This happens every time. Company does good thing. “But, why didn’t they do 2X good thing?!”

Working for a F500 company, I have tried to use budget surplus to reward open source projects we use. Management looked at me like I had grown an additional head.

> Management looked at me like I had grown an additional head.

this is my experience, too. they'll gladly take, take, take, take, take, and take some more, but when it comes time to give just a little bit, they balk.

Same for normal people, for example with any paid internet service. They watch 2 hours of youtube every day, but to pay a pittance for YouTube Premium? Unimaginable, how dare they ask for anything for the service. In every thread where it comes up, people act like it's pulling teeth. And also, microtransactions work because of the same reason. People's relationship with paying for things is complicated.

> I have tried to use budget surplus to reward open source projects we use.

"We've never heard of that happening, so no."

I don't think Proxmox is a huge company making lots of money though either... I've used it for free for years. I imagine most people use it for free. I'm sure there are companies paying for it, but I don't think it's some monster money maker?

I bet that they grew a lot with VMWare/Broadcom changes, even the somewhat paid subscriptions. But they are not yet one of the (commercial/enterprise) big names. I suppose that this donation is part of their "now that I have a positive budget, what I do with it?" plan, and finance growing up both as company/support as in adding features.

They are based in Austria, my assumption has been that most of their business/enterprise customers are in the EU.

Resellers exists in most parts of the world.

Maybe, but it’s also 100% higher than what 99% of companies built on open source software give back.

I was thinking about matching it since I'm retired and my early and mid career was built on perl but I also feel a bit unqualified as I'm not really a great programmer or really understand deep problems like language design and compilers/interpreters.

The problem with this world is that 80% of people think they are above average and from the remaining 20% most are above average and thinking they are below average (~bastardized quote from some famous guy)

I'm almost willing to bet that you did more than good enough work and if you still want to become a (n even) great(er) programmer I'm sure there's quite a few OSS projects you could contribute to as well if you wanted to :))

Re:matching it you could also spread it amongst a couple of projects.

Anyway have a great day

Proxmox is based on perl? Can you expand on that? Web front end, vm automation…?

Proxmox is written in perl, among other things like HTML and JS, on top of the other free software that they are using like QEMU. They also use Rust at places.

This is their repo: https://git.proxmox.com/?p=pve-manager.git;a=tree

But they also publish their work for free!