4 user: bite me!
  • Damian Conway was my lecturer for Object Oriented Programming last year here at Monash University in Melbourne (Australia).

    HE WAS THE BEST LECTURER I HAVE EVER HAD.

    His lectures are ALWAYS full, purely because he makes whatever he's teaching so interesting! There were always people up the front of the lecture hall participating in some sort of demonstration (like his "pick-up line" game, which taught encapsulation incredibly well).

    I remember one lecture, someone walked in about 20 minutes late. He had green 3/4 length pants on, no shoes, one of those puffy jackets and red hair. As he was walking up the back to sit down, Damian stopped what he was saying, pointed to the guy, and said, "oh my god, it's a leprechaun!" (all in good fun, everyone - including the guy - couldn't stop laughing).
  • But if you do go to a lecture of his don't sit in the front row!!! You're just asking for trouble.
  • Dr. Damian Conway is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science and Software Engineering at Monash University (Melbourne, Australia), where he teaches object-oriented software engineering. And first-year Intro to Programming. Yes, as well as his services to the Perl community, Damian is also responsible to introducing roughly two hundred first-year students a year to the wonders of programming, and I am one of the tutors (I think Americans call us TAs) who gets those students the semester after that. I'm really not looking forward to taking students who haven't had his input. If anyone else from Monash reads this: do you think we ought to solicit donations to keep him here?

  • And could you support a family on that?

    Actually I'm making $1000/wk and supporting a family of two (soon three) kids, house, 2 cars and all the relevant bills. So yes, it is possible, even easily so. I'm not in Southern Cali though so there may be a fair conversion factor involved there. :-)

  • Re:$55k is that all?? what a joke (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I think you're missing the point. Perhaps he *wants* to help out for a year. In that case, they don't need to pay him as much as he'd make in a year, really, just enough to cover expenses, and maybe a little more...

    Think about it. How much would you have to be paid to work for some corporation doing things they wanted you to do? Okay. How much would you have to be paid to do things you thought were just the coolest things in the world that you completely enjoyed doing?

    In my case, I'm looking at around a fifty-percent reduction between the two... Maybe more.
  • yeah, with your parents... sheesh.
  • They use slashdots code ( slashcode [slashcode.org] ) which is written in perl.
    Neat eh?
  • I think the idea is that this is something he wants to do but he still needs enough money so that they don't turn off his electricity.

  • Patrons (Score:5)

    by Capt Dan ( 70955 ) on Sunday October 15, 2000 @10:17AM (#704689) Homepage
    The concept of patron is ancient. There was a time (awhile ago) when artists and scientists were supported by rich patrons so that they could focus on their creative work.

    The modern world would be much different if it were not for the discoveries and art of these men. (if someone could reply to this message with some names of these artists and scientists, it would be much appreciated. I cannot remember any at the moment...)

    I have felt for a long time that free software development could benefit from this model.

    How many great developers are out there who have to work 8 hours a day, before coming home exhausted to fit in 2 or 3 hours of coding between dinner and bedtime?

    So here's the next point. Altough the wave of get rich quick startups that characterized the laste 90's is in decline, there are now 1000's of financially sufficent millionaire developers.

    If you are one of there people, run down to your investment counselor and find out how you could donate a couple of grand a year to Open Source development. There's probably some loophole that would make it tax exempt or a deduction. Get together with some of your millionaire friends and pick a project to sponsor. It doesn't have to be perl, but a project that you feel could benefit your interests and hopfully the interests of the community by having a full time developer(s). Go to sourceforge and find one that looks cool. Perl, linux kernel development, freenet, maybe a game engine. It's your money, but you could use it to help us all.

  • But what would the $55k buy you? (Score:4)

    by Anne Marie ( 239347 ) on Sunday October 15, 2000 @10:19AM (#704690)
    When you pledge money to public television or a thousand other "charities", you get a small gift in return, like an umbrella or a video. Does the perl community plan to continue in this tradition? I.e., for $100 I get Damien's half-eaten french toast; for $1,000 I get to play conceal&carry with ESR, and for $10,000 I get to have Larry Wall lecture me on the scriptures (especially the parts about uncovering people's nakedness)?
  • I could live *quite* happily on roughtly $1000/week... oh, wait, the tax man will take a good portion of that away... hmm...

