Craigslist Donates $100,000 To the Perl Foundation

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Craigslist Donates $100,000 To the Perl Foundation

Posted by samzenpus on Friday February 3, 2012 @01:08AM from the have-a-few-bucks dept.

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."

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Good on them by zakkie · 2012-02-03 01:13 · 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.
1. Re:Good on them by awwaiid · 2012-02-03 01:17 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  I think ebay has backed them financially (like own 25% of Craigslist), but otherwise have nothing to do with them. I suspect yahoo has plenty of Per and certainly lots of other tech, maybe they should match the donation :)
2. Re:Good on them by awwaiid · 2012-02-03 01:20 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  Er... s/yahoo/ebay/ ; s/Per/Perl/. Stupid pre-caffeination-time aka mornings.
3. Re:Good on them by SJHillman · 2012-02-03 01:22 · 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
  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?
4. Re:Good on them by rudy_wayne · 2012-02-03 01:29 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7399720.stm
  "EBay acquired a 28.4% stake when it bought shares from a former employee who had been given equity by Mr Newmark.
  A year after the deal was completed, eBay, which had said it wanted to learn from Craigslist, started Kijiji.com, a rival international network of classified ad sites that now sells ads in all 50 US states. "
5. Re:Good on them by drinkypoo · 2012-02-03 01:32 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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.
  I agree with everything you said except for easy to use. It's technically true, but only because it doesn't do anything. There's no distance search, in fact, it is actively discouraged by carving the site up into small pieces and then disallowing scrapers, which exist anyway because they are an absolute necessity.
  
  --
  "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
6. Re:Good on them by Stewie241 · 2012-02-03 02:44 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  But you missed the point. The idea is the ability to search through all the classified listings for items that are within 25 kilometres from my location. I don't want to have to look through 300 listings to find those items - I want search to work.
  This probably isn't as necessary in smaller centres, but where I live, there is a wall of city for 100km. Craigslist breaks this up into small segments and you browse those segments.
  Kijiji on the other hand, lets me pick a precise location and filter out ads that are inside a certain radius of it. This, IMO, is much friendlier to people in larger centres.
7. Re:Good on them by drinkypoo · 2012-02-03 04:14 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  There's another problem for people who live in bumfuck nowhere, which is my situation. Everything is far away from everything so I might as well look at ads in neighboring counties, and I'm going to have to if I want a reasonable chance of finding anything interesting. Now I have to visit various craigslists and manually repeat my searches again and again, or use one of the tools which are against the ToS. I understand that the stated intent is to encourage people to buy and sell in their area, but they really need to understand that doesn't make sense in all cases and make allowances for it. Besides, if I can't find it as near me as possible on CL I may well just end up buying something from much further away than necessary anyway, and what purpose does that serve?
  
  --
  "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Kudos to Craigslist by opentunings · 2012-02-03 01:19 · Score: 2, Interesting

And how many other companies making extensive use of Perl will pony up?
1. Re:Kudos to Craigslist by gmuslera · 2012-02-03 01:32 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Contributing code, modules, fixes, and error reporting? There are a lot that probably does that, and is not a minor thing.
2. Re:Kudos to Craigslist by John+Bokma · 2012-02-03 03:06 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  Yeah, that's my excuse, as a freelance Perl programmer. Still, each time I check Fund Drive Details 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.
  
  --
  
  Perl Programmer for hire
They make that much $? by netwarerip · 2012-02-03 01:20 · Score: 2

Nice to see that they make enough $ to make a donation like that, without the standard income generating popups that most websites use. Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.
1. Re:They make that much $? by Anonymous Coward · 2012-02-03 01:23 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  Nice to see that they make enough $ to make a donation like that, without the standard income generating popups that most websites use. Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.
  Craigslist is It! when you need that hook... - I mean temporary companion for that date to that important event you got stood up for at the last minute.
2. Re:They make that much $? by betterunixthanunix · 2012-02-03 01:35 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  They provide an actual, useful service. Why should we be surprised that they turn a profit without resorting to invasive, annoying advertisements?
  
  --
  Palm trees and 8
Not so altrusitic... by bazmail · 2012-02-03 01:26 · Score: 2, Interesting

This is an investment in whats keeps them alive.
1. Re:Not so altrusitic... by Stewie241 · 2012-02-03 02:53 · Score: 3, 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).
2. Re:Not so altrusitic... by glwtta · 2012-02-03 03:09 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  It's called 'enlightened self-interest', a much better position than altruism.
  
  --
  sic transit gloria mundi
Re:Great! by hlub · 2012-02-03 01:44 · Score: 4, Informative

Epic leaks? For the better part of a decade?
Is PERL still active by jellomizer · 2012-02-03 01:56 · Score: 3, Interesting

Ok full disclosure, I never really cared for PERL, I was always more of a Python fan myself.
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.

--
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
1. Re:Is PERL still active by ThePhilips · 2012-02-03 02:34 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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.
  
  Frankly, Perl got it all more or less right already in early 2000s. So obviously there is not much development happening: Perl already works pretty well. Most new releases have mostly bug fixes - but also some minor syntax improvements and features from the Perl6.
  IOW, Perl lost its shine only in the eyes of those who are after shiny. Perl is pretty down to earth tool to get the job done.
  
  But back in the day every time you tried to find an open source program to do something it required PERL
  
  Perl defines portability properly and allows one to access quite a lot of system-specific resources - in the system-specific way. Thus it was (and in some areas still is) quite popular as the language for install scripts of all sorts.
  Even now, Perl remains one of the few power tools to be most commonly included in the fresh UNIX system installs (including Debian and Mac OS X). There is no other language/tool which is as stable and as portable: that's why it is possible and useful to include it into the OS install.
  
