> So that's a long-winded way of saying that I don't sustain myself on open source. This is a pretty common story. Companies rarely make an effort to support individual developers. They will support language/project foundations, but that money isn't going to be directly divvied up among library developers for the language.
Thats interesting, is anyone aware of a language/software community where that does happen?
To clarify a bit, what happens with Perl is that The Perl Foundation funds the community in various ways. I'm a TPF board member, so I have a pretty good idea of what we do.
We fund a number of long-running grants for the Perl 5 and Rakudo/MoarVM language cores. We also have a smaller grants program for one-off projects, which have included things like documentation work for core & libraries, funding of work on existing libraries, and infrastructure projects for the community (websites, etc.).
We also work on marketing the languages by doing things like having a table at FOSDEM and other conferences, etc. And of course, we provide an organization to back up conferences and other events, to do things like carry an even insurance policy, help with Standards of Conduct, and lots of other background activities.
This is all good stuff, and I'm glad we do it. I don't think we could announce a plan to just give money to everyone who uploaded to CPAN. For one thing, that's thousands of people, so we could maybe give them a dollar or ten each. For another, the value of each person's contribution is obviously hugely different. I can't see how any community foundation could do this without causing more problems than it solves, even if the foundation had the funding to do it at any sort of scale.
autarch|5 years ago
We fund a number of long-running grants for the Perl 5 and Rakudo/MoarVM language cores. We also have a smaller grants program for one-off projects, which have included things like documentation work for core & libraries, funding of work on existing libraries, and infrastructure projects for the community (websites, etc.).
We also work on marketing the languages by doing things like having a table at FOSDEM and other conferences, etc. And of course, we provide an organization to back up conferences and other events, to do things like carry an even insurance policy, help with Standards of Conduct, and lots of other background activities.
This is all good stuff, and I'm glad we do it. I don't think we could announce a plan to just give money to everyone who uploaded to CPAN. For one thing, that's thousands of people, so we could maybe give them a dollar or ten each. For another, the value of each person's contribution is obviously hugely different. I can't see how any community foundation could do this without causing more problems than it solves, even if the foundation had the funding to do it at any sort of scale.