Google is now a Visionary Sponsor of the Python Software Foundation
pyfound.blogspot.com
pyfound.blogspot.com
Disclosure: I'm the Googler that got this funded. The process was roughly:
- We have some extra budget at the end of the year! What are some ways we can spend this to get results while giving back to OSS?
- Hey PSF, do you have any ideas for what you could do with some funding?
- Looks good to me!
We're just getting started, but we're working on ways to make this all more sustainable, scalable, and less ad-hoc.
If you have ideas here, please reach out! I'm dlorenc at google dot com, or join in the OpenSSF (openssf.org)! We discuss these topics and more in the Securing Critical Projects WG, info here: https://github.com/ossf/wg-securing-critical-projects/
The proper way is to hire devs with proven track record and let them work 100% on the project.
To be clear, I'm not another guy with no interest in Python just seizing the opportunity to complain. I care about Python deeply and have quite a few patches in core over the years.
Edit: I probably got the sponsorship dollar amounts wrong. The point stands.
Can you add some color/explanation/examples for why you feel skepticism is warranted?
Since then Microsoft has hired a few Postgres contributors (Jeff Davis, Thomas Munro, me, David Rowley, Melanie Plageman) to work on Postgres itself. While larger than before, that's still not anything close to a controlling fraction of Postgres developers.
Microsoft has - I guess I can't really provide anything more than just my word on it - been giving us a lot of latitude what we work on. FWIW.
Web standards are designed in the open with input from other browser vendors among other things. Increasingly often Safari and Firefox object to specs developed by Chrome and flat out refuse to implement them.
Chrome goes ahead, implements and releases them anyway.
The visible reaction from the wider community? From nothing to saying that other browsers should keep up with Google.
Edit: Forgot to mention: Google also disproportionately dominates the standards processes. The majority of specs and proposals across multiple working groups come from and are pushed through by Google.
Stop opening every thread that contains your trigger word and ruin it for everyone else who’s actually interested in an on-topic discussion.
I’m not a Python dev myself, but I know how many programs use it. If Google found a way to add some sort of telemetry to some core Python functionality (pip maybe?), it’s worthwhile for me to know to never install Python on my computer. Or at least not a newer version... or at least block Google’s telemetry IPs
It's quite a human characteristic to not welcome gifts from the right hand of someone who acts against their interests with their left hand.
A company, however, seems to have no problems with this or similar situations.
Don't blame the human.
Microsoft and Ubuntu were recently exposed to have teamed up and shared contact information of their users with one another to create LinkedIn leads.
The Raspberry Pi team recently added VSCode’s repository endpoint as a required add-on to the most popular OS on it because ... he felt like it, but it exposes new and upgrading Pi users to Microsoft telemetry, sooo
There is reason for concern given current events.
A. It wasn’t arbitrary. One of the goals of the Raspberry Pi foundation is access to computing and learning. To facilitate that they added this repository to make it seamless to install Visual Studio Code which as of the time of this writing is one of the most popular code editors and often one that is recommended to beginners
B) despite reports to the contrary, not a single system package was added, this specifically is aimed at making VS Code installs easier[0]
Again concern across the board is okay and things deserve scrutiny, but evidence needs to be provided when making these assertions. I’m no apologist, MS had done some deplorable things, this (and to the extend they were even involved is questionable entirely) is not one of them
[0]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/raspberry-pi-os-adde...
- Google's involvement in web "standards" [1]
- Google sabotaging Mozilla [2]
To quote from [2]:
--- start quote ---
At the individual level, their engineers cared about most of the same things we did... But Google as a whole is very different than individual googlers.
...
The question is not whether individual sidewalk labs people have pure motives. I know some of them... They’re great people. But focus on the behaviour of the organism as a whole. At the macro level, google/alphabet is very intentional.
--- end quote ---
Google today is what Microsoft of yesteryear couldn't imagine in it's top management's wettest dreams.
[1] https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1356125702513418249?s=20
One of my goals here is to normalize big companies giving back like this. Even with budget and supportive leadership, spending money on OSS is surprisingly difficult.
https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/...
