This is great to hear. Perl has been really hurting because none of the important people are employed by big companies with lots of money to spend, and none of the big Perl users really donate much money. That means Perl6 has been strictly volunteer-only up until now. (There has been a bit of money, but most people can't just take a month off from work and live on a grant.)
It has felt kind of like the corporate support has waned a bit in recent years...and some of it (like scientific computing, which was momentarily a bright spot for commercial Perl) has gone elsewhere, like Python. I worked on SciPy and for its corporate sponsors at Enthought for a couple of years, and it was very interesting to note the difference between the two cultures and where development was/is coming from. A very large percentage of Python development, including development of the language itself, is happening within the corporate world, while Perl is almost entirely volunteer driven.
I'm not sure the volunteer nature is entirely positive. Ruby, with the advent of the extremely commercially oriented Ruby on Rails, saw tremendous growth in a very short time. It takes a combination of forces to build products that are beautiful inside and out, and even the best Perl projects only ever really get the inner beauty going on. We've got more/better libraries than any other language, and yet, folks think coding in PHP is easier. It's a strange phenomenon.
I think what I'm trying to say is: The Perl community needs more great web designers. Oh, wait...We're talking about money and Perl 6. Right. So, having real money to get Perl 6 out the door faster is the definition of awesome.
Anyway, we're doing our part: We're sponsors of the upcoming YAPC, and plan to crank up our involvement (both monetarily and codewise) in the community by an order of magnitude over the next year.
