DuckDuckGo donates $25k to the Perl and Raku Foundation

Reaction to DDG’s $25k Donation

• Many see the donation as a positive, pragmatic move by a Perl-using company.
• Some are surprised $25k is “newsworthy,” expecting another one or two zeros if the ecosystem were healthy.
• Others note that for a single company, $25k is reasonable and that the real issue is many Perl-dependent companies giving nothing.

Perl & Raku Foundation Finances

• Linked financials suggest the foundation is in a rough spot: recurring deficits, unclear plan to stop them.
• Questions raised about why grant spending rose while revenue fell.
• Governance and transparency are criticized; internal financial monitoring and reporting have historically been weak.

Open Source Funding Models

• Repeated theme: corporate sponsorship is weak relative to how much value OSS creates.
• Debate over whether OSS should continue to rely on volunteer labor vs. charging users.
• Some argue corporations owe nothing; others frame non-funding as short-sighted risk to critical dependencies.
• Ideas floated: government grant programs funded via tax, better donation UX, dual licensing, and grant funds like floss.fund.
• Strong disagreement over whether “open source is a business model” vs. a public-good ideal.

Current Use and Status of Perl

• Perl usage is perceived as declining, but many report it still runs significant infrastructure: search engines, classifieds, telecoms, EDA workflows, financial firms, Linux tooling, Japanese BBSs.
• Some companies freeze existing Perl systems and rewrite any new work in other languages; others still start new Perl projects, especially for scripting and ETL.
• Perl’s long-term backwards compatibility is seen as a key reason old code keeps running with minimal maintenance.

Merits and Drawbacks of Perl

• Fans praise its power, expressiveness, regex integration, layering of features, and CPAN.
• Critics call it a “write-only,” overly clever language, problematic for team readability and maintainability.
• Comparisons made with Python: Python is seen as more bloated, more breaking changes; Perl code often still just works.
• Cultural issues like “there’s more than one way to do it” are cited as both strength and liability.

Raku’s Position

• Raku is regarded by some as a powerful, elegant successor (new regex model, grammars, multiple paradigms) but hampered by performance and lack of ubiquity.
• Frustration that Raku is rarely mentioned; belief that demand is “pent up” but overshadowed by Python, Ruby, etc.
• Question raised whether Raku can ever achieve Perl’s depth of documentation and ecosystem.