@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
@glyph @hynek @coderanger I do 100% share the hesitance around the VC funded corporation. We have had multiple examples of how this plays out in the PyData ecosystem (and the wider industry) with VC-backed companies changing terms/licenses/enforcement.
Even if the underlying codebase is MIT/Apache, it's not a clear fork situation because of a slow rot/increasing papercuts. Usually, founders (and, sometimes hired C-suite) are smart enough to not trigger full migrations off their thing.
@pradyunsg @glyph @hynek @coderanger As someone very close to both ecosystems, I can’t stress enough how important it is to not only get funding but to build lasting governance structures that can handle other stakeholders wanting to participate. Python did that well IMO with the PSF, the packaging ecosystem around it… not so much. There is still time though!
@jezdez @pradyunsg @glyph @coderanger Having suffered through the packaging open space at PyCon US 2023 I have exactly 0 hope that will happen. The best we can hope for is the PSF taking over.
@hynek @pradyunsg @glyph @coderanger I’m not sure what you mean, do you mean the summit? I don’t recall an open space last year TBH.
@jezdez @pradyunsg @glyph @coderanger Yes, summit, sorry.
@hynek @pradyunsg @glyph @coderanger Shrug, I felt this year was more effective, and led to some good conversations that acknowledged the difficulties of coordinating, had many new faces and also had Astral folks join, among other corpo stakeholders. The User Success WG idea was born which has now been established: https://github.com/psf/user-success-wg