Proxmox Donates €10k to the Perl and Raku Foundation
174 comments
·July 23, 2025ZiiS
oalders
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: olaf@perlfoundation.org If you take a close look at your stack, you'll probably find Perl in there somewhere.
bmn__
Then be worried. That amount is a quarter of the foundation's yearly revenue.
oofbey
Part of me wants to go send Perl some money, because it was so important in my formative years. Another part of me is like "people still use perl?"
systems
Raku is now a completely separate language from Perl and I think that while Perl still seem to be used, Raku usage is even smaller
I am really impressed of how Raku developers keep their motivation to work on it
And I am a bit curious to know if Proxmox is interested in Raku at all, or are they only using Perl
m463
proxmox is heavily based on perl
...and when looking through the sources, I thought <the proxmox folks> "still use perl?"
I guess proxmox IS 17 years old...
baq
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.
77pt77
Just look at OpenSSL.
How important it is, how much it's used and the money they get.
markoman
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.
rcxdude
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.
whatevaa
Donations are donations. Can't expect them.
axus
VMware has certainly extracted more dollars from me than ProxMox has.
It's nice when companies contribute fixes and testing up-stream, even when it's not a monetary contribution.
systemswizard
Proxmox had made other donations like they were a platinum sponsor at debconf25 and that’s $20k
0xbadcafebee
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.
slavik81
Proxmox were also a platinum sponsor at DebConf25 last week, which is at least €20K.
MDGeist
Kind of wondered if that was part of the rationale for making it news. Maybe another company will say "that's all!? we can do better" and help out.
exiguus
In many projects you can get Silver Sponsor Status with 10k.
AgentMatrixAI
Been using proxmox for a home lab and I still can't believe how much value they provide for free.
I use it with Cursor and create vm templates and clone them with a proxmox MCP server I've been adding features to and it's been incredibly satisfying to just prompt "create template from vm 552 and clone a full VM with it".
kilroy123
Yes, same here. Big shout-out to https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE as well.
MomsAVoxell
I use it for DevOps at work and it’s just wonderful. The data center features alone are worth the license fees .. but what I like most of all is how easy it makes managing ZFS pools.
pphysch
To be fair, Proxmox is essentially a UX wrapper around QEMU/KVM, which is free software and the true kernel of value. If you are going the MCP route I wonder if a direct QEMU or libvirt MCP server would be much more powerful and precise.
tlamponi
While UI/UX is–as probably everywhere–a huge topic, we actually have spent most engineering power in the whole management stack. And of that managing QEMU/KVM–while surely significant–is by far not the biggest part of our also 100% free and open source code bases. I'd invite you to try our full feature set, from clustering, to SDN to integrated Ceph management, to containers, backups including third party and our own backup server, and many more, all accessible through a REST API with full permission management and modern access control.
And we naturally try to contribute to every project we use however possible, be it in the form of patches, QA, detailed bug reports, ... and especially for QEMU et al. we're pretty content with our impact, at least compared to resources of other companies leveraging it, I think.
If all it'd take is being "just" a simple UI wrapper, it would make lots of things way easier for us :-)
pphysch
> I'd invite you to try our full feature set, from clustering, to SDN to integrated Ceph management, to containers, backups including third party and our own backup server, and many more, all accessible through a REST API with full permission management and modern access control.
This would be appealing in a world where Kubernetes doesn't exist as a mature option.
Don't the vast majority of Proxmox users use it for small VM labs, without all the bells and whistles?
AgentMatrixAI
While you could do that, proxmox offers lot of value with its UI which I need to default to time to time. With just an API key I generate from proxmox I have a wide range of capability that I can hook up an MCP server to.
The funny thing is with Cursor I can just generate a new capability, like the clone and template actions were created after asking Sonnet 4.
SparkyMcUnicorn
Proxmox has a UI and a bunch of APIs so I don't need to rebuild them myself, and maintains everything quite well (all major upgrades I've done have been pretty seamless). Proxmox is definitely an easy path, and you still have root access for drawing outside the lines.
placardloop
This is true for the act of launching VMs, but it’s pretty reductive towards the entire suite of important features that Proxmox provides like clustering, high availability, integration with various storage backends, backups, and more that qemu doesn’t.
