$4500 Raised for Perl Foundation at OSCON Auction

Krellis writes "Over $4,500 was raised Thursday night at the DynDNS.org/OnyxNeon party here at O'Reilly's Open Source Convention 2003. A large part of this was $1025 in a heated contest about the primary color for search.cpan.org. London.pm fought hard to make the change to orange, but Graham Barr's group managed to win out, and the color will remain as "web-safe teal." Graham is no sore winner though, and London.pm will be given their color for one month. See the DynDNS Press Release for more information, and thanks to everyone who contributed!"

Comments

Wow...

[Coyote67]

Man that sounds exciting. I wish I COULD have gone but I had to...uh.....hmm....I'll get back to you. Oh yeah do something interesting. You gotta be kidding me, the main focus was the color for search.cpan.org...guys...can't we make perl seem even a bit interesting. I'm not spending my weekends reading this o'reilly book because I want to battle of page colors once I finally get invited to one of these conferences.

Re:Wow...

[larry bagina]

I can't believe you'd dis color selection. I mean, have you seen the slashdot games section? or yro section?!?!

Re:Wow...

[ubikkibu]

Charity is a good thing. Maybe it could buy some of the OSCON perl "luminaries" some proper clothes. Or an ego massage.

I had a great time at OSCON, but some of these perl presenters seem to think they're gods. life => get;

$4500 will buy

[Anonymous Coward]

$4000 worth of hookers, $300 worth of beer and $200 worth of pizza. Sounds like a fun week.

Re:$4500 will buy

[larry bagina]

or a month for a full-time developer to work on perl 6.

Perl economics

[Anonymous Coward]

1. raise $4500 for Perl Foundation
2. ???
3. Profit !

4500? Is that all? Is that noteworthy?

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet every donor is still be living in his mother's basement!

Small Change, but no change.

[ralphclark]

This is, frankly, fucking shameful.

Heavy weather is being made because they made the paltry sum of $4500...and I wonder how much of that was actually contributed by people already actively contributing to the Perl canon. Probably all of it. We are talking, ladies and gentlemen, about the arrangements for funding the maintenance and development of one of the world's most widely-used development tools. Even in commercial enterprises with very deep pockets. So surely they can do better than just scraping together $4500 out of their own pockets...? But no, it appears not.

And this is why am I not surprised: people - let alone amoral corporations - people just do not want to pay for stuff. And if the stuff that is currently free dries up from cash starvation, well, too bad - at least we got ours while it was free. In another era it was known as the Tragedy of the Commons, referring to the overgrazing and desertification of land shared by the community.

For all the high-flown talk about the "gift economy", the truth is that this exists only between a fairly small group of altruistic idealists. Most people are delighted to give nothing back at all.

This is, IMO, one of the very worst traits of humanity and very possibly the one that will do us in for good (consider what it did to the village common, and then consider what it is doing to the world's lakes rivers and oceans, the ozone layer, increasing landfill sites etc.).

This point about greed often escapes people in our own OSS-loving community because, well, most of the stuff we like is mostly just made to give away, so we are not forced to think about it and can remain guilt-free. But the P2P crowd know, all right. Less interested in software, all they have to download is copyrighted music and movies. And they *do* go at it with a vengeance. "I want mine," they say, "before the content owners get mad and shut it all off."

Thus hastening the end for all. You see, if the illegal "file sharers" weren't so damn greedy, if it was just a single file here and there, the organizations concerned wouldn't have a credible complaint, they very likely wouldn't have bothered spending all that money on developing DRM technologies and lobbying Washington etc, and we could all still get a bit of discreet copying done now and again on the occasions when we genuinely needed to through lack of practical alternatives.

But as it is, we have entire music albums and movies being downloaded by thousands before they have even reached the shops in the most extreme cases. Result: heavy handed lawsuits, and quite possibly eventual legislation to shut down all P2P services permanently (if you don't think this is possible, you seriously need to get your head out of your ass).

Now I like free stuff too, and I also despise the RIAA and the MPAA for their corporate greed and their stupidity, short-sightedness and their shark-like tactics. But I know where to draw a line. I restrict myself to downloading what is freely given in most cases, and the exceptions are few and furtive.

The P2P crowd though, they routinely brag about how much music and/or movies they have illegally copied or are planning to copy. Their sole justification (for your average P2P punter hasn't bothered to rationalize away his misdeeds with armchair economics theories), is that other people are getting away with this criminal activity so they feel obliged to try and be an even more successful criminal. So the Tragedy of the Commons is with us yet again.

