Python Software Foundation gets a donor surge after rejecting federal grant
thenewstack.io220 points by MilnerRoute 21 hours ago
220 points by MilnerRoute 21 hours ago
Yeah, after what they did to Tim Peters in recent times, I don't see myself donating.
This is why folks can't take yall seriously when discussing code of conduct. This person has a history of being shitty, and they used the CoC to enforce a (temporary!) ban, citing the rules he violated. If the CoC didn't exist, you'd be screaming "he didn't do anything wrong", but obviously, according to the well posted rules, he did, and they enforced those rules for the good of the community.
The reality of the situation is that yall don't want to be excluded from communities for being racist, misogynistic, or creepy.
I looked into the issues listed ( https://discuss.python.org/t/three-month-suspension-for-a-co... ) and the surrounding context, and they all looked tenuous. I'd expect to see at see at least some clear cases.
I think moderation and CoCs are needed, but this example looks to be an example of their misuse.
It's been over a year, and they still haven't provided any tangible examples to support their claims. The best they could come up with was something like "he used the wink emoji" I think. There have been hundreds of posts, and many community members have demanded either evidence to back up those accusations or a public apology to Tim and their removal. But of course, those people are racist, misogynist, or creeps so nothing came out of it.
> This person has a history of being shitty
All evidence I have seen points to the contrary.
> citing the rules he violated
I wish I could have the graciousness of Tim Peters. Those accusations were not made in good faith.
If Tim Peters has a "history of being shitty", I'd expect Wikipedia to mention it. But his article is clean, if not golden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Peters_(software_engineer). The only thing I've heard is that he's a bit neurodivergent/socially awkward, which I thought we were suppose to be welcoming and inclusive of.
The reality is that you may be confusing a victim with your political enemies.
While Wikipedia is considered a source of truth, is it a moderated source of whatever those in power allow to be written there.
I wouldn't expect it to show up on their Wikipedia page, because Wikipedia has a high barrier for what they consider reliable information, and they wouldn't use email list postings, or personal accounts of behavior in what they'd include. This person isn't really relevant enough for his behavior to show up in the news.
But, the employees at the foundation, who are responsible for keeping the community healthy, and for enforcing policies, would absolutely take complaints, then use personal accounts, email list history, chat history, and such. It's effectively like how HR works.
> The only thing I've heard
Right, because you're talking to the wrong people, and you're ignoring the fact that he has had folks complain about his behavior, and you're also ignoring his email list and chat history, which you could go look at.
You're acting like this is some kind of witch hunt, when it's simply "HR" enforcing "employment handbook" standards. It just happens to be that this is a set of volunteers, rather than employees.
On the contrary! https://chrismcdonough.substack.com/p/the-shameful-defenestr...
The steering committee folks sound like a microcosm of a communist poliburo. Aiming for who can be the most offended over imaginary slights.
I'm glad as An American tax payer that we're not funding an organization with such petty politics and discriminatory behaviors.
Tim sounds similar to John Carmack recent she post about Meta:
> I wish I could drop (so many of) my old internal posts publicly, since I don’t really have the incentive to relitigate the arguments today – they were carefully considered and prescient. They also got me reported to HR by the manager of the XROS effort for supposedly making his team members feel bad
And it's not only limited to python. Same things happened to perl, ruby, node, and even in some film communities which I was member of.
Once you have such a committee or COC, game over.
The reality is that they go after intelligent people and political opponents on specious grounds because they are jealous and want to preserve their own power.
You can dig up any number of posts on anyone, as Richelieu has pointed out pre-Internet.
Oh, thank you for reminding me they did that.
I need to double my donation.
I wonder is this something all grants have now? edit: yep that seems to be the case https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/gc1-may25.pdf
:\ just finished applying for an NSF grant. I've got to look into other sources of funding.
Immediatly though of donating > $1.5M to remove that indentation hell.
What do you mean it's in their values?
More seriously, I can only respect someone (natural or legal) who refuses 7 figures for their values, which ever those might be and whether I share them or not.
Many people here have pointed out in response to flagged comments that the decision was legalistic, bureaucratic and self-preserving. I.e., the PSF did not want to enter a territory where it might be forced to repay the grant.
The money was earmarked for PyPI and the refusal did not impact those who have other positions in the PSF. In 2020, when it was politically safe, the PSF made several BLM support statements. There are no statements about people of color in Gaza or extrajudicial killings off the Venezuelan coast in 2025.
Moreover, they got political capital from this action for an organization that was/is severely damaged by the ruthless and libelous leadership. And they prepare for another pendulum swing that might materialize in the 2026 midterms.