I understand if it's too specific. But it would still be neat to see if someone could get the ball rolling. I think it would give some good publicity too. :)
But I suppose that the corporate culture dictates that you don't discuss most of these topics with management.
I certainly have my complaints about Google but this post is way off base.
Whether Google pursues any of these possibilities has nothing to do with this sponsorship; they would all be in separate budgets.
It's also highly unlikely that the grandparent has any input on these topics - how much influence do you have over your employer's strategic decisions? It's absurd to chastise someone in a large organization for decisions they almost certainly had nothing to do with.
> But I suppose that the corporate culture dictates that you don't discuss most of these topics with management.
Questioning strategic decisions is rarely beneficial to your career in any organization. I have yet to see anyone promoted for doing so but can think of at least 5 firings related to this.
So, you always make the more "convenient" decisions instead and pretend there aren't any problems?
If this is the result of company culture then this is indeed not the individual's fault, but I sure hope I can at least comment on it?
Denying a problem is senseless but you have to pick your battles. It's a waste of time and political capital to question some decisions. You have to pick the hill you want to die on.
Strategic decisions are divided into at least the following categories:
1. Decisions and practices that are effectively written in stone. You probably aren't, for example, going to be able to move Google away from a monorepo. It can be difficult to identify this category from outside the organization.
2. Decisions that are open to influence by people in that part of the org chart. The Chrome developers, for example, probably have some influence on Google's involvement in WHATWG. Someone who works on ad quality probably doesn't.
3. Decisions that seems possible from outside the organization but the inside perspective is quite different.
4. Decisions that anyone can influence. Some of the successful Google protests fall into this category.
5. Decisions that only a director can influence because they don't listen to anyone below them in the org chart. Google is large enough that there are probably some directors like this.
Google has been pursuing non-advertising sources of income for at least a decade; your other asks fall into at best category #2.
> - We have some extra budget at the end of the year! What are some ways we can spend this to get results while giving back to OSS?
> - Hey PSF, do you have any ideas for what you could do with some funding?
> - Looks good to me!
Was this also the process with getting a board seat over at the Rust Foundation, and the Kotlin Foundation?
"Don't worry, we only want a little bit of X."
Fast forward a couple of years, and the innocent group suddenly owns the mailing lists, the infrastructure, director seats, the chief ideologue position and subjugates the core developers who want to get hired by the innocent people.
I have been mulling on Something that makes it less charity - purchasing a "not really support" option. This might be a annual membership, in return for which you get ... early access to annual roadmap pdf. Or an online video from the main devs explaining what they are doing for five minutes (#)
What if there existed something to Make the above easy and simply to do - a small foundation who's job is to keep membership rolls and accept payments from companies on behalf of any foss project that signs up (it's something I imagine patreon could offer). They then ensure that the (minimal contract) is adhered to in some manner.
(#) Seriously - you could set up a zoom call with 1-5 devs and just hit record once a year - I promise that 99% will see this as unbearable imposition and then talk for two hours. And that's "actionable paid insights into the future of this tool we depend on"
So the point being, if your FOSS project gets traction, then sign up to this foss-patreon, tell everyone to click to subscribe and you might might get a sponsor or two.
I used to be 100% against tax deductible contributions to not-for-profits. I've turned 180 on this. Citizens are much better at allocating funds to worthy causes than a central government.
In the case of our Makerspace, we couldn't get any public funding because we didn't fit into a predefined category such as a "sports team", and operating a garage full of tools could be seen as competing with private industry. Somehow there was money available for the lawyers who delivered that opinion to the local government though.
For an individual, the charity can claim the basic rate tax the individual paid (Gift Aid) and higher rate tax payers can claim the higher rate taxes using their self assessment, so in round numbers, it doesn't really matter who makes the donation.
That being said, it relies on there being a UK charity, which a lot of software foundations are not.
(Aside: I work for a US company that does support US foundations, as well as employ a few CPython core devs)
Did you end up coming up with company sponsorship plans for your makerspace? What kind of perks did you offer your sponsors?
It's a platform I've created where you can allocate anywhere from 0.1 - 5% of revenue to causes you believe in. Right now it's geared towards charities but I'd love to include open source sponsorship in there too.