  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.
  
  IMO, Perl greatest weakness is the interface to other libraries (the PerlXS). It is not an easy task to make a Perl binding. It's fscking hard and includes lots of copy-paste. That's why Perl lacks many up-to-date bindings to many up-to-date libraries, what makes it not so suitable for many up-to-date tasks. Even Perl6 went on and pretty much excluded the XS/etc from the spec. What sucks and makes Perl6 worse (and useless to me) than the Perl5, because on top of general problem with bindings, Perl6 adds fragmentation: extensions written for different Perl6 implementation are incompatible with each other.
  
  --
  All hope abandon ye who enter here.
2. Re:Is PERL still active by oneandoneis2 · 2012-02-03 02:35 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Perl is *massively* active. The main "problem" with Perl is, unlike, say, PHP, you don't see it in action: A website that makes heavy use of PHP will have lots of .php files in its URLs. A website that runs on Perl will just use good old .html.
  If you're looking for Perl by checking for "cgi-bin" then you're a long way out of date with where Perl is these days
  
  --
  So.. it has come to this
3. Re:Is PERL still active by Sez+Zero · 2012-02-03 03:04 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Even on scales of visibility Perl is still in the top 10 and pretty much stays about there for as long as I've checked the Tiobe Index.
  Perl is like a shovel. There may be fancy post hole drills pneumatic jackhammers out there that get all the page views at Home Depot. But there will always be the shovel; because it gets the job done simply and have more uses than you think.
4. Re:Is PERL still active by John+Bokma · 2012-02-03 03:10 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  FWIW: Perl is the language, perl is a program that can run Perl. Case matters, and hence PERL is to me yelling.
  And yes Perl is alive and kicking, I make a living with it.
  As for lost its shine? You mean not everybody who "learned to code over the weekend" has moved to PHP or similar? I am glad for that.
  
  --
  
  Perl Programmer for hire
5. Re:Is PERL still active by ThePhilips · 2012-02-03 06:02 · Score: 2
  
  Up-to-date, portable and well documented Qt bindings.
  Place of portable GUI toolkit for Perl was always kind of empty. Many tried - but none remained maintained sufficiently long to become de facto standard. Most are abandoned. Few are managing to stay afloat, but sorely lack Perl-specific documentation. And I will not go with every little question to the mail lists.
  On many occasions, even Xaw-level toolkit would have been more than satisfactory - if portable. Even if primitive, there is nothing like that available.
  P.S. Many insisted that Perl/Tk works well. Indeed, applications written with it work well. Now go and try to find any documentation which isn't "but it's just like in Tcl/Tk!" and describes anything more complicated than a hello world exit button app. I have found couple of decent tutorials - only to realize 5 minutes later that I'm missing a decent reference. Because Perl isn't Tcl, lots of stuff really differs and doing it in Perl like in Tcl is very counter-productive. And there is no Perl specific reference documentation.
  P.P.S. But that in itself will not solve the problem that perlxs is a stinking pile of ****. I'd love Perl community to invest into a simpler, probably not so powerful interface.
  
  --
  All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Re:Successful ? by malilo · 2012-02-03 01:57 · Score: 5, Interesting

Troll much? You can always tell a made-up complaint because it describes a situation nothing like reality, and has a tone of venomous contempt that is excessive given the situation. People with no money to buy the item? Ok, maybe some people low-ball you but I have found that is easily curtailed by stating. "SERIOUSLY NO LOW-BALL OFFERS PRICE FIRM" on the ad. As for scams I get about 5% spam response rate on most things. They are super-obvious. Guess what. I click delete. I also get several offer emails usually and can only sell to one person! OMG, the horrors of selling something for free.

--
"sometimes he felt that his whole life was a dream, and he wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it."
Too little and small-minded? by SplatMan_DK · 2012-02-03 02:09 · Score: 2

Considering the role Perl (and the other software products they use) has in their business, it seems like a very small sum of money.

Had they purchased commercial software from Oracle, IBM, Microsoft etc. to solve this task the price would have been a two-digit million-dollar figure. And probably a bunch of additional millions on top of that, for more iron to run it on.

We should praise them for this step, but at the same time be aware that they got away REALLY CHEAP by this action. Hell, the marketing buzz it generates is probably worth half that amount by itself!

- Jesper

--
My security clearance is so high I have to kill myself if I remember I have it...
Re:Great! by close_wait · 2012-02-03 02:21 · Score: 4, Informative

Its not a leak, Someone has already commented in the ticket that if you repeatedly create and destroy perl interpeters, then you need to set PL_destruct_level, because otherwise, (for efficiency), perl doesn't completely free the old interpreter, on the asumption that you're about to call exit(). So, it's just that no one got round to marking the ticket as rejected.
Re:Great! by preaction · 2012-02-03 05:08 · Score: 2

Ever used ithreads? Ever?
No, and neither should you when POE, Reflex, AnyEvent, Coro, and fork() exist.
Perl 7 by eminencja · 2012-02-03 06:54 · Score: 2

Perl is where JavaScript used to be at version 1.3 -- version 1.4 was on the horizon, it was supposed to change the language radically, add packages, type system, etc. However, 1.4 was killed and 1.5 was born. 1.5 was a small incremental update to 1.3.
Perl 6 is never going to make it (yes, I've looked at it recently) so the community should let it die and start Perl 7 instead. Perl 7 should be for Perl 5 what JavaScript 1.5 was for JavaScript 1.3. It should add 1) classes using MooseX::declare syntax 2) autoboxing @arr.push( $elem ) instead push @arr, $elem and 3) and maybe a few syntactic enhancements that everybody is going to love such like chained comparisons or while @arr -> $x, $y
We know (thanks to CPAN modules) that those work.