HeroDevs Donates $10,000 to The Perl and Raku Foundation

Sep 11, 2026 by Olaf Alders

The Perl and Raku Foundation is delighted to announce that HeroDevs has donated $10,000 to support our work. We’re grateful for their generosity — gifts like this go directly toward the people and infrastructure that keep Perl and CPAN healthy.

HeroDevs provides long-term security and support for open source software that has reached its end of life.

As we continue to see support from community members and corporate sponsors, 2026 has been shaping up to be a genuinely good year for Perl and CPAN.

The CPAN Security Group has been very busy with security research, publishing CVEs and patching some of the exploits which they have found. Alpha-Omega funded that work, which was a solid vote of confidence in the ecosystem. The CPAN Security Group is also working with other packaging ecosystems to learn from their experiences fighting the same battles. This is the kind of work that cannot be done solely by volunteers. We would like to see it funded on an ongoing basis.

Meanwhile, the ecosystem itself is growing. Comparing January to August 2026 against the same period in 2025, we can see significant growth in CPAN across multiple metrics. The first-time releaser number is particularly encouraging. It’s great to see people deciding to publish on CPAN for the first time.

• First-time releasers: 31 to 54, up 74%
• New distributions: 464 to 1,007, more than double
• Uploads: 6,276 to 9,430, up 50% — already past last year’s full-year total with four months to go
• Distinct authors releasing: 489 to 546, up 12%

The in-person side has been busy as well. The Perl Toolchain Summit met in beautiful Vienna, Austria in April to work on the infrastructure everyone depends on and nobody sees. The Perl and Raku Conference ran in Greenville, South Carolina in June, and the London Perl Workshop is coming up in the UK at the end of November. Perl 5.44 also shipped in July — the annual stable release, succeeding 5.42 (odd versions like 5.41 and 5.43 being development-only).

It has been a good year, but there’s plenty still to do and we need your help to do it.

If your organization is interested in becoming a TPRF donor, please reach out to me. I’d be more than happy to set up a call so that we can discuss how a donor relationship with TPRF can benefit your organization.