0xbadcafebee
I mean, that's actually not being fair... It's like saying Windows is just a UX wrapper around a microkernel. There is quite a bit of functionality provided by that wrapper.
Spivak
Calling Proxmox a wrapper for KVM is hilarious, you're ignoring that Proxmox does all the work to make a functional cluster of VM servers including stuff like shared storage and live migrations and networking. If you only use Proxmox on a single server with local storage then I could see how you would say this but having a fleet of VMs on a cluster of servers where you can take down physical hosts to patch transparently is the "hard problem."
mort96
It's an annoying thing common to a lot of technologists. They (we?) see a product which solves a problem, then imagine some hacky way to set up existing tools to half-way solve a similar problem in an easy but incomplete way, then make fun of the product for existing when the hacky solution exists. The Hacker News comment on Docker's announcement post comes to mind, where a person makes fun of the concept when you could "just" run rsync in a cron job.
_zoltan_
it's not. their SDN built on frr and vxlan is itself a complex piece that has been missing from the free space (integrated as a package).
trallnag
What do you use all these VMs for in your homelab? I've dabbled with Proxmox in the past but settled on plain Ubuntu for my home server that I now treat as a pet managed with Ansible.
SparkyMcUnicorn
Take your pick. Everyone wants different things. This site/repo is pretty great.
zamadatix
For me Proxmox is mainly a means to be able to have more than 1 pet (partially for simplicity's sake of not having to make everything play well together in the same install, partially because I have some things which require Windows and some things which require Ubuntu).
I guess I do also sometimes use it for ephemeral things without having to worry about cleaning up after too. E.g. I can dork around with some project I saw on GitHub for an afternoon then hit "revert to snapshot" without having to worry about what that means for the permanent stuff running at the same time.
npteljes
I personally self-host a bunch of stuff for myself and my household. Nextcloud for my phone, mattermost for in-house communication, private wordpress as a multimedia diary, a bunch of experiments, wekan for organization, network storage, network printer.
I found Turnkey Linux pretty nice. They provide ready to use Linux images for different services. Proxmox integrates with them, so for example to install Nextcloud, all I needed to do is to click around a bunch on the Proxmox interface, and I'm good to go. They have around 80-90 images to choose from.
nickthegreek
immich, n8n, openwebui, metube, hoarder, gethomepage, freshrss, tailscale, reverse proxy, on and on it goes.
trallnag
I do that with containers running on a single-node Kubernetes cluster (k3s). Doing it via the Proxmox UI feels like I'm giving up "control". Maybe that's just because doing it with Kubernetes etc. is closer to how I'd do it at work.
AgentMatrixAI
it gives me a direct bridge from cursor -> VM, for local dev & test out open source projects
I like having a local server I can carry with me and control using just Cursor to manage it.
So basically the freedom that comes with a homelab without using proxmox UI and ssh.
nickdothutton
Most management has no idea of the importance of the open source building blocks that their business rests upon. Similarly they cannot begin to conceive of the benefits of making a donation. Probably the most effective thing you could do is to somehow attempt to copy the "greenwashing" effect of companies being environmentally responsible, and having an environmental section to their annual reports. "The health of the open source ecosystem is essential to sustainable research, development, and operations at ACME Corp. This year we have sponsored the following...for our current and future benefit".
bluGill
I've long tried to figure out how we can donate to projects. If we were to buy/license those tools it would cost thousands of dollars, but I don't know how to get any money for the free tools we use. When I ask half of management doesn't understand the question, and the rest don't know either.
TristanBall
Perhaps look to your marketing folks rather than engineering.
"Purchasing silver sponsership with [org] as a way to grow our brand awareness" is intrinsically understandable to pretty much any businesses manager.
"Giving away money for something we already have", which is what most technical managers will hear regardless of your actual pitch, is completely inexplicable to many.
It does require that sponsership is even possible, and recurring sponsership may be harder than recurring license fees of course, so its not a sure thing, just an option to try.
kblissett
I wish more companies would do this. €10k is a cheap price to pay for some great exposure and goodwill!
uncertainrhymes
Even though Varnish may not be in fashion any more, there were many companies happily using it for free and still demanding security updates.
