NOTE: This page is still under initial construction (i.e. more stuff from this fundraising thread is still being incorporated).
The purpose of this page is to consolidate information and discussions on Perl 6 and Parrot fundraising, with the aim of greatly increasing financial support for Perl 6 development.
See Perl 6 Donors, Sponsors, and Supporters. Become one! Find one! Thanks!!
This page is intended to become more general in scope:
Donations and fundraising tend to be an unnecessarily contentious issues. Please keep the concurrent version of TIMTOWTDI in mind.
The Perl Foundation is the focus of Perl support.
To be determined (see "Pending Fundraising Questions" below).
To be determined (see "Pending Fundraising Questions" below).
This wiki page had its genesis in the following Perl 6 fundraising thead on Perl 6 Users:
http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl6.users/2008/02/msg685.html
That thread had some independent continuations on the language and compiler groups. There were additional off-list discussions, some of which are also reflected here.
These questions are presently under consideration by the Perl Foundation (as of 2008-02-24), and this section will be updated in a week or two, when key people are available to respond:
These questions and suggestions are next in line:
Want to do additional Perl 6 related work, but need financial support? Put your name, proposed task, proposed duration, and proposed amount here.
In my $life, I raise money from sponsors.
It is not difficult to spend money, once you have it.
It is not difficult to raise money, once you know how to spend it wisely.
What's difficult is putting the two together.
Some donors know what to contribute to - they choose specific projects and people.
Some donors want to help achieve a general aim - they give to a foundation that will wisely spend the money for them (eg. Warren Buffet giving gazillions to Bill Gate's foundation).
Any sponsorship program should enable both ear-marked and general contributions (and I am certain if the paper-work's done right, this can be achieved within TPF).
To be frank, the ONLY reasonable systematic way of managing a sponsorship process is to have a Foundation, and the foundation should have people who are trusted, who already have contributed to the process, and who are prepared to report back on how the money has been spent. The Perl Foundation meets these criteria.
If you spend time on administration, you are using resources, in just the same way as programmers hacking on the code. So if the officers of the Foundation are paid for their efforts, that is acceptible so long as the payments are commensurate with resources spent in other directions.
It is not a mathematical formula, its a question of balance and fairness and transparency.
No one likes bureacracy. But I feel much happier about handing over money, or persuading someone else to hand over money, to a group of people with established procedures and collective responsibility, than to some enthusiatic individual who promises the earth and whose the world-number-one genius at code writing, but might also go and blow the whole lot on girls and booze cos his cat died.
Whilst debating issues like parrot vs pugs, or single-track vs parellel track development, can be quite interesting, especially if it induces Larry to compare straight lines to mountains and railroads, it is likely to be more useful to have suggestions like chromatic's - 1month of dedicated work for $5000.
How about adding a page to one of the web sites where offers of help, time and expense, can be made?
The micro-grants idea is great. What I have seen of the results and reporting is fine. More grants, more people, and more results are needed. How about everyone reading this thread thinking about a micro-project they can do.
Finally, there needs to be recognition for the sponsors, both those that donate their talent resources such as volunteer designer, implementors, & hackers, and those that donate just cash.
How about a mandatory section of text at the top of each core and sponsored module that lists the sponsors? Just like license text. That way all contributors are recognised when/if perl6 becomes the predominant programming environment, those names become distributed around the world.
The advantages of Perl 6's adaptibility for more effectively exploiting the changing hardware landscape.
The role of Perl 6, Parrot, and CPAN6 for developing extended multi-language infrastructure, leading to "programming's new Library of Alexandria" and "WikiCPAN6pedia".
Much academic work in the USA is funded by federal grants. There is usually some sort of case involved for advancing the technological state of the art, for increasing economic competitiveness, and so on.
For extreme-meme futurists:
"Perl 6, the programming language of the technological Singularity."