151–160 of 192 posts
They are probably trying to build influence. Why is a startup that is burning cash donating money?
They are probably trying to build influence. Why is a startup that is burning cash donating money?
They are heavily focused on code. Claude Code likely generates 100 of millions lines of Python a day, make the language a little bit better with $1.5M is extremely high leverage.
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> (Also makes me wonder if they still have a Microsoft employee running the PSF… always thought that was odd.) You might be confusing the Python Steering Council - responsible for leadership of Python language development - with the PSF non-profit there. The PSF is lead by a full-time executive director who has no other affiliation, plus an elected board of unpaid volunteer directors (I'm one of them). Microsoft empl…
Wow, I didn't know you got a spot on the board, that's a great choice on their part! Thanks for giving your time. Yes, I was talking about Wages -- the day-to-day is surely complex, but I'm sure you'd agree that the president of the board is ultimately "above" the chief executive if push ever came to shove, at least on paper. I will grant that I used "running", which is quite unclear in hindsight! "Responsible for" o…
That is not true of the PSF, nor of many (most?) other US nonprofits. Not on paper, and not practically speaking. The director reports to the board, but officers have little to no unitary power. You can go read the PSF’s bylaws if you like, and if you do you’ll see that officers, including the president, can do very little without a board vote. And because of aforementioned policy, that’s a max of two votes from people employed by a single company.
Also, like, do you know anything about Dawn? She’s been serving the Python community waaaay longer than she’s worked for Microsoft. Questioning her ethics based on absolutely nothing is unfounded and, honestly, pretty fucked up.
There’s this pernicious lie that Microsoft is somehow controlling the PSF. It’s based on about as much evidence as there is for Flat Earth, yet here it is again. At best, repeating this lie reflects profound ignorance about how the PSF actually functions; at worst it seems like some kind of weird disinfo campaign against one of the most important nonprofits in open source.
"Over two years". Does that mean the foundation has to do what they want it to do or else the tap stops?
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Just to clarify: the NSF grant was refused because it required the PSF to abandon all DEI efforts, not just that the grant itself couldn't be used for DEI. Accepting the NSF grant would have required the PSF to forgo one of its core principles. It was the right decision, not bad management.
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Poor management has played a role. They refused to invest in packaging to the extent that a separate company (astral) had to do it for them. Bugs closed for years with the excuse “we’re only volunteers.” Meanwhile, “outreach” was funded for several million a year. Not confidence inspiring. Maybe would have improved if the funds had been spent more appropriately. Similar story with Mozilla.
> They refused to invest in packaging to the extent that a separate company (astral) had to do it for them uv didn't just happen in a vacuum, there has been lots of investment in the Python packaging ecosystem that has enabled it (and other tools) to try and improve the shortcomings of Python and packaging. There's PEP 518 [1] for build requirements, PEP 600 [2] for manylinux wheels, PEP 621 [3] for pyproject.toml, P…
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All people do here is complain.
We can both applaud the effort and indicate it’s not enough. Two things can be true simultaneously.
Still crazy how little investment goes to Python given how critical it is to the ecosystem.
As far as I'm aware, Python was only recently (2020s) taught in most schools, so that's the reason it wasn't and isn't well funded. Schools will stick with legacy languages far beyond their market lifetimes, as that is what the instructors know best. So it's not that it isn't well funded, it's that it's still early in terms of global popularity. As we just witnessed, the funding is just now coming in big drops.
(By most metrics, Python became "big" in the mid-late 2000s, which is why the Python 3 transition was so painful.)
[1]: https://www.wisdomandwonder.com/link/2110/why-mit-switched-f...
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Right? "I find these matters are often more complex than I can understand from a headline but this feels like..." Drive-by insinuation rather than argumentation.
I mean there were conversations in closed rooms nobody outside of the room knows about. What we know publicly is they refused the funding because it required them to drop DEI activities, which not only would have solved their funding issues but was the morally correct thing to do. The PSF should be focused on improving Python, it shouldn't be a political organization.