Putting on my company hat, and I'm no expert, I believe for this to work in Denmark (where I live), you would need to be able to put some form of goodwill on the balance sheet. Companies still need to pay tax on donations (at a reduced rate up to ~2300€/year for recognized charities).
Unfortunately, 0.5% of the Danish workforce is directly employed by the tax office. It's a serious threat over here.
You kind of threw this out there. What makes you think this, is it something different about a charitable cause versus say health care? Both are distributing the same resources.
I might agree that decentralized decision making about resources is superior, but even that is full of caveats. I’m not sure why you think independently unorganized citizens are better than a group of citizens whose official capacity is to allocate (ie why call out government as something different? The important piece is centralized/decentralized, not govt vs citizen.)
At least it is supported in the literature - the lag and loss of resolution in reporting back centrally makes decisions a worse fit for actual conditions on the ground.
Another thought: Often devs have a yearly budget that can be spent relatively freely on training/conferences/courses/books/etc. Conferences and travel are expensive, but with everything going on it's not being used as much. I'm sure people would pay to get on a Zoom call or Q&A with a few core devs if it comes out of that budget. Price it pretty high, perhaps a few hundred $ per participant, maybe add country-dependent pricing or make exceptions for OSS projects/etc. Basically a fundraiser with a training/conference talk component.
From my own experience, I got just one donation in about a year of giving away free learning material. I then tried out ebooks (which was initially paid option only, but later switched to free online version and paid pdf/epub). This set up now pays my living expenses and recently started saving a bit as well.
Anyway, probably the best model at least for me is to make eBooks freely available, but with an optional ability to pay for a book.
It is 100% correct that bigcorps find it much easier to make purchases than donations. One-off charges are also much easier to sell than subscriptions as they get treated as depreciable capex and are less vulnerable to being optimized away by future cost-saving initiatives.
Not really related but a barrier for me in contributing to something new has been I'm already on recurring donations for a few things and it's easy to lose track. It would be nice if there were a solution to that.
I think they even have a rewards program now.
I highly recommend it if you can get over the uncomfortableness of linking a bank account to it. I just created a separate online account for this purpose.
In this case, I'd just create a separate card for each project you want to support with a monthly limit equal to your desired amount. They have an app and browser plugins and the like. It's really easy.
Do not try to sell charity. Sell it as the investment is is.
Basically this is a hard problem and without a market solution it's unlikely to ever get within spitting distance of fair. But I cannot see the market solution.
If only there was a way to get a bit of money from everybody to pay for common goods...
But that's a great little trick - the accounts department sees "annual support plan" and thinks they are buying support from the project - but really ... :-)
I've been saying this for decades:
For-profit companies are expected to generate profit for the shareholders. As such, donations are hard to justify.
- Most technical teams have pre-approved budgets for licenses, SaaS, consultancy services.
- Most teams do not have pre-approved budgets for donations. Managers need to go through bureaucracy and justify it.
- Donating to organizations that are not famous charities can look suspicious (think bribery & so on). Donating to an informal group more so. Donating to some person on GitHub even more so. Imagine lawyers and accountants having to explain it to some tax agency.
- Many countries don't have the tax relief and loopholes that encourage donations
At the time, JPMorgan had around 4500 Python devs globally and many of the FX/Commodities/Credit/Rates trading systems were Python-based (Google for Athena or watch [2]).
I felt the bank had gained hugely from the Python community so it was only appropriate to give something back. Fortunately I had lots of support from my MD internally. Ultimately the budgets were controlled from New York and it took time for the approval discussion between London and New York to conclude.
We took sponsorship packages that included logo on banners, an intro during the opening keynote, a recruiting booth, and entry passes for 10 of our devs. The money paid to PyConUK was small in corporate terms, and certainly less than the cost of the time I and the recruiting lead invested in getting it going.
The net result was a good amount of exposure, lots of people saying "I didn't know JPMorgan used Python", two direct hires I think, and useful support for Python in the UK.
I'm no longer at JPMorgan but as long as my future employers benefit from my Python experience, I'll look for ways for them to give back to the community. If you are in the same position, please encourage your employer to do it too. (I'm happy to be quoted on the benefits; my email is in my profile here).
