In reply to a thread on Free Software Business:
I have two problems with the open source donation model.The first is that open source projects are made from code, and the best donation I can give them is not money but code. In the case of Perl, I maintain nearly 40 modules, managed the release of the first few versions of the Perl 6 interpreter, and have contributed many patches and documents to the Perl 5 core. I feel absolutely no guilt at all for not giving a single cent to the fundraising drive.
If all we did was throw money at a small number of people to get the code written for us, there'd be no community to maintain.
Second, and far more seriously, donation models reinforce the myth that software is important in any meaningful sense of the word. Of course, software is relatively important to programmers, but for the vast majority of the world, it's pretty meaningless.
I'm very lucky that I have the opportunity to give reasonable sums of money to charity reasonably often. When this happens, I naturally have a number of things vying for my donations. Here are a few:
- Work with homeless people in my home town.
- Care for the elderly mentally ill.
- Providing AIDS vaccines for children in Africa.
- Digging wells and providing fresh water for villages in Pakistan.
- Allowing privileged first-world programmers to sit in front of a computer for more hours than they currently do.
Put like that, I hope it is clear that software is not as important as the biased eye of a programmer may perceive. Indeed, no matter how much of my income I derive from the existence of a given open source project, it becomes very difficult for me to fail to take a global view in cases like this. The common counterargument that I should donate money to Perl because it provides my livelihood makes sense only for those who cannot see beyond their own needs.Meanwhile, I know full well that as Perl is an open source project, it'll continue to be maintained and developed whether or not people are paid to do this. This makes it even more difficult for me to help the poor white-bread middle-class afflicted.
So I'm happy to contribute to Perl in my own way, but I'd rather not lose my sense of priority.
of the foundation entirely which isn't money rather support of a common goal. I think Jarkko well outstrips you in both time and code contributed yet he gave several hundred bucks to the foundation because it's important. It's not about the foundation, it's not about the personalities, it's about giving a vote of confidence to an institution that has only yet begun. I have some reservations and am not even all that wild about perl 6 ...but I gave too since I think it's important this Foundation doesn't fail.
The foundation will fail utterly with enough people feeling the way you do since why should any large corporation, granting institution or major philanthropist be arsed to give to the foundation when the home constituency can't be bothered to support their own people and goals?
Before Jon started throwing cups that fateful day we were talking about the community and how it eats its own far too often...unfortunately Perl 6 came up and noone ever came back to this important issue. The elitism, the sense of entitlement, the unrelenting vapidness will lead to languish. Because if what you say is true, then the whole concept of Open Source as an equal playing field is a lie and this language and this community will sink deeper and deeper into the cult of personality until there is nothing left but contempt.
Re:Individuals yes, Corporates no
hfb on 2002-07-03T21:34:38
You aren't getting it, so I'll be more blunt.
I was a grant officer for a foundation for a number of years and one of the sometimes written rules of thumb was "If the organisation doesn't care enough to get the community involved, we can't be bothered." It's a big red flag. Why should any company give money to this foundation when so many seem to think themselves above doing so? They won't or maybe a few will, but they shouldn't until this community figures out that supporting the foundation from within is the one way to keep it going.
Annual giving is the bread and butter of any philanthropic organisation such as this one. Grants are attractive but writing grant proposals takes time as well as getting into the various grant cycles means that it's going to be at least 6 months before cash starts raining from above. With Dan and Damian being shed to lighten the load and with no large influx of cash pending, it is likely that Larry won't be far behind. I'm irate that it has reached this point for a myriad of reasons but mostly because of this attitude that corporations owe us something. They don't. Philanthropy isn't extortion.
Corporations should not be expected to give money if we cannot give first. It's like going on a date, paying for dinner and expecting the girl to put out since you fed her. It is warped thinking to expect something in return for an act you did presumably for your own pleasure and entertainment.
Anyone can think of 100 reasons why not to part with $5 or $10 bucks but I'd like to think that most people would see this as an opportunity to invest in something greather than themselves to benefit everyone in the community if not today, tomorrow.
Re:Individuals yes, Corporates no
Matts on 2002-07-03T22:38:02
I didn't say I thought myself above giving (for whatever it's worth, I changed jobs and took a massive pay cut, and so live to the very edge of my salary - giving simply isn't on the schedule right now).
I wouldn't even dream of arguing that people should think of not helping out with TPF. If they can, they should. But, I can see Simon's point, that we don't *need* Perl 6. Not like those starving in Africa *need* a meal. That's all. Make of it what you will.
On the flip side, TPF does *need* us, so if you can, and are reading this, please make a donation.Re:Individuals yes, Corporates no
hfb on 2002-07-03T22:57:52
Simon's point is so obvious as to be irrelevant. The perl community is where you live and if it fails it will be a lesser place for the lack of it.
This month I've spent a few hours (free) writing a program for a cancer researcher so that he can automate access to genome database's otherwise intractable interface, so that he can spend his time on actual cancer research instead of spending a week or two or twelve mindlessly copying and pasting to and from Netscape. The program I wrote for him uses general-purpose tools that Gisle, Martijn, and me have been working on for years. Remember that the next time someone you know gets cancer and doesn't die of it.
The problem with toolsmithing is that as you solve metaproblems, it's easy to forget that that translates directly into making people happier -- people you probably will never even know.
