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Comment by jsnell | Hacker News Reader

The editorialized title "Meta pledges Three-Year sponsorship for Python if GIL removal is accepted" seems misleading at best. The actual wording was:

> support in the form of three engineer-years [...] between the acceptance of PEP 703 and the end of 2025

It seems much more like them pledging engineer time from Meta employees to work on this project than sponsorship, not a monetary sponsorship like the title implies.

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Offering dedicated specific CPython resources (aka. enginneering hours) is worth more than a monetary sponsorship in my view.

That also depends on the scale of the monetary sponsorship, though. If I heard something like "Meta/Google/Whoever is the main sponsor of Python for the next 3 years", I'd assume (perhaps incorrectly) much more money per year than it takes to hire a single engineer. On the other hand, someone just saying "sure, we'll do the silver tier at your next few conferences" is worth a whole lot less than one engineer.

Regardless, the previous commenter's point stands that the title could be a lot more informative.

Right, but that's not the topic at hand. For better or for worse the title is a little misleading.

How do I diff colesbury/nogil-3.12 with python/cpython? https://github.com/colesbury/nogil-3.12

And also in direct response to a comment from GvR, not something out of the blue

Yes, and the comment is to request help essentially:

"it would be great if Meta or another tech company could spare some engineers with established CPython internals experience to help the core dev team with this work."

The title is fine. Sponsorship doesn't need to include a money a transfer.

It sounds like Facebook is volunteering 3 person-years which is nothing resembling a 3 year sponsorship. We're talking at least an order of magnitude difference. 3 person-years sounds like one team at Facebook working on the GIL for 3 months.

It's until the end of 2025, about 2.5 years from now. The comment was by GVR, who is presumably adding up all the pledged time to estimate whether there's enough in total.

Yep, the original comment was very carefully worded.

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