[1] https://pyvideo.org/pycon-uk-2017/pycon-uk-2017-jp-morgan-sp...
[2] https://pyvideo.org/pydata-london-2018/python-at-massive-sca...
With the pandemic, I moved us from being just a pycon sponsor to sponsoring the psf directly (https://www.python.org/psf/sponsorship/sponsors/), though without a senior MD championing these types of initiatives it's always up to lower level employees being vocal and committed enough to push.
My takeaway from that surprisingly short deal was that with FOSS the real hard part (demonstrating value) is done and dusted long before any money conversations come up.
Most people I have had this conversation with in companies large and small are like Steve above - see the value of FoSS to their business and want to both give something back and more importantly support the producers of an important input to their business.
FOSS does not have and probably cannot have the "money for licenses" business model, but that's not to say there are not decent lines of funding that cannot be tapped.
It's a frustration, yes but both sides are aligned in this.
(#) For various definitions of meaningful I guess.
Ha, Paul, I do indeed remember that coffee! I didn't have the authority to approve anything on the spot, but I did promise to do my best to make it happen.
I always wondered why that wasn’t the PSF model (having a business arm that provides these things to fund development and other initiatives like putting together conferences)
With Python in particular I’ve heard first hand from people who I have no reason to believe wouldn’t pay for what they’re saying: specific language features or enhancements. It’s impossible to donate directly to the PSF or otherwise for it be a line item for that specific purpose though, and I think in Pythons case it has hurt their ability to raise funds, maybe
Complex topic for sure!
So what's in it for Big Tech? Well, in a situation where controlling the technology or suppressing it is difficult due to the low costs of starting over, it is in their best interest to promote the ecosystem rather than control it. When they put in the time, money, and engineers to make it better the return on investment can be massive, because of the help they get from the community to grow, maintain, and keep compatible this core component at less cost than if they did it themselves.
The incentives align and benefit everyone, especially if there is a fair governance system mediating between all parties involved. The biggest threat to an open source project is therefore not Big Tech collaboration, but project abandonment and lack of maintenance. I hope this makes everyone a little more optimistic about the direction of open source, especially as companies realize the real value it can have for all involved.
1. Not malice but incompetence
2. Actually malice, trying to make it look like incompetence, but being incompetent at that makes it... both?
3. Actually being competent at feigning incompetence (the ultimate malice?), perhaps we need to develop a new 'razor' for that.
I see your point and I'd tend to agree, except that we've all seen cases of successful projects suffering under the umbrella of a big company. If Google took care of Nim or D, I'd be more than happy. But Python? It's doing well, they better leave it alone.
I doubt Google is going to sponsor any though.
In fact, Jetpack Composer and Kotlin cross platform are pretty much a counter attack on Flutter.
Nothing is black and white in the world. Personally, I use products that I pay for from Google (GCP, YouTube Music, etc.) and Facebook (Oculus VR), but I stay away from “free” stuff paid for by data that is owned by me.
This would represent a significant increase in the number of people paid to work on the Python language. Two years ago it was estimated that it only had (the equivalent of) two full-time employees working on it.
https://discuss.python.org/t/official-list-of-core-developer...
And yet ... collectively we can only find enough money to pay two full time salaries?! Seriously?
There are so many better (and worse) things to finance than Python Foundation.
Your point would make more sense if the claim was that a significant portion of the corporation's profits should go towards financing Python. Then I would agree that "there are so many better things to finance than Python". But if we're discussing a salary or two in the context of corporations that employ hundreds of thousands of people, then your argument makes much less sense in the current context. There are very few things that would have better marginal utility then paying for the (effectively) third full-time Python developer.
This problem isn't solved by little old me pulling out my check book. My bank and my insurance company don't need charity from me in order to fund the technology they've built their businesses on. They need to learn to pony up and start funding the "free" software they use. Paying myself would only help kick the can down the road - and encourage and enable this sort of corporate mooching to keep happening.
In 60 years most of the volunteer maintainers of the software we depend on every day will be dead. Some time between now and then we need solution to this problem of opensource sustainability. Delaying buys us nothing.