All in all, I'm unimpressed.
Many of the comments here are disappointing. Regardless of your opinion of the PSF or its leadership, you should be opposed to this kind of clawback threat because it nakedly represents an attempt to place a non-profit in a double bind: even attempting to comply with these requirements would allow a politicized IRA to claim that the PSF is failing to uphold its stated mission.
Organizations should avoid funding by the government whenever possible. It creates incentives for the organization to align with the politics of the government. I am all for this outcome, as it’s a net win for PSF and any organization that can fund itself
But if they don't get it from the government, they'll get it somewhere else, and then that will create incentives for the organization to align with the politics of whoever gives them the money. There's no escaping the implicit dependence that comes with accepting money.
I think we just need to reduce the amount of discretion involved in government action of all kinds.
> But if they don't get it from the government, they'll get it somewhere else
It's not an equal comparison. The biggest governments in the world don't need anymore consolidated power.
> I think we just need to reduce the amount of discretion involved in government action of all kinds.
This we both agree on.
Regardless of how you feel about the nature of government funding, you should be able to cogitate a strong argument for the U.S. government not playing “gotcha” games with its funding.
The problem is that the population of the US is itself polarized, and different factions want the government to be doing extremely different things with its funds. If faction A has successfully gotten the US federal government to fund something for a long time, and faction B hates that thing, campaigns on ending the funding, and then does end it once they win an election and take power - then a demand for the US to not play gotcha games with its funding is isomorphic to a demand from political faction A to keep some of their preferred policies in place even though they are not currently in a position of electoral power.
Yes, outcomes like these are the best way to avoid dependency on a central authority. I’m more for moving away from the ability of such authorities to exercise such power, rather than hoping they don’t abuse it. They certainly will eventually
This is exactly what set OpenBSD back in the early 2000s.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/defense-agency-pulls-openbsd-f...
Maybe that $500k that was earmarked for OpenSSL vulnerability testing would have found Heartbleed.
> you should be opposed to this kind of clawback threat because it nakedly represents an attempt to place a non-profit in a double bind
The clawback is this sentence, yes? "NSF reserves the right to terminate financial assistance awards and recover all funds if recipients, during the term of this award, operate any program in violation of Federal anti- discriminatory laws or engage in a prohibited boycott."
How exactly is "you must follow anti-discrimination law" a "naked" attempt at a double-bind?
(And, um, I'd be more worried about that "prohibited boycott" thing. It's mentioned explicitly in the sentence with the clawback, and I don't see where it's defined.)
Boycotting Israel, for example, is a prohibited boycott.
This is a little-known but long-established part of US policy; see https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/enforcement/oac for more details. My employer actually has a reminder in the legal trainings of our corporate responsibilities under these policies (and yes, it rubs me the wrong way).
> Many of the comments here are disappointing
Disappointing?
This is what Hacker News has been for at least a decade. Why would you expect any better?
It’s been disappointing to you for at least a decade and yet you keep using it? Blink twice if the mods have been keeping you imprisoned in the server closet and forcing you to speak to them in Arc
The government shouldn’t be spending itself further into unsustainable debt. And state funding of private organizations will always be subject to the politics of the state, leaking those policies into the organizations they fund. Avoiding both is a net win for everyone, so this is a great outcome.
Funding supply chain security for one of the most popular open source ecosystems in the world isn’t even a rounding error on the budget.
The debt increases are a political choice: the budget was balanced at the turn of the century, which was used as the pretext for cutting taxes to a level which ensured the problems we’re seeing now based on highly unrealistic growth projections. Cutting all funding on open source, or science, or foreign aid, or even all of those combined is a drop in the bucket compared to our cost of healthcare being whole multiples higher than in our peer countries.
And yet, this organization found a way to grow its funding base by avoiding government handouts. It’s a net win
They announced grassroots donations for 10% of the total. That’s good, but still short of where it should be for something so popular.
I think of it like crime or natural disaster: a PyPI compromise could easily cause economic damages on the order of a bad storm or small terrorist attack. Collectively we spend billions trying to mitigate those societally rather than telling each person to defend themselves, and this feels like the same idea adapted to a different context.
I think you’ve badly misread the numbers here: donors have only covered a small fraction of what this NSF grant would have covered.
(And of course, it should go without saying that relying on the public to react to the government’s capricious behavior does not make for a stable funding situation for a nonprofit.)
Externalizing responsibility while taking the value of things and calling that a net win until the consequences come up seems short sighted.
