CPAN Testers

CPAN Testers has now been running for nearly 13 years. In that time we have been supported mostly by the community and some very thoughtful individuals, to whom we owe a massive thank you. Ten years ago we were submitting less than 1,000 reports (March 2002) each month, 5 years ago we reached a new high with just under 25,000 reports (March 2007) submitted. In the last year it is no longer unusual to see 1 million reports (August 2011) submissions in a single month. Regular readers of this blog will be well aware of how successful CPAN Testers has become, and how much data we store, as we sped past 20 million reports in February 2012.

This awesome success is now reaching the limits of community generosity. As we are capturing ever larger amounts of data and providing increasing amounts of report analysis, we are starting to look further afield for the help and support we would like. The increasing volume of report data, and the more sites we deploy, means we need to look at more powerful servers, more disk spaces as well as several other things (such as SSL certificates). As a consequence our costs for maintaining the CPAN Testers project have also been increasing.

Although we can sustain this growth in the short term, we really need to look towards more corporate involvement to ensure we have a long term future.

For the past 4 years most financial contributions have either been from the admins themselves, or via Birmingham Perl Mongers (being a registered non-profit company), but we wanted a more formal sponsorship and donation programme. We needed a way to encourage donations via a public Perl entity, that businesses could recognise and acknowledge as a legitimate representative of the Perl community.

Following several long private discussions between Mark Keating, David Golden and myself during 2011, Mark put forward the proposal to the Enlightened Perl Organisation to manage a fund on our behalf. Very kindly the members agreed, and we now have a CPAN Testers Fund you can donate to. But this is just a first step. Having the fund in place now means that not only do we need to promote it, we also have to actively promote the sponsors who have helped CPAN Testers get to where they are now, to encourage further sponsorship. And so....

Please welcome The CPAN Testers Sponsors site.

This site will contain all those sponsors who we would like to thank, including individuals, and provides further information about how and what to sponsor. If you have any questions regarding sponsorship, please free to contact us and discuss what we can do to help make sponsorship from your company as easy as possible.

In addition the site provides a feed that allows the corporate sponsors to be promoted across the CPAN Testers family of sites. The feed hasn't been activated just yet, but I hope to implement this across most of the sites during the coming weeks.

If your company has a sponsorship programme, or you think there will be a benefit to them sponsoring the CPAN Testers project, please point them at this new site and ask them to get in touch with us.

But that isn't all. There are many individuals within the Perl community who would like to donate to help CPAN Testers cover their overall costs. This new CPAN Testers Fund will now make this possible. While we would welcome large donations from the business community, we are also just as pleased to have members of the Perl community continuing to support us. As such, the new site aims to make a point of thanking those individual sponsors too. No matter how big or small the donation, it all counts.

CPAN Testers has provided a lasting and valuable service to the Perl community, even if indirectly for some. We have helped to make the CPAN repository one of the most respected and revered amongst the OpenSource community. The new fund and site will help us keep that reputation for many years to come.

Cross-posted from the CPAN Testers Blog