I am sure we are all grateful for Proxmox's generous donation; but if €10k is newsworthy for a Foundation with Perl's historic profile, I would be very worried.
Fundraising is hard. There's a longer history around it that I don't have the space to fully explore here, but the quick version is that I'm currently looking for more sponsors in this 10k range rather than having to rely on 100k donations from very large orgs.
Some companies immediately understand the value of this kind of support. Getting that news out will hopefully allow me to find more orgs who can/will donate in this range.
So, if anyone has any leads, please do contact me: [email protected] If you take a close look at your stack, you'll probably find Perl in there somewhere.
we live in a world where it's easier to burn $10M for a repackaged chatgpt than to have someone wire $10k for a core infrastructure project. sad reality, but reality still.
if you're motivated to do OSS work, the best bet is to figure out how to take VC money to do that and don't end up on some blacklist.
Have you every counted how many old buildings that, if replaced/redesigned/rebuilt, would be both 100x more useful and worth 10x more you see in any large city's center?
Shouldn't their donation be weighed against the revenues they enjoy using the Foundation's labors? Is Proxmox enjoying particularly strong revenues, and doesn't their product involve much more than what Perl provides? I think the donation is pretty fair. Their success certainly owes more to things beyond Perl itself.
I think the point is proxmox's donation is fair, but there's many more businesses getting much more value from perl which are not donating, if their fair donation is notable.
Or, be inspired that it proves there's business value in supporting the foundation? They wouldn't spend thousands of euros if they thought it was going down the drain.
Unpopular opinion that's gonna get downvoted/flagged soon based on my experience here: That just shows you how broke EU tech companies are that even 10k is newsworthy for them.
For context, I only worked for average (not big-tech/unicorns) EU/French/Dutch/German tech companies my whole life and I was shocked to see how much more, the average US tech companies spend on frivolities(forget the wages) than the European companies I worked at.
From what I saw, for US tech companies big or small, buying fully decked MacBooks and Herman Miler chairs for their SW devs was the norm, while I only saw the discount bin chairs and base spec HP/Dell/Lenovo laptops wherever I worked here.
Even where I work now, SW engineers get the same crappy HP notebooks that HR uses to read emails, since beancounters love fleets of the same cheap laptops for everyone, so my manager needs to jump through hoops for the beancounters to let him order more powerful notebooks for the SW engineers in his team, cause ya' know, Docker and VMs eat more resources than Outlook and Excel. This is relatively unheard of for US SW engineers where little expense is spared on equipment.
They even reduced costs related to facility management like AC runtime and cleaning services, so trash bins are emptied twice a week instead of daily, leading to some funny office aromas in summer, if you catch my drift. And of course, they blame Putin for this.
I always naively assumed (mostly due to anti-US propaganda we get here in EU) that due to how expensive US labor and healthcare is, it would be the opposite that US companies would have to cost cut to the bone, but no, despite that, US companies still have way more money to spend than European ones. Crazy.
My explanation is, European companies are just run the same way EU governments are run, on austerity and cost cutting, so instead of trying to make money by innovating and investing and splurging to get the best of everything, they instead try to increase the profits by cutting all possible costs from purchasing to labors' wages and offshoring, since I assume that's also what's taught in European MBA schools.
How many US companies are donating more than 10k to perl? Or even that much?
If your anti-EU rant is right, open source projects should just naturally come into a whole bunch of donations this size from these rich US companies. Does that happen? Especially once we get past the big 3?
How is it anti-EU? I was explaining what I observed, nothing what I said has to do with the EU political union, but with the way EU companies operate. Criticizing the way European companies choose to do business doesn't make you "anti-EU".
What's with this hyper-partisan George-Bush-style "You're either with us or against us" type of arguments, where you can't criticize something without someone accusing you of being a hater?
Can't we just debate things reasonably and assuming good faith as per HN rules, instead of resorting to attacks and accusations of partisan?
Note that Proxmox did not put out any news, the Perl foundation did, and that is based in the USA, so not sure if it really shows what you try to suggest.
> I always naively assumed (mostly due to anti-US propaganda we get here in EU) that due to how expensive US labor and healthcare is, it would be the opposite that US companies would have to cost cut to the bone, but no, despite that, US companies still have way more money to spend than European ones. Crazy.
It's actually almost the opposite here in the US. Because labor is expensive, especially engineering labor, it doesn't make sense to scrimp on expenses like computer equipment or office chairs that support that labor, as you want to reduce development costs. If a faster laptop costs $500/unit more but reduces toil/wasted time for a $300k/yr developer of 30 minutes a day, it is easily justified that it's worth the cost since labor cost is so much higher.
> European companies are just run the same way EU governments are run, on austerity and cost cutting
To a certain extent yes.
