@hynek @coderanger you are conflating two things here. We've been begging corporations to *give* money to the community, to invest in infrastructure. Which, to their credit, they have! The developer in residence, the PyPI team, Fastly's CDN stuff. Nobody's handwringing that Fastly is going to turn off their service, even though that *is* risk, because there's no alternative. But this is a VC investment. Which *could* be great, if we knew what Astral's revenue model was
@glyph @hynek @coderanger We've been asking corporations to donate money, and they're... you know... not keen on giving away money like that.
We've gotten increased funding around this stuff because the PSF/Python Core Devs/PyPI/pick-the-group have shown that it's not the same as throwing money into a fire pit (and someone within the political structure of those corporations successfully advocated for throwing money anyway as a bit of a gamble, at the start).
Edited 76d ago
@pradyunsg @glyph @coderanger I think this is one of the most under appreciated lessons lately: corporations are much more likely to throw significant money if they know what they get. Sure, the PSF supporting conferences around the globe are good for them too long-term, but it’s too abstract for a balance sheet. But saying you pay X for Y and they want Y, works.
@hynek @glyph @coderanger Yea, this has been a good lesson to learn.
It's also why I'm not particularly concerned about a corporate takeover of Core Python today -- the in-group is aware of the risks and the funded pieces are targetted in specific ways to avoid overreach via those roles.
I think it helps that almost everyone involved is also at-least-mildly skeptical that corporations will do the right thing, when given the choice between that and more control. :)