This is very nice. Between this and Booking.com's (disclaimer: I work there) €100,000 donation just over a month ago TPF is really getting on track for having large corporate sponsorship from organizations who recognize how valuable Perl is for their infrastructure.<p>I talked to some of the TPF people at Booking.com's donation event and they expressed desires to have more paid-for developers working on the Perl 5 core, and they're really gearing up as an organization for making that happen.<p>One thing of note for those unfamiliar with the Perl community: Notice how both of these big grants are earmarked for Perl 5 development, not Perl 6 development.<p>By now Perl 6 is viewed as best an interesting research project by organizations using Perl 5 in production.<p>I don't mean that as a comment to detract away from what the Perl 6 developers are doing, but to point out that it's a very different pattern than what's happening with the next generation of Python, Ruby, PHP etc. runtimes.<p>1. <a href="http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/01/bookingcom-sponsors-100000-to.html" rel="nofollow">http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/01/bookingcom-sponsors-1...</a>
A few months ago there was this discussion on HN - <i>Why is Funding Perl Core Development So Difficult?</i> (<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3247925" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3247925</a>).<p>Unfortunately Perl doesn't have a <i>Sugar Daddy</i> :( However it does have a few benevolent Uncles :)<p>Here's the breakdown of the last 12 months contributions...<p><pre><code> $10,000 Jun 2011 Vienna.pm
$10,000 Jul 2011 Booking.com
$10,000 Jul 2011 cPanel
€100,000 Jan 2012 Booking.com
$100,000 Jan 2012 Craigslist
</code></pre>
ref: Figures by trawling TPF website. Hopefully I have this correct! <a href="http://news.perlfoundation.org/2011/06/viennapm-donates-up-to-10000.html" rel="nofollow">http://news.perlfoundation.org/2011/06/viennapm-donates-up-t...</a> | <a href="http://news.perlfoundation.org/2011/07/bookingcom-sponsor-p5cmf.html" rel="nofollow">http://news.perlfoundation.org/2011/07/bookingcom-sponsor-p5...</a> | <a href="http://news.perlfoundation.org/2011/07/cpanel-sponsor-p5cmf.html" rel="nofollow">http://news.perlfoundation.org/2011/07/cpanel-sponsor-p5cmf....</a> | <a href="http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/01/bookingcom-sponsors-100000-to.html" rel="nofollow">http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/01/bookingcom-sponsors-1...</a> | <a href="http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/01/craigslist-charitable-fund-don.html" rel="nofollow">http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/01/craigslist-charitable...</a>
And TPF can put the money to good use; recently (2010 or 2011, don't remember exactly) they started to pay one core developer (Dave Mitchell) to work on bug fixes and refactors that nobody else wanted to do. Later Nicholas Clark got a similar grant, and both have been used to great effect.<p>I'm not deeply invovled the p5 developers, but it doesn't look like these grant create envy in other contributors, judging from the development speed.
I rather like this, especially the quote:<p>[Jim Buckmaster] added, "It was unclear at first how best to give something back to Perl. Fortunately there was more than one way to do it."