But that's because of margins. An large automotive parts vendor or a major biopharma company isn't generating revenue on software, so software engineering is treated as a cost center.
It's the same in the US, but at least you have tech first companies that generate most of their revenue of tech.
Europe's tech industry died out because of a mixture of mismanagement and bad luck. Velti [0] used to outcompete AdSense, but their management was incompetent and borderline fraudulent, and that's why the AdTech industry boomed in the US and collapsed in Europe.
The same thing happened to Nokia, Ericcson, and others.
The good European startups like Datadog, Spotify, Databricks, and UIPath all ended up relocating to the US so an entire generation of startups doesn't exist in the EU.
> they instead try to increase the profits by cutting all possible costs from purchasing to labors' wages and offshoring, since I assume that's also what's taught in European MBA schools
I've dealt with MBA grads from the EU and US - they aren't taught any of this. IMO, the issue is most leadership in European companies tend to be ex-accountants from KPMG/EY/PWC/Deloitte/Mazars-type companies, because manufacturing industries like pharma, automotive, etc have severely low margins.
Was it really bad luck or just bad management refusing to accept the reality that they were bad so they blamed luck?
Nokia CEO was famous for saying "We did everything right and still lost". Clearly he didn't do everything right if they lost.
I think EU leaders and CEOs have no accountability, hindsight or self reflection capacity to see how badly they're failing so then just blame bad luck because it always has to be someone else's fault.
> Was it really bad luck or just bad management refusing to accept the reality that they were bad so they blamed luck?
Bit of column A and bit of column B. There was a LOT of bad management, but the Eurozone Crisis (2007-2014, 2018 for Greece) was also extremely severe and out of corporate leadership's hands.
If 70-80% of your customers across the Eurozone were delinquent in payments and in the midst of bankruptcies and rolling down operations, you wouldn't be generating the same amount of revenue needed.
In the US, enforcing vendor arrears and collecting dues from bankrupt customers is much easier. These are business law issues that business leadership within the 26+ EU/EFTA nations cannot solve, as this is a legislative issue.
> I think EU leaders and CEOs have no accountability, hindsight or self reflection capacity to see how badly they're failing so then just blame bad luck because it always has to be someone else's fault.
To a certain extent yes, but that's because they don't empower the private sector beyond a handful of politically connected firms to have an actual say or input. Lobbying happens in the EU as well, but it is much harder for startups and companies that aren't national champions to get a say.
Of course, this depends on the country as well as the EU as a whole, which is the crux of the issue - should national law or "EU law" be prioritized? In action, enforcement and regulatory capacity is devolved from the EU to individual member states, and logically, companies do jurisdiction shopping, hence why you see American companies over-represented in Ireland and a strong tech ecosystem in Czechia, Poland, and Romania.
>but the Eurozone Crisis (2007-2014, 2018 for Greece) was also extremely severe and out of corporate leadership's hands.
What does Greece's economic crisis have to do with the way European companies are run?
>In the US, enforcing vendor arrears and collecting dues from bankrupt customers is much easier. These are business law issues that business leadership within the 26+ EU/EFTA nations cannot solve, as this is a legislative issue.
I think you'll find it's exactly the opposite.
In many EU countries, if you're behind on payment, the government's debt collection agency comes after you and seizes your assets to pay off your debt, while in the US a lot of people have 5 figure debts spread over 20 different credit cards, debt they'll never repay because the collection process is up to the CC companies, not on federal government, so CC companies give up after a while since the cost to chase down people to collect a 1000$ debt is not worth it.
This doesn't work in the EU. If you have 20 Euro unpaid debt, the state's debt collection agency will slap a 1000 Euro collection fee on that and seize 1020 Euros worth of your assets be it from your home, bank account or from your pension fund.
That's how Swedish payment provider Klarna si going bust in the US due to how many people are defaulting on their debts from buying burritos and pizzas off DoorDash, probably because Klarna naively assumed it was gonna be like in Sweden where the government goes after you to collect the 20 Euros you owe.
> What does Greece's economic crisis have to do with the way European companies are run
Velti and a number of other mobile AdTech and app vendors were clustered in Greece+Balkans. Greece was also in the process of spinning up a tech investment promotion policy comparable to what Israel and India did in the 1990s right before the Eurozone crisis happened.
Velti was the largest AdTech platform in the late 2000s and early 2010s - outcompeting Google AdSense and what became Google AdMob, but they went under due to their heavy European presence. Same with plenty of other European startups.
An entire generation of potential unicorns died out.
> Correct me if I'm wrong
I'm talking about corporate bankruptcy. It's much harder to shut down a business or go thru bankruptcy and arrears when you maybe to deal with a state collections agency due to the associated compliance and red tape hurdles.