Hopefully nobody else funds this critical infrastructure piece of both the government and private sector software world. Especially someone of a country/color/gender you don't like.
Culture wars are intentionally engineered by the rich to distract everyone else from forming class solidarity against them. And it is amazingly effective.
No, people actually disagree about cultural changes. Not sure what kind of world model you must have in order to believe that ANY society wouldn't suffer from "culture wars" as it evolves. I suppose you believe that the entire prohibition episode in US history was also orchestrated by "the rich"?
Struggling over cultural changes is a real phenomenon and sometimes even worth engaging in.
But ultimately, ideas are secondary to matter. Most people on this planet work for the profits of a very small group. If they weren’t divided, they could easily defeat that small group and organise society for the benefit of the majority.
As Warren Buffet said, class warfare is happening and his class is winning. We should all internalise that and engage in class struggle.
Not if all the culture wars in 2020-2024 received $billions of funding by the same companies who now support Trump.
There is nothing organic about this, and organizations like the PSF play their role by never veering into economic and class warfare territory.
I mean...this thread joins the dozens of others in recent memory that has turned into a war-zone, filled with disposable throwaway accounts and bad faith downvoting that will almost certainly go unpunished.
Considering the kind of money behind YCombinator, they're not exactly beating the rap.
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If people don't stand up to this sort of gov behavior, it emboldens them to take it to the next level and make even more demands, as universities are discovering.
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When did "woke" - i.e. "awake and not closing ones eyes to the problems in the world" become some sort of slur ? What does it say about people that use it as such?
The problem is that they went too far. Over-correction is a thing.
Instead of getting distracted by what is a slur and who is using it, focus on the meat of the matter, which is discrimination in all forms beyond merit. Anyone distracting from the core topic is a part of the problem.
Discrimination is not bad in itself. A scientific approach is to apply discrimination over biased sample to compensate the bias. The difficulty is how to compensate fairly. And when you compensate fairly, you will have people who will say you compensated too much and other people who will say you compensated too little.
When I look at the other opinions and values of the majority of people who say that DEI compensate unfairly and too much, I either see that 1. they don't even accept to consider that maybe there was a bias, 2. they also defend policies quite marked politically. These two things make me think there is not really a compensation that it is too big, and that it is just the people who have different values that say they disagree. If it was indeed unfairly balanced, they would be more "pro-DEI on principle" that would react on the dysfunction. (not saying they don't exist, but they are just too few)
I can’t remember the exact date. It’s all part of a “tradition” since at least the 90s. First things were PC, then there were SJWs, then woke, then DEI. Who knows what they will call it next. It’s always complaining about the same thing, just with new verbiage.
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It's not the source of the funds, it's that the government grant wanted to force a change of how the foundation does things, especially inclusion and outreach efforts.
Importantly:
1) The grant was for a specific, bounded project, but the anti-DEI terms would have applied to all activities of the Foundation, regardless of whether they were funded by the grant. (Which isn't to say that those terms would have been acceptable even for a single project, but having them apply to unrelated activities is even worse.)
2) The terms of the grant included a clawback clause - if, in the administration's eyes, the Foundation did anything to "advance or promote DEI", the grant would be rescinded, and the Foundation would be required to repay any money they had already spent. Given the size of the grant relative to the Foundation's budget, this was an unacceptable risk.
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I don't think this timeline is quite accurate - the 'transgender tipping point' Time magazine cover was in May 2014.
Disagree.
2014 was years before it became a mainstream cry to treat trans women as cis women. I didn’t really hear or notice this until the late 2010s.
I also believe the trans community hurt itself and its own members by pushing this narrative/falling into this trap, though things like the bathroom bill made it inevitable?
Perhaps it’s old fashioned, but what I believe is an acknowledgement and celebration of differences. What the new generation pushed is hiding those differences; by pretending there are none.
It’s much harder to argue against “let’s all agree we’re all human and make this work”.
> 2014 was years before it became a mainstream cry to treat trans women as cis women. I didn’t really hear or notice this until the late 2010s.
That's because somehow you only managed to notice the protests against the rollback of protections by those favoring discrimination but somehow missed the long push for those protections that led up to the federal policy wins (many of which were in 2014, specifically) including:
* Executive Order 13672 (explicitly prohibiting discrimination on gender identity or sexual orientation for federal agencies and federal contractors)
* Formal DoJ guidance that discrimination on the basis of gender identity was included within the scope of sex discrimination prohibited by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—an interpretation later validated by the US Supreme Court in Bostock v. Clayton County, 590 U.S. 644 (2020).
