Fastmail's $10,000 Donation Keeps Perl 5 Core Development Alive

Fastmail has donated USD 10,000 to The Perl and Raku Foundation (TPRF), providing crucial support that will keep Perl 5 core maintenance on track and allow the foundation to reopen its community grants program for 2026.

2025 was a challenging year for TPRF, with budget constraints forcing the foundation to pause its community grants program and putting Perl 5 core maintenance grants at risk. The donation from Fastmail arrives at a critical moment, ensuring that the work of maintaining and improving Perl 5 can continue without interruption.

Ricardo Signes, Fastmail's Director & Chief Developer Experience Officer, explained the company's motivation for supporting Perl development: "Perl has served us quite well since Fastmail's inception. We've built up a large code base that has continued to work, grow, and improve over twenty years. We've stuck with Perl because Perl stuck with us: it kept working and growing and improving, and very rarely did those improvements require us to stop the world and adapt to onerous changes."

Signes emphasized that this stability is no accident, but the result of dedicated developers who focus on making Perl better without making it worse. "The money we give toward those efforts is well-spent, because it keeps the improvements coming and the language reliable," he added.

The donation highlights an important aspect of Perl's success: its reliability. As Signes noted, upgrading Perl versions is often a "very boring deployment" - your code works before, and it continues to "just work" after the upgrade. This stability is the result of careful attention from Perl 5 core maintainers who prioritize backwards compatibility and ensure that upgrades don't require developers to constantly adapt to breaking changes.

Fastmail's support extends beyond this monetary donation. The company has been providing free, rock-solid email hosting to the foundation for many years, demonstrating a long-term commitment to the Perl ecosystem.

The impact of this donation will be felt across the Perl community. While the funds are specifically allocated to Perl 5 core maintenance, TPRF is now positioned to reopen its community grants program with USD 10,000 funding for 2026. The foundation sees potential to increase this funding further if sponsor participation grows.

As TPRF begins its 2026 fundraising efforts, the foundation is looking to expand its base of supporting organizations. "Maybe your organization will be the one to help us double our community grants budget in 2026," said Olaf Alders, who can be contacted at [email protected] for sponsorship opportunities.

The donation underscores the symbiotic relationship between companies that rely on Perl and the open-source community that maintains it. For organizations like Fastmail that have built their infrastructure on Perl over decades, supporting core development isn't just charity - it's an investment in the stability and reliability of their own technology stack.

This support comes at a crucial time when many open-source projects struggle with funding and sustainability. Fastmail's contribution demonstrates how established companies can play a vital role in ensuring the continued health of the technologies they depend on, creating a virtuous cycle where reliable open-source tools enable business success, which in turn funds further development.