PerlMonks used to be owned by The Everything Development Company and was one of the showcases for their web-site-development tools. TEDC paid vroom to create and maintain the site.

Not too long ago, TEDC gave up trying to make a profit and so vroom is no longer paid to maintain the site. TEDC has another site that gets more traffic than PerlMonks and so the meager revenues from things like ads and merchandise sales are used to keep that site running and PerlMonks tags along for the ride.

TEDC is mostly defunct as a company as they couldn't make a profit. I seriously doubt they have done the work to be declared a "non-profit organization" as far as tax purposes go but they are a non-profit organization in the normal English sense of those words. (:

So donations go to just keep things running. If some of the donations go to help compensate vroom for the time for which he is no longer officially paid, then that is great in my mind (and is quite normal for even "officially non-profit" organizations).

You should probably consider the above as gossip as I have no official involvement with TEDC and have just picked this up over the months. But I thought it might be easier for vroom or nate to correct a few mistakements than write down the whole story.

By the way, what the donations will be used for is already documented at Offering Plate.