0:00 Gabor: Hi, this is Gabor Szabo in the first episode of the Perl Maven show, or television, with me is Jeffrey Thalhammer. I am really happy that he volunteered to be the first guinea pig, in the first interview. He is the author of the Perl::Critic and more recently the Pinto application, module and I'd like him to... hi Jeffrey.. now maybe I'll talk to him so hi

Jeffrey: Hi Gabor, how are you doing today?

Gabor: I am a bit nervous, but I'll get over it, I think.

Jeffrey: I think you are doing a fine job. Thanks for having me on the show.

Gabor: OK, It's a pleasure to have you. So tell me a little bit about Pinto. This is your recent project

Jeffrey: So Pinto has been my baby for the last year almost 2 years It started out as a project for a client actually. Genentech has hired me to build them a custom CPAN repository. This is something I have done at 3-4 other companies. Basically any shop that uses Perl modules wrestles with the problem of churn in the public CPAN. There is always new modules coming and going and if you build up your application by installing modules from the public CPAN you never know what are you going to get from one day to the next. So one workaround to that problem is to have a local private CPAN that has exactly the modules you want in the specific versions you want. And there are existing tools for this. This is not a new idea, or anything. But I didn't really like any of them. They were all kind of hard to work with. Each one of these CPAN that I have built seemed to be very customized and not very general purpose. So Genentech hired me and they gave me the opportunity to start from scratch. So Pinto is the result of that work.

2.08 Gabor: That is awesome , both that there is that module or application and that there is a company that was OK with having this thing going out to open source and to implement something.

Jeffrey: The staff there is very progressive so the terms of the deal with them explicitly were that, anything that I did had to be released to CPAN and that is how they received their deliverable from me. Which is unusually I'd be happy if it happen more often.

2.50 Gabor: I saw recently that you had this fund-raising that brian d foy started or he's doing for you. Can you tell me about that a little bit? I mean I saw that you're trying to raise 4,000 dollars and 3 quarters of them is already there?

3.10 Jeffrey: Yes, yes

Gabor: Why do you do with all this money?

Jeffrey: Well I'll tell you the back story first. so brian d foy has been experimenting with using crowd-funding platforms to fund open source projects. So he was looking for candidate projects, things that he could run a campaign for and we could use the data or he could use the data to study where the interest is, where the community is and just generally to prove whether or not crowd funding was a viable way to finance this kind of projects. So he sort of put out a call for suggestions for campaigns or for projects to run campaigns for it and I stepped out a said hey how about Pinto, there were some key features that I thought we could do. It has been my primary work for the last couple of month I haven't been doing anything consulting, working full time on Pinto.

4.20 Gabor: So you say that you don't actually have any income right now? So basically that would be the income? Right, OK.

Jeffrey: so this crowd funding project campaign is my income for this month anyway. It's not so much that I need the money, I'm not living on a crust of bread, at least not yet, but I think that the campaign is more about demonstrating whether or not you can fund open source development through crowd funding, whether you can bring together the open source community around these projects and particularly around Perl. It's kind of difficult to make money in the Perl community, it's sort of non-capitalist.

Gabor: Idealist, people are very idealist, I think.

5.29 Jeffrey: That is a good way to say it, we are very idealist and the notion of directly financing these kinds of projects it's a little bit foreign to some of us. We wanted to see if this project could change that.

5.48 Gabor: So are you satisfied so far? I mean it looks OK but I'm not sure what was your expectation really.

Jeffrey: I didn't know what to expect really, part of me thought that like if there was like maybe 6 people in the world who knew me personally, who would be willing to pitch into this, but there was also a part of me that thought well the world is a very big place and Perl is everywhere and I think the perl community wants to win, wants to succeed, it wants to see this campaign succeed. So I have been totally blown away by the results so far. Everyone has done a really good job of spreading the word through Twitter and social media and like you said the contributions were up to about 3200 or so, so we have about another 8 or 900 dollars to get to our goal and we have 2 weeks to get there, but I'm pretty sure that we will. I really have to thank everyone who made a contributions we have some large some small from all sorts of people, many of whom I have never met before, many of whom are probably not even Pinto users, but like I said they like would to see perl win and I hope that this is just the start of a trend in perl and in open source in general, where we see a lot more of thees crowd funding campaigns come out.

7.35 Gabor: OK, so I saw that there are like a 90 people and you don't know them but do you know what kind of people or did you talk to them or can you say who do you expect, what kind of background of these people would you expect more likely to give you some money for this?

7.56 Jeffrey: Some of them are Pinto users, some of them are probably Perl::Critic users and they are maybe using this as a way to say thank you for that, which I'm very grateful for.

Gabor: I'm in that camp actually.