    And could you support a family on that? Honestly now... at least in california, perl developers are making anywhere from $60k - $100k. I think that Mr. Conway would be at the top of the pay scale here. For him to take $55k/yr would be a donation to the community, even more so than his work so far.
  • 55k a year? ive heard of MIS grads with no work experiance getting hired for 65k to learn vbscript. how much, if anything, do they wish to accomplish with a 55k a year budget?

  • You have to dig a bit to find this...

    http://registration.yapc.org/ [yapc.org]

  • Sure, it's not an extreme amount of cash, but since it'd be a donation straight to Damian, he would actually be better off than if he earned $70K from a corporation....

    Add to that the freedom of doing whatever he wanted , and you have a winner. Besides, a lot of well known programmers have enough cash to actually partake in projects like this without feeling financially strained by a small-ish donation...Steve Woston for instance, often does programming boot camps for beginning computer game programmers.

    I'm sure there are plenty of other examples of this kind of thing happening - and it's a good thing, after all, in the end, Conway's stills devoted full time to Perl hacking will increase Perl's chances of becoming the next killer open suorce language app.

  • URL for donations (Score:3)

    by jbc ( 3796 ) on Sunday October 15, 2000 @10:26AM (#704695) Homepage

    If you want to contribute to the Damian fund, you can pay online with a credit card at:

    http://registration.yapc.org/ [yapc.org]

  • Where? In the middle of Arkansas? Rent in the big city, my friend, is upwards of $1000 a month...
  • and remember that 1 USD buys almost 2 AUD these days
  • I just recently attended the extraction and reporting ORA perl university class. I can confirm that Damian is an excellent teacher. I learnt a lot. I had never heard of him before, but realized fairly quickly how important he is in the Perl world, with his understanding of, and contributions to, Perl 6. Parse::Recdescent can be used to process data, according to grammar based rules and generate results or even code. He showed one example of processing a "simple" perl program, to generate a very complex perl program. perl parsing perl. Yikes. He'll be worth every penny spent!
  • Okay, doing an aol here:

    Yup, he's the best lecturer I had too. More anecdotes:

    He actually makes QuickSort understandable, and makes it look easy.

    His code is full of puns. Grab his excellent Object-Oriented perl (no, it ain't an oxymoron: read it!), and see some good examples:
    my $grain = "headache";
    ${"grain"} = "rye";

    Man, I miss him.

  • I hadn't wanted to comment (lest it seem like pan-handling), but this is an important issue...
    • I'm curious, though, how his work will be determined. The information at the link is fairly light, but it seems as if he will have free reign, making this is a beautiful thing. On the other hand, if the "sponsors" are simply paying to have their own agenda pushed, this doesn't feel so pure any more.
    If I were selling out to a "sponsor" you can be sure I'd be selling out for much more than $55K ;-)

    The deal is that I will have total freedom to work on whatever I think is worth doing. Currently that's looking like:

    • Improving those useful modules that people are already using (Parse::RecDescent and Text::Autoformat being the leading contenders);
    • Developing new useful modules (Regex::Common and Parse::Perl being the top priorities);
    • Developing new useless -- but fun -- modules (along the lines of Coy, Quantum::Superpositions, and Lingua::Romana::Perligata);
    • Giving talks at as many conferences and to as many Perl Mongers groups as I can reach;
    • Writing another book;
    • Helping with Perl 6 in whatever way I can;
    • Whatever other weird ideas come to me.

    To their great credit, none of the major companies that have offered to help fund this experiment has even mentioned the issue of "artistic control".

    But let me make it plain: no-one -- no matter how much they offer -- will get any say in what I do. Funding with strings attached will be politely but firmly declined (even if that means this venture doesn't happen at all).

    You have my word on it.

    Damian Conway

  • Isn't it great that the anonymous corporate donor had money laying around to contribute to things like this, instead of having it taxed away from them "because they don't need that much money"?

    -
  • At least bring a big sheet of plastic! Those watermelon pieces can put an eye out.

  • If that's USD then it is probably about what Conwei-san already makes. Lecturers and proffessors aren't paid that well. This is balanced by living in Melbourne, which is pretty cheap when you know where to look.

    I had Damian as my project supervisor many years ago, I hope this turns out well for him.

    Veltyen

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