I like their transparency about who actually supports them, and what the whole community gets for it. I wish other projects would do that, if for no other reason than to make it obvious that FOSS isn't just something that happens.
walterbell
Also sponsorship of community conferences/meetups for OSS software.
lordofgibbons
Are people still using Perl for new software?
I remember at a former company, we had a major migration away from Perl 12 years ago. The Perl code base was considered extremely ancient even back then.
G3rn0ti
I am working for a company maintaining an enterprise grade software system that is primarily driven by Perl 5 and Postgres. It generates about EUR 50 million in revenue every year.
To avoid creating new Perl code from scratch we created a REST API many years ok which new frontends and middlewares use instead of interacting with the core itself. That has been successful to some extent as we can have frontend teams coding in JS/TypeScript without them needing to interact with Perl. But re-writing the API‘s implementation is risky and the company has shied away from that.
Fixing API bugs still require to dive into a Perl system. However, I found it easier turning Python or JS devs into Perl devs than into DB engineers. So, usually, the DB subsystem bears the greater risk and requires more expensive personnel.
6031769
Yes, we mostly use Perl for new software.
If you let your codebase get into an "ancient" state then that's a problem of your own creation rather than that of the language or system in which it is written.
kosolam
I’m very curious to hear your experience building greenfield projects with perl today. And what are the main advantages you feel that you get from it?
6031769
The experience is all good. The toolchain, the speed of both development and execution, the breadth of CPAN and the famous backwards-compatibility all make for a happy development team.
The advantages are the same as they have been for years: cross-platform compatibility, one system to run all aspects of a large project, the flexibility to get the job done in the simplest, most efficient and most maintainable manner.
One caveat: we don't do any MSWin32 development at all. I'm vaguely aware that there are some extra considerations on that O/S but it isn't something which we have to deal with.
doublerabbit
For my company, it's cross-platform and just works. It's file & data capabilities are powerful enough to deal with lots of miniature sized files from the renderer.
Perl just hovers them up and does whatever processing. We did test Python but it just felt clunky in it's habits and felt lacking in terms of performance such as stalling in building a dictionary list of files to work with. Perl may be one of the older languages, but it still holds strong.
If Perl is supported for your $OS your script is guaranteed to execute. Sure, adjustments may have to be made if you're targeting the underside of the rainbow such as Windows but it's trivial for *nix hosts. Migrating from Ubuntu to Debian, BSD? -- 99.9% chance your script will run.
I am bias, in that their isn't anything majority wrong with perl. It was used as the main language back in the 80's for a reason and Perl's ecosystem (cpan) is still pretty comprehensive and still holding weight.
As it's not taught anymore due to newer trends this is causing it's shine to dull and it's overall presence dropping away. I wouldn't disagree that new languages boast optimism in to the future of programming technologies but with perl it has been battle tested and just works.
daneel_w
I maintain and develop the back-end of a telecom services provider. It's almost 100% Perl, and once in a blue moon when we add something entirely new we usually stick with Perl.
autoexec
Perl is still what I reach for when I have a regex heavy task. At my job there's a near 50/50 split between python and perl scripts. I've re-written some of the perl used for general sysadmin tasks in python too, but I haven't seen enough benefit to justify doing more. It works. Plus, in my opinion, perl is more fun to write.
nailer
> Perl is still what I reach for when I have a regex heavy task.
That's the point of PCRE though - you get Perl's excellent regex implementation in more places.
autoexec
It's not usually that there are features I need which python doesn't support, it's just much more cumbersome to use in python compared to perl where it's part of the language and can be used just about anywhere without even adding another import.
forgotmypw17
Yes, it's still well-maintained and highly backwards-compatible, avoiding breaking changes between releases.
walterbell
We need an ROI metric to quantify the backward compatibility and low churn of Perl relative to languages like Python, Ruby, golang.
lordofgibbons
Golang declared a perfect backwards compatibility guarantee way back when version 1 was released. So in this regard, Perl isn't unique.
martinflack
And the last release was three weeks ago! Perl 5.42.0 was released July 3, 2025.
SoftTalker
> avoiding breaking changes
Perl 6?
