Re^3: Donate to The Perl Fund

[demerphq]

L~R, I actually dont know where I got that idea from. Its quite possible its not correct.

I don't have any direct relations with the TPF people. I sent them a mail about getting the dev server some financing but it went unanswered. Im going to call this thread to their attention and see what happens.

Id like to say that part of the problem is that there are only so many people suitable for doing deep-core PM development and most of them already do as much as they can afford to do. Maybe its possible that tye or ysth or someone could arrange to do some contract work and give the site their full attention for a while, but they havent mentioned it recently.

Anyway, the issue with paying for developement is that the people that can do it are the people least likely to say that you should pay them. I dont have the time to donate more efforts than I already do, and I dont contribute to get paid. Sure it would be nice to get paid for some of my lost weekends developing this or that, but id be just happy if you guys all got a T-shirt and wrote your names on it and sent it to me. You know what I mean? I volunteer my dev time because I love the site, i dont do it for money, that would cheapen my contributions in my own mind.

On the other hand Id love it if Corion and I weren't the only ones paying for the dev server.

Anyway, i realize that none of this resolves your feelings about this issue, but I hope it makes it clear why your idea of funding specific enhancments wasnt taken up with wild enthusiasm, at least by me.

[kurt]

Here’s the short answer to the questions about PerlMonks and money. Hopefully we can put together something a little more detailed and put it with the donations page soon. First, when we get money, how do we decide where to spend it? Whenever we get some money, I contact Tim and the gods and we decide how to spend it.

This has really only happened twice in the history of the web site. The first time was in 2003 when we started to get enough money to fund some upgrades that Tye proposed. Since that time, the donations virtually dried up.

Recently, however, O’Reilly has started running a few banners, putting an extra $3k in our pockets. We are discussing some possibilities, but figuring out where to spend money in an all-volunteer community is always a big challenge.

To clear another thing up: donations earmarked for PerlMonks have been/will be spent on PerlMonks. There hasn’t been much activity recently since there haven’t been many donations and we need a reasonable pool of cash before we can start to spend it.

Though I would like to make one request on this topic. When making a donation to perlmonks, please follow the link from the donations page instead of just sending a paypal payment to [e-mail]. If you just send money to that address, it is really hard to tell which fund you are targeting. By using the web form, you guarantee that your money is allocated to the correct fund.

Hopefully that clears up a couple of the questions raised in this thread.

-Kurt

[demerphq]

Hopefully that clears up a couple of the questions raised in this thread.

Thank you very much kurt, I hope so too.

[Limbic~Region]

demerphq,
Thank you. You are right, it doesn't change my feelings. I love this place and I don't think any one would question that. I know that people volunteer here and don't do it for the money. My issue isn't that my personal idea went unused but that there doesn't seem to be any idea from anyone suitable for use. As I pointed out in Monastery Slush Fund, the only use of the fund I am aware of was for tye's node cache refactoring.

The Monastery has been around for about 5 years as I assume the Offering Plate has been. The TPF only shows a rolling 12 month window of donations. I just don't see the point in contributing anymore if no one is going to bother to use it regardless of our recommendations. It also feels wrong to me that there would not be some public report of how much is in reserves or how the money is being used.