Surely you’ve seen volunteers join existing projects out of their own interest and need now. The decades that you contributed (thank you, BTW): were those all on projects you started, or did you also join some existing efforts?
I don’t see any reason to think that will stop in 10, 20, or 60 years.
Will there? I feel like most of the opensource attention flows gradually up stack / toward trendy things on github and away from infrastructure older than github. When heartbleed happened a few years ago it was revealed that OpenSSL was maintained by basically one guy. The same is true of the linux timezone database. Apparently python is mostly 2 people.
I'd put money on this being is a theme for lots of tools we take for granted. How many people work on bash? Or busybox, grub, libpthread or libicu? I bet the number is tiny.
People want to work on popular, useful things. Python is both of those.
Worse: they are exploiting people's good intentions.
They co-opted the Free Software movement.
Copyleft has been painted as "business-unfriendly" and replaced with permissive licenses - aka unpaid labor without "strings attached".
> They need to learn to pony up and start funding the "free" software they use
...instead they even dodge taxes.
Yet it's become such a widespread sentiment to expect software for free that charging for something like Python would probably be seen as obscene and kill the language through loss of reputation alone.
I'm not a big fan of "Now this language has gotten popular, let's add all the features to it that made our other language so unpopular."
Definitely concerns that more hands could make another Angular, which had 2 incompatible branches, with one going from v2 to v11 in 5 years.
The python3 interpreter could have been largely (or completely) source-compatible with python2 code. They could have done it rust2018 style - where source code files can opt in to a newer parser, and in return get access to the new features. Then the whole python3 drama would have been avoided. MacOS still ships with a python 2.7 interpreter because of all that nonsense.
But if they only had 2 full-time people working on it, no wonder they didn't have the man power to do the transition any other way.
Disappointing.
> WARNING: Python 2.7 is not recommended.
> This version is included in macOS for compatibility with legacy software.
> Future versions of macOS will not include Python 2.7.
> Instead, it is recommended that you transition to using 'python3' from within Terminal.
banner on launch nowadays...
If more people are working on it full time, we'll just get more Walrus Operators. A very hypothetical gain at cost of an increasingly complex core language.
/rant. Those kind of features are going to keep coming anyway, I'm afraid.
It's like someone used to PHP or JS style coercion, doing: 1 + "2", getting a type error and asking "wtf python?".
The walrus operator is obvious, and very handy in many cases.
The capture part of the pattern matching PEP, on the other hand, has been designed shodilly.
People do this with Google and Facebook all the time. We call them ads. Not every ad campaign has a positive RoI.
But what’s the problem here? Is python struggling as a language? If there were clear calls for help companies could find it a lot easier to justify donating money or dev time.
As a language, interpreter, runtime, yes. In terms of adoption, no.
Much of the popularity of Python is based upon third party libraries that have been contributed by both individuals and organizations. These are still contributions, and there are many cases where the contributors are paid.
Should Python receive more funding and pay more people to work on the language? Probably, yet it is doubtful that having a large team working on the core language will improve the health of the language.
It's also a big statement about how non realistic were the ideas that FOSS will thrive on volunteers working together.
Back in the day where the "Cathredral and the Bazaar" was published, VALinux got its IPO, and FOSS was the latest hype, people really believed that this will work without corporate sponsorship, just by volunteers doing the work.
Then again, they also believed in many eyes available through the magic of FOSS making bugs shallow (Torvalds), and you get 20+ years of some obvious bug in something as critical as OpenSSL.
https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/...
Needed funding though.
Ruby got MJT in a big effort to make Ruby a lot faster. PHP is constantly increasing it‘s performance and tries to change a lot to get faster (basic building blocks for JIT in PHP8).
Why is python not iterating so much on it‘s performance? Or is it doing this but it‘s not as public in promoting it like my former two examples.
It doesn't have that much adoption, which suggests that performance isn't critical to Python's user base. If PyPy got significant market share, perhaps the CPython developers would prioritise an approach like this. (Or perhaps they'd have even more justification to say look, there's already a performance-focused implementation, we'll do our thing).
But the speed improvements would be welcome if they were in cpython because you can be quite sure there will be no problems.
