Proxmox Donates €10k to the Perl and Raku Foundation

Size and significance of the €10k donation

• Some feel €10k is small given Perl’s centrality to Proxmox, but others argue it’s far more than most companies using open source ever give back.
• A commenter notes this sum is roughly a quarter of the Perl/Raku Foundation’s yearly revenue, which is both worrying (low overall funding) and encouraging (Proxmox’s impact is real).
• Others emphasize that Proxmox is not a giant cash-printing enterprise and that its success relies on much more than Perl alone, making the donation proportionate.
• The Foundation explicitly wants more sponsors in this range instead of depending on rare six‑figure donors; publicizing Proxmox’s gift is seen as a way to attract peers.

Proxmox’s tech stack and value-add

• Proxmox is heavily based on Perl (plus HTML/JS and some Rust), atop QEMU/KVM and other free software.
• Debate over whether Proxmox is “just a UX wrapper around QEMU”: several replies push back, citing clustering, SDN, Ceph integration, containers, backups, REST APIs, RBAC, and long-term upgrade paths as substantial engineering beyond a thin UI.
• It’s popular in homelabs due to ease of use and being fully FOSS, but also reportedly used in sizable VMware replacement deployments.
• Users praise its value for small businesses and labs, especially ease of managing ZFS and “pet” VMs.

Perl’s current status and use in new projects

• Multiple participants confirm Perl 5 is actively maintained with recent releases and strong backward compatibility; very old code still typically runs.
• There’s extended discussion of how rare language-level breaking changes are, with hash key ordering randomness cited as a notable but documented shift.
• Some organizations continue to write greenfield backends in Perl, citing:
  • Cross‑platform reliability.
  • Strong text/file processing, especially with regex.
  • CPAN’s breadth.
  • Fast development and execution and low churn over decades.
• Others consider choosing Perl for new systems a red flag and prefer Python or other languages; many “Perl shops” now use a second backend language.

Raku / “Perl 6” debate

• Confusion persists around Perl 6: some call it a huge breaking change; others stress it was always a separate redesign and is now Raku.
• Several lament that calling it “Perl 6” misled people into thinking Perl 5 was obsolete. Renaming to Raku is widely seen as the right move but late.
• Raku is portrayed as niche but technically interesting (grammars, Unicode handling, lazy evaluation, hyper-operators), maintained by a small motivated team.

LLMs, idioms, and “one best way”

• People report that modern LLMs can generate usable Perl, including with newer class syntax, though sometimes mixing in Moose/Raku concepts.
• Some find Perl hard because of idioms and “there is more than one way to do it”; they wish for clearer “best practice” paths.
• Others recommend resources like “Modern Perl” and “Perl Best Practices”, along with tools (perltidy, Perl::Critic) to standardize style and reduce choice overload.

Open-source funding and corporate culture

• Multiple commenters describe failed attempts to direct budget surplus to OSS projects: managers see no precedent and balk at “paying for what we already have”.
• Comparisons are drawn to individuals resisting paying for services they use heavily (e.g., YouTube Premium), and to microtransactions exploiting this psychology.
• Suggestions include:
  • Framing donations as marketing/sponsorship (“brand awareness” at conferences) rather than altruism.
  • Emulating ESG-style reporting: a visible “we fund our open-source dependencies” section in annual reports.
  • Contributing code, QA, and bug reports when money isn’t feasible.
• There’s broader frustration that it’s easier to raise millions for trendy products than thousands for foundational infrastructure like Perl or OpenSSL.

Regional and economic side-discussion

• A tangent contrasts perceived frugality of many European tech companies (cheap hardware, cost-cutting culture) with higher spending norms at US firms; others partly confirm this but note structural differences (industry mix, margins, regulation, insolvency regimes).
• Some push back on turning this into an anti‑EU narrative and point out that this particular donation story originates from a US-based foundation highlighting an Austrian company.

Community sentiment toward Perl and Proxmox

• Several commenters express nostalgia and gratitude: Perl was foundational to their careers, and Proxmox delivers remarkable free value.
• Others admit they assumed Perl was “dead” until this reminded them it’s still in active use and development.
• A minority view calls further investment in Perl/Raku “beating a dead horse”, but this is countered with evidence of conferences, ongoing releases, and real-world deployments still generating significant revenue.