And for almost a decade now, I've been involved with writing software for people that work on documenting endangered languages, so that they can than produce dictionaries almost twice as fast, and at a fraction of the cost, and with inestimable gains in the quality of the finished product. Moreover, the data will be in formats that will be sanely tractable, and not some ghastly .DOC stew.
Thought for the day: I bet the guy who wrote CDEX doesn't know that I use it to make .wav/.ogg/.mp3 files of our interviews in Native languages, nor does he know that because his software is free, that means that our grant budget is free to buy that many more blank CDs, pay the Natives for that many more hours of their time, and so on.
YOW! Am I privileged yet!?
BTW, code is nice, but sometimes it takes money to get things done. I keep meaning to get around to fixing the whole current mess with the various Pod parsers/renderers, and I think I'll finally find some time soon. But frankly, if people had waved some money at me to do it, it'd have been done a whole lot sooner.
Re:vying for dontations
Matts on 2002-07-04T21:46:12
The pod parsers problem is fixed. Pod::SAX provides a unified and standardised interface for doing it. Feeding SAX into DOM gives you searchability. Feeding SAX into XSLT gives you renderability.
I *think* it's fully perlpodspec compliant. If not, most bugs now should be small.Re:vying for dontations
TorgoX on 2002-07-05T00:33:25
The pod parsers problem is fixed.It sounds like altogether too much XML is required to do useful things with that parser model. I will have to have a look at this.
Re:vying for dontations
Matts on 2002-07-05T06:21:42
SAX is not XML. I need to create some more demos showing non-XML output, perhaps then people will understand ;-)
Re:Simon++
hfb on 2002-07-05T06:41:28
It is unfortunate that the Perl Foundation became the "perl 6 fund' since perl6 is still not widely accepted. Again, this is not the point of the organisation since, if it manages to survive at this point, it may go on to fund and support many other worthy projects within the community.
My father died 3 years ago from a hideous bout of cancer and my mother is not far behind...however, comparing disease research to donating $5 to the Perl Foundation is an emotional, obvious and pointless ruse. If you don't want to give because you think the foundation has communicated infrequently, if at all, supported a project you aren't interested in or any number of things, fine...but don't drag starving children in africa or curing cancer into it as, while an admirable cause, it just isn't a fair argument.
I'm not so interested in Perl6 rather what the foundation represents and what it will mean when it dies. If you have issues with the foundation, say it, say it loudly because whether or not it has been communicated to you..the foundation needs the support of the communtity as without it failure is a certainty. Perl has, I'm sure, helped save lives among many other things and it is worthy of a funding organisation behind it to reward and support those doing work that will benefit others, maybe even cancer researchers.
Re:Simon++
vek on 2002-07-05T17:30:35
It is unfortunate that the Perl Foundation became the "perl 6 fund' since perl6 is still not widely accepted. Again, this is not the point of the organisation since, if it manages to survive at this point, it may go on to fund and support many other worthy projects within the community.
Right, but the call for funding right now is to primarily help pay for Perl6 development - no?
...it just isn't a fair argument.
Fair or not fair it actually happens to be my point of view. If I have a spare $100 laying around I find it really hard to justify why that $100 should go to fund Messrs Wall, Conway & Sugalski instead of some other "real world" need. If you have the financial means to give to the Perl foundation and other meaningful charities then great. If you're not in a position to give to both, the "real world" need obviously gets the cash (or it should anyway).
Perl has, I'm sure, helped save lives among many other things and it is worthy of a funding organisation behind it to reward and support those doing work that will benefit others...
I'm not saying it doesn't deserve a funding organization. If you can donate then donate. If your company wants to donate then more power to it. However I personally cannot justify helping fund an unnecessary new version of a programming language when there are so many more significant causes worthy of my cash.
Time to move on.Re:Simon++
hfb on 2002-07-05T18:29:28
Right now, yes. But it has only just begun and, who knows, maybe next year or sometime in the future they'll fund a wide variety of projects in the community. I cannot argue that starving children and cancer research are important causes. They are. But, considering you use perl and make some part of your living off of it, so is the perl foundation. Perl has, directly and indirectly, helped people doing important work for important causes both for profit and not for profit and it is pretty 'real world' too.
Look beyond Perl 6 and to the future with a funding foundation that will foster many more projects within the Perl community. If you can't find a reason to give $5 to the foundation than neither will a corporation thus leading to certain death of what was a very promising institution.
I can't save the world but I gave a few bucks to an institution that I strongly believe should exist and prosper in the hopes that some day it will be a mature and professionally run organisation.
Re:Points
mir on 2002-07-05T20:30:11
Darn, I find myself agreing with Pudge!
I have benefited so much from Perl, from the paycheck I get every month to working with a language I love, to meeting people I can relate to at conferences and through the Perl Mongers, that frankly I could not imagine _not_ giving to TPF.
The Perl culture, to which I think TPF contributes significantly, is just such an important, and treasured, part of my life that I feel like giving to TPF is akin to paying a psychiatrist, it really helps improve my sanity (at least what little is left of it ;--).
Re:Points
pudge on 2002-07-05T20:54:51
Hey, we also agree that the Dolphins, Bills, and Colts suck! :-)