At that point I inevitably lose all respect for the greedy, drooling P2P addict before me and go back to my nice legally obtained Linux etc. OK, I may not have contributed much to the OSS world in return yet - just a few detailed bug reports and the odd helping hand on a mailing list - but at least what I took was freely given, I didn't have to steal it, and I didn't have to risk hastening its demise and thus depriving others by taking it.

So I guess what I'm saying is, if you must take from the pot,

Re:Small Change, but no change.

[Anonymous Coward]

Another disillusioned Open Source advocate. Now that you've realized the truth, that people weren't joking when they told you not to expect anything in return, what are you going to do? If you force people to give back, then you are precisely where the rest of the world is and Open Source vanishes in a puff of hot air. If you don't believe that Open Source works simply by creating better results, thus benefitting not only the leeches but also the generous contributors in the long run, then you really have no reason to participate except for a misguided illusion of fame and riches through Open Source.

Re:Small Change, but no change.

[ralphclark]

You misunderstand me. I'm not an author, so there's no return for me to expect and no personal axe to grind. I'm just a concerned consumer. I guess my rant must have been a little too heavy on the whining.

I do indeed believe that the open source way produces better results. However there are some critical, fast-moving infrastructural projects which everybody uses (like the GNU compiler suite, Linux, Apache, Samba, Perl), moreover which have major users in the business world, and for the good of everybody these need to have the principal developers funded to work on them full-time. Larry Wall should not be having to worry about his mortgage.

And to think...

[cliveholloway]

... I thought it was something in Damian Conway's page when I was searching for Acme::Bleach

I was convinced it was a secret cookie-changes-css thingy for anyone dumb enough to download that module.

Ah well, at least it's not "Slashdot Games Blue"

Phew!

cLive ;-)

People would contribute if Perl 6 was on track

[Anonymous Coward]

Initially the Perl Foundation had around $200,000 of grant money. That money was poorly spent on some grand unifying VM to supposedly run all languages and produced very little to advance Perl. Now I wonder if the Perl Foundation even gets $10,000 per year. Once people saw that Perl 6 development was going nowhere and money was spent on advancing non-Perl causes they withdrew their support.

Re:People would contribute if Perl 6 was on track

[babbage]

On the contrary, the Parrot runtime engine is reasonably complete, and useful.

Just to give one current, more or less viable Parrot application that I know of, the virtual machine been embedded as mod_parrot , which can in principle allow you to run Parrot bytecode in Apache. Why would anyone want to write web applications in what amounts to assembly code? Well of course, most people wouldn't, but as Perl6 matures this could become a viable competitor to mod_perl ...and mod_python , mod_tcl , mod_scheme , etc.

More to the point, the development of Parrot has forced a cleanup of the Perl API. The current situation where the reference implementation is the only implementation has never been theoretically clean -- other languages, like Python, C, and Java, have long had multiple implementations, and this has consistently been a healthy thing for the evolution of the language. Abstracting out the virtual machine layer will allow Perl6 to have a pluggable runtime layer (e.g. replace runtime compilation & execution of bytecode into, say, dynamic execution of precompiled bytecode (as Python does), or direct compilation from source to executable machine code (as C does). More recently & concretely, abstracting out the VM layer has been the motivation for Ponie -- an effort to re-implement Perl5 to run on Parrot, and in the process give Perl that abstracted alternate implementation that most other languages have. This will be a very healthy thing, both for Perl5 and for Perl6.

If there has been a dropoff in contributions, it isn't due to Parrot work. Dan Sugalski et al have done excellent work here, and I think most people in the community recognize this. If there has been a dropoff, the much more mundane explanation is probably just the taking economy: a whole lot of people just don't have the spare cash to give these days.

Re:People would contribute if Perl 6 was on track

[Anonymous Coward]

The performance of Perl5/6 on top of Parrot will be far less than everyone expects. Why is this? Because all Perl scalars will end of being PMCs with every operation invoked via a vtable function call. The much ballyhooed Parrot integer and floating point registers will not get an opportunity to get used because the types of the variables in Perl are not known until runtime. You would need a very sophisticated optimizing just in time compiler for Perl (the language) - IMCC is not enough. Without such optimization the Perl/Parrot combo might exhibit a 50% improvement over the existing Perl 5 interpreter at best. Ponie will run into this problem very quickly - expect to see a lot of fancy dancing by Dan for not forseeing this.