The Perl Foundation has a goal to get more smaller donations, rather than a few large ones and it seems like they've been doing okay lately.

You're probably correct that this could better be summed up later in the year as one single news item. In terms of getting publicity and attracting more donation, announcing and discussing each "small" donation might be better.

I was impressed to see at the new keynote that Blender is successfully shifting its revenue growth to small donations. So it can be done.

This is also true for KDE e.V., where we've evolved from a roughly 50:50 split between corporate and individual donations to now about 75% of the donations (which have overall increased multi-fold) coming from individuals, many of whom are on recurring plans.

99% of companies don’t donate anything, lets not criticize the few that do.

I only knew of one company with some kind of techie fandom primarily using Perl before reading this (Fastmail out of Melbourne, Australia). Now I know of two.

Still, two is a small number. And we're probably talking about like 20 Perl developers in total across these two companies (just having looked at their total employee counts).

iirc, large parts of Proxmox VE is still also written in Perl

This is better than nothing at all?

I've seen many promising and still in use open source languages and projects that barely even get $500 a month in contributions.

Yet these projects have added value in the millions to startups that never give back to these projects because $500-$1000 a month is 'too expensive' for them.

You might call that on brand given their name.

It's the German word for "scrooge", for those wondering.

I don't think that will even qualify as a tax deduction in the US for most engineers with 2026 rules. (this is not tax advice)

Relying on large donation sponsors make the situation unstable when loosing only one sponsor?