One example is that Pypy switched away from reference-counting to fully garbage collected. They are probably right that's faster, but if I'm running a webserver, it's actually really comforting to know that any garbage produced by the processing of a request is collected when that request ends (barring cycles of course) so I don't end up with weird hangups.
I'm not in the python community, so it's possible this person is well known and respected enough that part of this can be taken on faith. However, because the author does not provide benchmarks or any other proof of the effectiveness of the supposedly almost complete stage 1, I cannot personally call this proposal serious.
The most information we got was "on a few simple benchmarks I'm seeing about a 70% speedup vs master for both default and LTO configures." However, this information is almost completely useless. What benchmarks? What architectures? What hardware?
It would take the author 5 minutes of their time to say "here's the benchmark code I ran, it executed in [time] on CPython master commit [hash], and [lower time] on my patch, running on a machine with [hardware]." To be completely honest, I fail to see why they are not providing this information that would make their proposal significantly stronger.
Since he was only asking for payment once he hit his benchmarks for each stage, why does it matter?
So it might be true that there are only a few FTEs working on Python, but the larger community of people contributing to it is much larger.
That post was made while Guido was at Dropbox, and it claims he had one day a week?
Considering the larger Python ecosystem the community does a lot of the work, so saying there are only two people working full-time on Python is quite misleading IMHO, as Python has probably one of the largest communities in the world for a programming language, the Github repo alone lists almost 1.500 contributors.
The discussion thread on that reveals that it was a bit low even by its explicit premise (core devs that had allocated time for OSS that was used for Python), and that methodology itself undercounted reality because it ignored people who had and made use of employer permission to use paid time but did not have a set allocation.
Coupled with the fact that they get paid for the alleged churn and others have to catch up on unpaid time, this can ruin a project.
The Python dev community has certainly gotten far less vibrant (and productive) in the last decade due to stifling corporate influence.
One is two people. The other is a few thousand person-hours of effort per year.
The equivalent of two full time employees could be 10 people with 20% of their time. I suspect there are a lot of patches submitted to python that were developed by someone being paid while they did the work that isn’t accounted for in the 1 actual full-time plus 5 20% time people.
IOW, paying for 1 additional named person to work ~2000 hours in 2021 will almost surely not be a net increase of 50% of capacity.
In fact, I have nothing but the deepest of respect for the Devs who built a version of python better than the "officially sanctioned one" without having any financial support.
This massive leverage is sort of unique to open source because it’s non-rivalrous. Resources you donate like food, shelter, etc can only help a limited number of people.
Note that this analysis of highest-impact does not make any moral judgements about which is more important. I personally would rather pay to help build plumbing in Uganda rather than this, but it definitely won’t have the same leverage.
Love that trickle-down economics,
Step 1: less time spent on dev tasks
Step 2: ??????
Step 3: end war, end hunger
An improvement to the Linux kernel scheduler that could reduce the power consumption of every android phone and the majority of servers in the world by 0.01% has a bigger impact than building an entire offshore wind farm.
Let that sink in. It’s hard to fathom how leveraged changes are to the software run all over the world. This is not delusions of grandeur, this is just the reality of so much of the world running on the same software.
AFAIK most core developers spend, at most, 20% of their paid time on the language / 80% on other things, not (as you might think) 80% / 20%.
I think that's one of the main reasons they've been pushing stuff like protobuf and gRPC out there: just so that people outside have some exposure when they end up getting hired.
Visionary: $150k (this is the level created for Google)
Sustainability: $90k
Maintaining: $60k
Contributing: $30k
Supporting: $15k
Partner: $7.5k
Participating: $3.75k
Associate: $1.5k
I think we agree the engineers want their employer to fund open source. It's up to us to establish a new normal: if your company relies on open source technologies, you are expected to give back 0.1% of your revenue to open source projects. That's it.
Obviously, the challenge is to go from today's situation, where 0 companies give 0.1% of their revenue to open source foundations, to 1. Maybe an open source startup will be the first. Then a second. Then maybe the Google engineers can pressure Google to join this program. And maybe, just maybe, in 10 years, it's become expected, and most tech companies do it.
(a) 0.1% is an example, chosen to be low enough that it doesn't impact the financial results of the company, but large enough that it dwarfs all current donations to open source.