Consumer Insolvency tends to be pro-consumer in the US, and Business Insolvency tends to be pro-business in the US.
>Velti and a number of other mobile AdTech and app vendors were clustered in Greece+Balkans
I don't know enough about these companies because I never heard about them so I can't contradict this but googling tells me they're Irish, not Balkan.
And on the other hand, best to look at how important and influential they are to the EU economy, because at the end of the day that's what matters and what drives the economy, politics and citizen votes.
The truth is, nobody cares about the failure of some random ad companies with a workforce of ~100 maybe, that barely pay any taxes locally.
So I don't see how some no-name ad companies are relevant to this. If they were to be highly profitable for the EU, pay a lot in taxes in the EU, and hire tens of thousands of EU workers, we would have heard about them and they would have had lobbying power and support form workers like the likes of VW, Renault or Airbus do. But they're most likely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things so I don't see how they fit in this discussion, as small companies go bust every day around the world, be it US, EU, Asia, etc.
> It's much harder to shut down a business or go thru bankruptcy and arrears when you maybe to deal with a state collections agency due to the associated compliance and red tape hurdles.
It really isn't more difficult since the government helps you with the shutting down part the moment you are unable to pay workers' wages.
>Consumer Insolvency tends to be pro-consumer in the US, and Business Insolvency tends to be pro-business in the US.
Maybe true. Which is why very few Europeans want to start businesses and hire workers, when they face the wrath of the government the moment the finances of their business go south and can't pay the workers wages.
But from the proof I saw, the defaulting on your debt situation is bad in Europe whether you're a business or a consumer, while in US is not that bad as you have a lot of opt-outs legal and otherwise.
This isn't accidental, it's malicious enemy action. Overpaid fund managers are sick of seeing their business walk out the door in favor of funds with low/no fees, so there's a very active submarine campaign in progress to make BlackRock, Vanguard etc. seem like mustache-twirling villains, instead of "just a bunch of people owning shares".
For example, note how all the stories about institutional investors buying up housing stock mention BlackRock, even though REITs and private equity firms are doing much, much more of this business.
Also, Vanguard is run as a sort of cooperative where it is indirectly owned by the fundholders, which is why they were always incentivized to LOWER fees. The founder of Vanguard (Jack Bogle) probably left tens of billions of wealth on the table by creating that model (and he had no regrets, FWIW).
There are concerns because by default they usually cast votes by board recommendations and since they have such a huge stewardship of the stock market it means others can have more direct influence, but Vanguard itself is otherwise as neutral a stock ownership intermediary as can pretty much exist.
It’s especially sad when you read or listen to what Jack Bogle had to say. Such a thoughtful, kind and honest person who choose to help people invest rather than pocket their money. But the modern financial system is too complex for your average moron.
There is confusion on your part. Blackrock owns a number of different funds that do things like you describe (and explicitly called private equity funds).
BlackRock and State Street biggest funds are all passive and are indistinguishable from Vanguard. All 3 offer active investments, but their passive portfolio dwarfs the active ones.
BlackRock != BlackStone, if that’s what you were thinking of.
Then enlighten me about the, presumably, massive difference between BlackRock and Vanguard passive funds. It must be something so huge that they are both in the index fund/passive fund category and yet “can’t be lumped together” because it seems you’re the one who doesn’t know much.
They hold shared on behalf of other people, i.e. if someone buys one of their index funds they buy the corresponding shares. They are the on-paper owner of a very large fraction of shares in public companies, but they are a) not the ultimate owners, just agents of the real investors, and b) as a consequence very hands-off in the operation of the businessness. They in general just go along with what the company executives and other, more direct investors want. They have a general stated goal of 'encouraging long-term value for their stockholders', but the most activist thing they've done was contribute to a shuffle in exxonmobile which pushed them to pay a little bit more attention to the environment and climate change, which is if anything the opposite of what people tend to assume they do.
I mean they also send me an email to vote with my fractional S&P 500 shares whenever a shareholder vote comes up, so even if they're the on-paper owner of the shares they seem to pass through the voting rights every bit as much as the direct value and dividends.
You are probably voting for the ownership of the fund, and not the companies the fund owns. Unless you get around 500 different share holder vote forms every year you are not voting for the companies in question you are just voting for the leaders of your funds. (around 500 because S&P 500 funds often buy companies like what is in the S&P500, but not always exactly the same companies. Even if they want to be exactly the same companies they take time to buy and sell anytime the S&P500 changes just because the market could not handle them buying/selling everything the minute the S&P list changes)
Only in very high-level, abstract terms. Company executives have, especially of publically owned companies, a very large degree of leeway in how they can operate, and most corporations do have some idea of a mission beyond 'make money'.
