Dov, > At the risk of a common uproar - what's in it for end-user companies? They, > in general, buy pre-packaged (and supported) versions of > open source > software.
I don't think that's actually true. There are lot of companies paying for a support contract for some Open Source technology but there are lot more that do not pay a dime. Or they might pay for some Open Source but not for other. Has the company you work for ever paid for Perl? For CPAN modules you use? IMHO companies slowly understand that its good for them to invest/support/give back to open source technologies. Allowing their developers to be involved in open source will improve their developers and their capability to support the technologies used in-house. Providing financial help to open source technologies will improve the chance the technology stays relevant 5-10-20 years from now protecting their own investment when building on top of that technology. Of course your company might not care about Padre now as it can easily replace it but probably it would cost a lot of money to them if they had to replace perl itself. On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 8:49 AM, David Baird <[email protected]> wrote: > This is my un-researched observation of how open source works: > > If there is a vested interest for a company to directly support an > open source project (Linux) it is because they use Linux in their own > product (Android phones, HP or IBM servers, Cisco routers) and mostly > develop device drivers to support their devices which work their way > back to the Linux project. As for other major open source products > (Perl, Python, PHP), there are for-profit companies which support > those products (ActiveState) whose work also goes back into the open > source space. Some of the money given to ActiveState goes back to perl through allocated development time (both core perl and CPAN) but most of the development on perl or on CPAN modules is still volunteer work. > > I am hard pressed to think of a major company (Microsoft, Google, > Apple) which directly supports an open source product other than > Linux. Are there such examples? Who is directly supporting Perl > development? Take a look at the list on the Perl Foundation web site: > http://www.perlfoundation.org/sponsors. I recognize only one name in > the list. For comparison, the Python donor's list is not that much > more attractive: http://www.python.org/psf/donations. A quick look at some of the Open Source related Foundations and the list of their corporate sponsors: Gnome: http://foundation.gnome.org/ Eclipse: http://www.eclipse.org/corporate_sponsors/ Apache: http://apache.org/foundation/thanks.html As for amounts, the Apache Platinum sponsorship is 100.000 USD / year Programming languages have a lot less direct financial support but that is something we are changing with the Perl Ecosystem Group: http://perl-ecosystem.org/ We are new so the list of members is still short http://perl-ecosystem.org/members but you can see that both Uri Bruck and Raz (Oded Resnick) are members and we have members from several other countries as well. Gabor _______________________________________________ Perl mailing list [email protected] http://mail.perl.org.il/mailman/listinfo/perl