(b) if you are worried about the complexity of donating to multiple open source projects, you can imagine that a company could donate its share in one chunk to some open source foundation, which then redistributes among individual open source projects.
One of the reasons that Python’s development has been so haphazard in the past few years is because the language is primarily developed by volunteers, and the philosophy has been that “you can’t tell volunteers what to work on”. I wonder if something’s going to change there.
You can probably improve (ensure is to strong of a term) the effectiveness of outside volunteer development in a number of ways, though, such as improving community communication of priorities and improving processes around accepting, reviewing, and providing feedback on contributed code.
Remember: "open source" has never meant anyone can get changes upstreamed. It has always only meant anyone can use the source downstream. This confusion has resulted in a lot of indignant outrage by armchair contributors.
This will turn into a bureaucratic nightmare that increases the power of the existing cabal, most of whom already do not provide any meaningful code contributions.
That sounds very "Google." They tend to be quite data-driven. Seems to have worked for them. I tend to be a bit sloppier, myself.
And this is very sad for me, because in my opinion Python is one of the best scripting languages. Unfortunately, Mr. Kitchen Hackers, Python has no optimization capabilities. GIL is great for calling C code, but it kills the language.
Just shut up and... save this thread. Sooner or later Python will die (Google is pt. 1 in this party). And then you'll shed a few tears and go program in Rust. Sad, but true.
Whether they have any other hidden agendas is pure speculation. Time will tell.
It's my opinion that they are simply making sure that a technology they are very heavily invested in doesn't bleed most of its brains out.
Eric Idle, representing Google, lights far too close to him and begins: "Does your wife Go? Is she a Goer?"[1]
(This is, after all, Python thread, no?)
Can someone explain what this means?
TLDR long rant ... Boiled down. G00gl3 didn't do this selflessly. No praise, no PR, no prepared BS.
You’re right, Python is not a simple language at all. Yet that’s how it’s widely perceived - I’m not sure why.
I wouldn't hold my breath for a "big payout" -- a company will invest in what they find is necessary. Maybe it's a gold sponsor, maybe a junior engineer hire or more. The market is efficient in my view and everyone involved benefits. The disconnect I see is the delusion that open source contributor(s) are owed something because someone else found the software useful. They seem to so quickly forget that they picked the liscense and that liscense is being used as designed.
Your narrative is not productive. Instead, maybe advocate for cultural change in what it means to adopt open source technology, eliminate barriers for monetary or other forms of support. It's unlikely the intent of adoters is to be laughing all the way to the bank as you're claiming.
If you don't want companies to use your work without paying, then don't open source it under free licenses. Simple, simple solution. You can't make something freely available and then complain when people use it. You don't get to choose both sides of the argument.
> promoting open source movement manipulating developers into giving up their hard work for free
Make up your mind, were they exploiting open source by using it or were they getting more people to contribute to open source? You know the point of contributing to open source is it make it open source, right?
Do you exploit open source by using Linux instead of paying for Windows? Do you exploit open source by celebrating open source developers?
> were they exploiting open source by using it
Yes, they were profiting from labour they didn't pay for
> or were they getting more people to contribute to open source
Yes they promote open source so they can get more work done for free
> You know the point of contributing to open source is it make it open source, right?
That's the idea, but reality is that this is a loophole where big corporations save on R&D and get work done without having to pay salaries and taxes. In many countries you cannot hire someone without paying them even if they agree to work for free and the same should apply to software.
> Do you exploit open source by using Linux instead of paying for Windows?
The problem is that it is difficult to reward all the people who contributed to Linux and that needs to change.
> Do you exploit open source by celebrating open source developers?
That makes little sense. If you embrace open source you are actually helping big companies getting free labour.
In those countries, am I permitted to shovel my neighbor’s sidewalk or mow their lawn? Can I help a friend paint a room or change a tire? Am I permitted to write a poem and share it for free? Can I publish scientific findings that I might have created?
> If you embrace open source you are actually helping big companies getting free labour.
I see it as “Yes, and:” We are helping all humans avoid the tedium and drudgery of solving now-pointless problems because they have already been solved, avoid introducing novel security bugs, and overall to help us collectively stand on the shoulders of giants rather than on the toes.
