The PSF’s mission statement enshrines a commitment to supporting and growing “a diverse and international community of Python programmers,” and the Foundation ultimately decided it wasn’t willing to compromise on that position, even for what would have been a solid financial boost for the organization.
“The PSF is a relatively small organization, operating with an annual budget of around $5 million per year, with a staff of just 14,” Crary added, noting that the $1.5 million would have been the largest grant the Foundation had ever received - but it wasn’t worth it if the conditions were undermining the PSF’s mission.
The PSF board voted unanimously to withdraw its grant application.
It’s astounding that the entire modern world runs on open source maintenance and not a single big corporation bothers to throw more than a pittance at keeping them going. Like, it should be basic ethical governance that if you have a dependency on Python, you should keep the python devs fed.
feed the pythons
That would eat into this quarter’s profits
The Java EE/JakartaEE/whatever the fuck they’re calling it these days (
:frieren-tired:) specifications are governed by a steering committee with reps from various big-name tech vendors (particularly Motorola and IBM/Red Hat) who
on various features being incorporated into the overall stack of frameworks. It’s just funny that they still have this artifact of a bygone era when people (well, companies) actively used JEE, given that it has been cast aside for literally any other Web app development stack in the last decade or so.Nerd shit
For those not in the know, Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE [or JEE]) – in spite of its name – is not an “edition” of the Java language or platform, or even a paid set of extensions or anything like that. It’s a set of standards and specifications for various backing services that, together, make up a full-stack Web development platform with Java as the underlying language and runtime system. (They recently renamed it to JakartaEE for some reason or another; probably Oracle fuckery, or an attempt to distance the project from Oracle fuckery.)
To give an example of WTF I mean by “standards and specifications” versus anything that comprises an actual platform, I think a pretty good one is Java Persistence API (or JPA). JPA provides a standard interface for “decorating” your code with annotations that link fields in a data class back to a physical database table and its columns, and then provides a boilerplate code generation interface for interacting with those data classes and their associated database tables. JPA on its own doesn’t do anything but define the annotations and an interface or three; there are multiple libraries that provide the actual implementation of the interface’s functionality. For example, Hibernate is an old-school Java persistence library that was updated to conform to the JPA specification. There’s also EclipseLink, which sometimes actually works when you want it to.
For a server package to be Java EE-compliant, it has to include an implementation of JPA (along with every other similar specification or “standard” service). There are paid distributions, like IBM WebSphere and Oracle WebLogic, and free/open source ones, like Wildfly, GlassFish, and TomEE (Java EE libraries added on top of Apache Tomcat). So you get a Java-based container platform with a fuckload of standard libraries baked into it. It’s kind of sad that it took until the 2010s for them to really get their shit together and make something halfway usable, only for it to be immediately eclipsed by literally anything that wasn’t JEE.
My decision to use Python for everything remains valid
Still insane that open source orgs that maintain critical supply chain infrastructure operate on such tight budgets…
It’s inevitable that open source organizations suffer under this kind of pressure because open source itself is a capitalist term.
Open Source has successfully depoliticized the previous free software movement and has co-opted it for the benefit of large finance capital interests who are now able to take advantage of public infrastructure at zero cost or massively reduced cost.
Open source has become a way for tech workers to build out their resumes and make themselves appear more appealing to large corporations who are inevitably the only source of capital funds. This creates a system of patronage which in turn affects which software gets developed and created versus other kinds of software. It is to say which software produces the most profit and expense cutting versus which software would actually liberate people.
By rejecting the collective ownership of copy left, tech no proletariat have relinquished their rights in order to appease capitalists who, in the very end as we see, will always be the exploiter and robber of the labor power of millions.
When the vast majority of this “open source software” is developed on a proprietary Microsoft-owned platform that advertises proprietary products, you know that the movement has been co-opted.
The only way forward is to insist that all software must be collectively owned by the workers and by society as a whole rather than hoarded and sold by capitalists.
GPLv3 only for my code. MIT and Apache AR for chumps.
wait… only 14 people maintain the code that everything runs on?
a small number of really smart people is better for systems programming and similar things like interpreters/compilers. also i think that number doesn’t include open source contributors, of which there are likely many more
Yeah, the employees are the ones setting goals and steering the project while a large amount of the development work is done by outside contributors. This grant would basically just get them the funding to properly organize a push.
I recently tried to explain the code I was building “you know what an adverb does for a sentence? this module basically works like that.” and they were all “I don’t know what an adverb is.”
I imagine having 13 other people would be kind of like having to explain an adverb 13 times and everybody getting an 85% understanding of what’s going on. If it’s like that and they are eating good then those 14 are tight like the Straw Hat Pirates are tight.
Source: came to me in a dream
I know the exact feeling. I’m a solo dev at my company and frequently feel like I’m the only one who knows what’s going on since everyone else just uses my code.
I’ve had other devs pop in and out over the years and it’s always a nightmare staying organized when they get pressure from management to do something and end up breaking a whole subsystem just to hit a deadline (not their fault).
That being said, I’ve seen how PSF handles appointments of core devs and it’s really hard to get in. You have to do years of work with the team before you’re even considered and probably maintain a large PyPi package or help maintain one of the standard library packages. The discourse is full of people who have super detailed knowledge of very specific parts of the Python language.
and they were all “I don’t know what an adverb is.”
Should have hit em with the Lollys
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
python rocks. Glad to see they don’t fuck with Trump.