It was so breaking they don't even call it Perl anymore.
kstrauser
In fairness to Perl, that's a good reason not to consider it a breaking change.
em-bee
perl 6/raku was a redesign. as far as i remember, upgradeability from perl 5 without code changes was never the goal.
SoftTalker
How good are LLMs at writing Perl? I've tried to use Perl a few times, even being pretty conversant with shell scripting, sed, awk, etc. I found Perl to be difficult because it's so full of idioms that you "just have to know" and (to me anyway) TIMDOWTDI actually makes things harder for a new/learning perl developer.
What I want is TITBWTDI (this is the best way to do it).
cestith
Check out Modern Perl. It won’t limit you to one best way for everything. It will give you one best way to do many things, and a smaller set of good ways to do others. https://isbn.nu/9781680500882
Keep in mind though that the current state of Perl includes being in the process of getting a native object model baked into the language core. So that’s still in some flux but it’ll be better than choosing among eight different external object model libraries. It’s also more performant. The docs for that I’m not sure are in a bound paper book anywhere yet, but I’d happily be corrected.
chromatic
I'm not aware of any published books yet, but I'd like to publish a 5th edition of Modern Perl sometime, and it will include the native object model.
johnisgood
Claude seems to fare well. I have used it for a couple of existing and new projects written entirely in Perl. LOC was below 2k per project.
doublerabbit
Not bad. At my last gig we had a modernization project where we were converting Perl to Python and the company invested in their own self-hosted co-pilot. (Bank)
It would hiccup where it would write the existing perl codebase in to a hallucinated python syntax but this was two years ago.
polytely
I've actually started using raku for hobby projects recently (my day job is C#) and it is actually really fun to write.
0xbadcafebee
Python is only 3 years younger than Perl, should we throw Python away? (actually, I'm on board...)
kosolam
Way to go. Proxmox is one of the best open source free software out there for small businesses/lab use cases IMHO
tingletech
If you use Fidelity Charitable giving, the perl foundation is listed under "Yet Another Society"
ei8ths
thanks proxmox!
lynx97
People are going to HATE me for this, but I genuinely think: This feels like beating a dead horse...
I had my Perl phase. I even wrote the first piece of code for my employer in Perl. Well, it was a CGI script, so that was kind of natural back then.
But really, since all the hollow Perl6 stuff I've seen, I've never really read or heard anything about the language in the past, what, 10 to 15 years?
There are tons of languages out there, all with their own merits. But everything beyond Perl5 felt like someone was trying to piggyback on a legacy. If you invent a new language, thats fine, call it foobar and move on. But pretending to be the successor to Perl feels like a marketing stunt by now...
cestith
Perl 5 got a development release within the last week, and the latest production release within the last month or so.
jcynix
No reason to hate you, just because you didn't pay attention ;-)
Maybe take a look at the search results from
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=perl%20conference%202025
and you'll learn that there are ongoing events related to Perl and Raku.
librasteve
not sure I hate you :-)
Raku has perl DNA running through it … both languages were authored by Larry Wall and the Raku (perl6 at the time) design process was to take RFAs from the perl community and to weave them together.
I do wonder why you consider Raku to be hollow? Sure it has suffered from a general collapse of the user base and exodus to eg. Python. This has slowed the pace of development, but the language has been in full release since Oct 2015 and continues to have a very skilled core dev team developing and improving.
There are several pretty unique features in Raku - built in Grammars, full on unicode grapheme support (in regexes), lazy evaluation, hyper operators, and so on that work well together.
Maybe unpopular, true. But hollow?
doublerabbit
In future sight most of modern languages are coming from a C derivative.
Perl isn't possible without C
Python isn't possible without C
Go isn't possible without C
With those languages you can't get any more raw than C.
Unlike a language like Pascal that is still modern today that as is based on ALGOL are forgotten about. Make's me wonder why such older languages were left behind. Just a ramble.
77pt77
Wow!
Less than a month of compensation at FAANG is newsworhty.
neuroelectron
Perl? Wow. I'm a big fan of perl, but I gotta say I thought it was dead. Despite, the dynamic features of the language, I feel like it's much mote secure and mature than other modern convenience languages like JS/TS and Python. It certainly is much faster in general.
petdance
What does "dead" mean?
77pt77
> It certainly is much faster in general.
No. V8 killed that.
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.