Hacker News Reader

Comment by cls59 | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. I think the buried lede here is actually the clawback clause. With that in the contract, this isn't a $1.5 million dollar grant, it's a $1.5 million dollar liability.

If you take the money and spend it on research and development and then get hit by a clawback, whether due to "DEI" or some other reason, that is a financially ruinous event to somehow come up with $1.5 million dollars that was already spent.

A shame and a waste as it sounds like the project would have been beneficial outside of the Python ecosystem, had it been funded.

View on HN

As treasurer of a similar FOSS org, this is the correct take.

An important responsibility of the people running a FOSS community's backing non-profit is to keep the org safe and stable, as the community relies on it for vital services and legal representation. A risk like that is unacceptable, even more than in commercial business.

Could the foundation take the money and sit on it in bonds or some other safe instrument? Call it an "endowment"?

$1.5M at 4% is nice.

But I suppose the "proposal" means these funds come with a distribution plan attached?

Typically in grant work you submit a complete proposal with milestones and roles defined, and receive payout over time to cover the costs in the plan, or some part of them. It's earmarked money.

In more established non-profit areas there's usually also quite some compliance overhead and audits to be passed, so this can be someone's fulltime job on the org side. FOSS backing orgs are typically smaller and less experienced, so donors have so far found ways to make things easier for them and give more leeway.

> If you take the money and spend it on research and development and then get hit by a clawback, whether due to "DEI" or some other reason, that is a financially ruinous event to somehow come up with $1.5 million dollars that was already spent.

This is it. The conditions / circumstances of the clawback are irrelevant. If there's any possibility of a clawback, then the grant is a rope to hang your organization with.

I don't think an NSF grant should be a trade, wherein your org sells its mission / independence, and the NSF buys influence.

> I don't think an NSF grant should be a trade, wherein your org sells its mission / independence, and the NSF buys influence.

This is the whole reason the administration is implementing these policies. It's not just about political opposition to diversity programs, it's about getting hooks into science funding as a whole. With a clawback clause, the administration gets the ability to defund any study that produces results they don't like.

They'll use this to selectively block science across entire fields - mRNA vaccines, climate studies, psychology - I fully expect to see this administration cutting funding from anything that contradicts their official narratives.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com