This Week in Perl Fundraising

This has been a really good week for Perl fundraising. DuckDuckGo donated $25,000 for the third year running. That’s $75,000 in total, which is significant for The Perl and Raku Foundation (TPRF). The foundation has very little in the way of administrative overhead, so the vast majority of funding can go straight to the places where it matters. This year we have also had at least three new donors:

The Alpha-Omega donation deserves its own blog post, but adjusted for inflation it’s the second largest payment ever made to TPRF. So it’s a pretty big deal. The largest would have been the Hague grant which was $200,000 in 2008 from Mr Ian Hague (over $300,000 in 2026 dollars). Boring anecdote: I was working for Richard Dice (he was my manager) back when he was President of TPF and I remember him flying to New York to close that deal. You can imagine he was pretty chuffed to have gotten that done.

Fun fact: the Alpha-Omega gift is actually directed at the CPAN Security Group, with TPRF acting as a fiscal host. So TPRF is a pass-through for most of the funds, but the money is ending up in the Perl communities anyway.

"Denarius featuring emperor Marcus Aurelius" by Rasiel Suarez (Tantalus Coins) is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .

A few days ago I wrote about the public IRS filings of TPRF. You can see from that post that the total revenue of TPRF for 2025 was just under $216,000. We have now exceeded last year’s total and are on an upward funding trajectory for the third year in a row.

The Alpha-Omega grant is coming to a close. There will be a report to wrap up that 6-month effort, and the numbers are impressive. This is all great, but the work is far from done. We have another Perl Toolchain Summit on the schedule for 2027. There will be another Perl and Raku Conference as well.

One thing I’m enjoying about this process is trying to solve the puzzle of each new organization.

Do they use Perl, or do they support open source in general?
Do we have a contact person on the inside?
Is that person our champion, or do we need to find one?
Who makes the funding decisions?
What might they need from us?

There’s not really a one-size-fits-all solution here. Sometimes it takes a month or two and sometimes it takes years. I have been part of one sponsorship that was years in the making. What it needed was someone to be relentless in following up, setting up meetings and checking on the status of things.

Conversely, I jumped through some hoops to find a billionaire to pitch to. It was exciting to be able to reach them by e-mail. They were also lightning fast to give my pitch a hard pass, but I really appreciated the swiftness of the decision. This person can make decisions all day, I thought to myself.

Given that in this job you’re going to lose a lot more than you win, solving the puzzle can be very rewarding. It also helps if hearing “no” or getting ghosted all over the place is not going to keep you up at night.

What’s the point of all of this meandering? I’m always looking for new contacts, new introductions and new opportunities. If you know of someone on the inside, especially at large telcos and/or financial institutions, please reach out to me. Why these institutions? Well, we know they use Perl internally in many cases, but they are also not inclined to advertise what’s in their stack, presumably out of some security by obscurity posture. We are, however, well placed to accept anonymous donations or work within all sorts of parameters. I just need someone with whom I can start the conversation. We are playing the long game here.

I’m also very interested in speaking with small and medium-sized businesses. The beauty of a small shop is that they can often get to a decision much faster than a large one can. While the large donations are important, having a wider pool of smaller donations in any given year helps us avoid becoming reliant on one or a few large donors. Ever look at your stack and find a single point of failure? Yeah, it’s a bit like that.

For today, I’d just like to thank DuckDuckGo, NVIDIA, HeroDevs and Alpha-Omega for helping us to improve our part of the open source world.