That does help large companies avoid creating a bunch of tedious, pointless, repetitive work which humans would have to forfeit large chunks of their lives solving. That sounds like a feature rather than a bug to me.
It also helps small companies afford to offer tech-based solutions and to better utilize the constrained pool of “people who are good at programming”.
I think you’re crossing legal and moral arguments. I might decide to shovel my fixed-income pensioner neighbor’s sidewalk for free while deciding to not shovel Larry Ellison’s sidewalk on the other side of my property even if he asked nicely (which I doubt he would).
That’s a moral/ethical choice on my part, but the law everywhere probably allows that transaction.
If you don’t want to contribute your time, skills, and attention to open-source, I don’t see anyone suggesting that you be forced to do so. You are the one claiming that there’s something that ought to be illegal about it, with which I disagree.
No, it's a power grab, because full time developers plowing through the code base and working on minor issues crowd out the actual IP creators and make them leave.
Expect a dull, boring corporate controlled maintenance age where one or two people do mundane work and directors of various foundations and groups take the credit.
That would be an ideal scenario to be honest. If company wants to use the work, they should pay for it and for all time that lead to it or developers should be required by law to change licenses so that companies would have to pay either a subscription or a fixed fee for the software version.
That divide between boring development and rock star seeding indeed exists and typically people working on IP have their own companies and contract out their work. They create a PoC and then company employees make it into a product. That used to work well in the UK, but law has changed to be more akin to the US rules where you can't provide IT services as a small company (typically one man) and you have to be an employee.
Then suddenly this.
Now I'm wondering if MS hiring Guido triggered some reaction to not loose control of what is currently one of the most popular language in the world. Or something else I don't know about.
I really want to rejoice. My favorite language gets $ 350k.
Yet I can't help but be suspicious of philanthropy coming from big players. I'm getting cynical and always look for a PR, strategic investments or counter attacks.
They probably get their logo on the python.org website somewhere, and $350k isn't a ton of money. p The reason is PR. Still, good for the python foundation to have a program that allows it to harvest some of the PR budget out there.
Here's what I found under the details link. Does anyone understand what this actually means?
> One major component of the PSF’s mission is protecting Python-related intellectual property. To strengthen the PSF’s trademarks and copyrights for Python, PyCon, and PyPI, the PSF spent over $198,000 USD in 2019 and $77,000 through October 2020.
If it was 2 billion then they contributed less than 1/500th of what they received.
Also, Google uses Python heavily and employs at least one Python core dev off the top of my head (almost certainly quite a few more), so there are engineers there with a sense of the PSF's finances and enough seniority to influence folks who decide on donations.
That's the most obvious angle to explain this. It's a strategic investment - Google cares about Python and they know the PSF needs money.
Many core developers have given an equivalent of that sum in free labor and receive no praise. On the contrary, a comment in this very thread accuses them of being "white males".
Secondly, just "giving money to OSS" is meaningless. It depends on how it is used, who pulls the strings in the background and long term effects on the health of the volunteer part (who has done virtually all of the meaningful work in Python).
People cite gcc and the Linux kernel. The situation is quite different. Sponsorship has started early by companies like SuSE, RedHat and Cygnus, who at the time were aligned with the original OSS values.
The means of sponsorship was hiring top developers directly, bypassing foundations and councils. The is pretty different from the bureaucratic process that is being envisioned here.
But, yeah, ultimately I'm glad any company is contributing to upkeep the language, but the whole "Visionary Sponsors", "Sustainability Sponsors", "Maintaining Sponsors", "Contributing Sponsors", etc distinction between them seems very unnecessary.
I agree with the embrace-extinguish crowd. The strategy will be to introduce a huge breaking change in the next release.
This is a corporation. They don't do things for free. What started out as a "free" browser turned into a vehicle to capture a monopoly on internet video. What makes you think they dont have a long term plan to profit from python?
So your conspiracy theory is that Guido, the BDFL at the time, colluded with Google, who use python for numerous products, to destroy python and popularize Golang......?
You don't need a scheme to kill a plant. You can just stop watering it.