The craigslist Charitable Fund has donated $100,000 to the Perl community for Perl5 maintenance and general use.
The Perl Community is obviously delighted:
In expressing his gratitude to craiglist, Karen Pauley, Perl Foundation President stated:
"This generous donation will allow us to further improve the Perl 5 Core and the work done with the Core Maintenance Fund, as well as sponsor a range of Perl 5 related activities through grants and initiatives already in existence and in the community."
craigslist, the network of community moderated and largely free local classifieds and forums sites now available in 70 countries, and 10 languages, began in 1995 as an email list of San Francisco events run by Craig Newmark. craigslist now gets more than 30 billion views per month and it is mostly written in Perl. The entire architecture of the system is open source - a proxy array based on Perl and memcache and a backend provided by Apache, memcache, MySQL and, of course Perl.
So you could see this as a successful enterprise giving something back to open source - which is how it should be.
According to craigslist CEO and former Perl Hacker Jim Buckmaster:
"craigslist has gloried in and relied upon Perl for most of its software development for more than a decade.
craigslist Charitable Fund is honored to recognize the wizardry and generosity of the Perl community and help ensure the ongoing maintenance of Perl5, and contribute to the future evolution of Perl."
A useful proficiency matrix has been produced that could be used to track your own progress when learning to program or to advertise your skillset to prospective employers.
The light field approach to computational photography has more uses than capturing 2.5D images - it can create a display that you can view clearly without your glasses.
