Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Anthropic invests $1.5M in the Python Software Foundation

discuss.python.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 192 posts

Re: Anthropic invests $1.5M in the Python Software Foundation

#61

Post by Foxboron »

ajross wrote: post #53
godzillabrennus wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big Tech should really be footing the bill here as well as large established VC firms.

To a large extent they do and always have. It's not as broad or fair as it should be[1], but for almost any economically important project all the major contributors and maintainers are on the payroll of one of the big tech interests or a foundation funded by them. The hippies writing that software may not be compensated at the level you'd expect given the value they provide, but they'll never go hungry. [1] LLVM and…

> but for almost any economically important project all the major contributors and maintainers are on the payroll of one of the big tech interests or a foundation funded by them.

"almost" is the load bearing word here, and/or a weasel word. Define what an "economically important project" is.

> Also just to be clear: node is filled with povertyware and you should be extremely careful what you grab from npm.

Is "povertyware" what we call software written by people and released for free now?

Re: Anthropic invests $1.5M in the Python Software Foundation

#63

Post by mixmastamyk »

qaq wrote: post #47

Still crazy how little investment goes to Python given how critical it is to the ecosystem.

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.

Re: Anthropic invests $1.5M in the Python Software Foundation

#67

Post by larkost »

zoobab wrote: post #12

I did not know you could make donations with a string attached ("improve security")...

My wife's previous job was as an accountant with the endowment foundation at a mid-sized public university (San Jose State University). A lot of her time was spent making sure that the spending from the endowments many different funds corresponded to the rules that the donors had given when donating that money. Much of that was working with groups to shift spending around between accounts when they invariably made "mistakes".

One of her biggest projects was shepherding a large group of very old donations through a legal process to remove provisions in the donation agreements that were now illegal. In these cases the donors were long deceased, and the most common rule that needed to be changed was targeting race or ethnicity (e.g.: funds setup to help black people, or Irish, etc...).

The sheer number of different variations on "donor intent", or even just the wording on that legal document was astounding. There was always a tension between my wife's group and the group that was bringing in the money ("stewardship"), her group wanted things to be simpler and the "stewarding" group wanted nothing to get in the way of donations. It was remarkably similar to the tensions between sales and engineering in many software firms.

Re: Anthropic invests $1.5M in the Python Software Foundation

#69

Post by whilenot-dev »

neom wrote: post #31

Seems like a good time to throw out a reminder regarding "Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure" by Nadia Asparouhova. While she may have published it in 2016, it's still relevant today and speaks to the need for the private sector generally (looking at you VC firms) to support and understand the open source work, hours of unfunded labor, powering our societies. https://www.fordfoundat…

*by Nadia Eghbal

EDIT: or are you rather thinking about the book Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software?

Re: Anthropic invests $1.5M in the Python Software Foundation

#70

Post by nedbat »

guywithahat wrote: post #54

[flagged]

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.
Post reply on HN