* A wide array of regulatory and administrative actions by other federal agencies, mostly applying the same logic as the DoJ guidance referenced above to other existing sex-discrimination provisions in law an regulation.
In the past no one cared about cis or trans because it didn't matter, but they found how it could be used for political leverage to divert attention away from more important things like the actual quality of work.
I'm ignorant of the world outside of the USA.
TERF was started in 2008: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERF_(acronym)
The GOP started to make it a major issue prior in 2016. See Bathroom Bill: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
In 2017 the Southern Poverty Law said that the Christian Right was trying to separate from the T from LGBT. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_transgender_...
The GOP started what is a woman in 2022 https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
> It wasn't exactly the Streisand effect, but I remember thinking the whole flourishing of trans rights and acceptance between 2017 and 2021 never would have happened if Hillary had won. Is there a name for this phenomenon?
2017-2021 wasn't a flourishing of trans rights and acceptance, it was the big wave of active discrimination by, particularly, state-level Republican governments against previous progress in that dimension. That made the issue more visible, but specifically because it was the exact opposite of a flourishing of trans rights and acceptance.
But, sure, it probably would have looked a bit different if there had been a federal administration likely to defend rather than abandon that progress (but it probably still would have happened.)
Yes, if the running government is seen to be anti-trans, it makes sense that trans supporters will show more support.
Likewise for every topic that is under contest, including right wing topics.
As an aside, I'd say calling it "the Streisand effect" could be seen to be hinting that if people just stopped support trans so strongly, there would be less backlash. That might be true, but given trans people have historically suffered abuse, it would be risky for trans supporters to let things settle and hope for the best.
> Did both parties implicitly understand up until 2017 that going too hard too fast is counterproductive?
Of course they did, as they do now, it's game politics 101, it's all in the game plan.
I don't understand the implication of your first sentence.
The NC Bathroom Bill passed in March 2016, and it had an immediate flurry of corporate backlash that lasted to the partial repeal in 2017. The bill was part of a growing amount of anti-trans rhetoric (and legislation) from the Republicans starting a few years before. But it was the first bathroom bill AFAICT.
Are you saying that the Republicans would have been less likely to pass that bill under a Clinton presidency? If so, what's the extraordinary evidence for that?
Alternatively, if you are saying they would have been more emboldened to pass it, are you suggesting that the backlash would have been smaller under a Clinton presidency? That's in the realm of possibility, but again what's the evidence here? Obama had already shifted to supporting gay marriage before the relevant Supreme Court case (probably due to Biden's gaffe of pre-emptively announcing his own support for it). So I just don't see why you would assume a Clinton presidency would effectively muzzle support for trans rights in this case, or have any effect whatsoever on the NC Bill and its aftermath.
Edit: clarifications
>Did both parties implicitly understand up until 2017 that going too hard too fast is counterproductive?
Politicians know this, people don't necessarily.
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I think "The US government is too unpredictable at this time to be a trustworthy source of funding" is actually pretty in-touch with reality, unfortunately.
God forbid they stand up for people and fight for an inclusive work environment. How dare they!
“Inclusive” - meanwhile, I’ve not felt comfortable at a PSF-sponsored event since 2013, when people started losing their jobs for barely off-color jokes… and for reporting them.
You're saying you feel excluded because you can't tell racist jokes?
Chilling effect of the witch hunt by political activists tends to make people be and feel excluded.
Because you can't tell racist jokes?
Constantly waking on eggshells that anything you say could be misinterpreted to be offensive and have career ending repercussions is exhausting.
Now, go on, parrot the same question again. Surely you’ll bait someone into accepting your framing of the issue sooner or later.
What is it that you say on a regular basis that makes you feel like you need to walk on eggshells?
As I've said many times in the comments. I have 20+ years experience working for corporations. All through the me too wave, the increase focus on DE&I, and the general move to try and be less exclusionary. I've worked with woman, gay people, trans, and people of just about every ethnicity you could think of. Never once, in all those years, have I ever feared for my job or felt excluded.
Literally the only people I have ever heard complain are the ones I know for a fact tell racist and sexist jokes because they always felt comfortable enough around me to tell them.
If the fact that we are a bit more mindful about being racist and sexist in the work place bothers you, I think you may need to look inward at your own behavior. Not outward.
This is exactly the kind of dishonest manipulative baiting that makes people feel uncomfortable. Absolutely nothing InvertedRhodium said was in any way racist, and your allegations otherwise are both wholly devoid of evidence and against the community standards here.
If you can't make your point without leveling extreme and baseless allegations at fellow posters, that's a good sign that your point is without merit.