Progress on the Gilectomy

This is an ongoing discussion in the community; in fact there's a PSF board election happening right now and several of the candidates have variants on "hey lets spend money on python development" in their platforms.

I'll have to take a look. I admit that I don't follow things like PSF board elections any more.

The PSF has a substantial budget relative to other similar organizations, but a "six-figure dollar total" isn't necessarily enough to pay for one developer! And the PSF has been extremely conservative about hiring, because they don't want to ever be in a position where they have to be like "oops, that sponsor dropped out so surprise, you don't get paycheck next month".

I don't think you'd ever see the PSF hire someone as a developer. Then again, the PSF does appear to have some full-time positions, some of them administrative, others related to the conference/event orientation of the organisation, and I don't know whether those positions are competitively paid or not.

(OTOH if you have an idea for something that can be done for a fixed chunk of money in the $1k-$10k range then you can totally apply for a grant; e.g. the PSF gave twisted a grant to help with their py3 porting. But I'm guessing $5k wouldn't make a difference to how much energy Larry has to put into the GILectomy work, given he already has a full time job.)

As I think I noted, grants take up a rather small proportion of the PSF's spending, and one can even argue that they only seem to be done out of necessity, such as fixing up the packaging infrastructure before something really bad happens, or to support the Python 3 migration vision that hasn't been realised all by itself. And then, as you note, you have people wanting to do the work having to fit that work in around their day job, leading up to the somewhat perverse example of various core developers being hired to "work on Python" actually not really spending their work time, or very much of it, "on Python" as such.

All of this suggests a structural problem with the way people expect stuff to get done. Which ends up being expressed as "we need more volunteers", but where those volunteers can only really nibble away at the smaller problems because the focus is on funding sprints or hackathons (or whatever) as opposed to projects, initiatives and, ultimately, people. And the solution that involves getting people hired to work on Python, thus avoiding awkward issues (see next paragraph), doesn't really seem to work out in general (see previous paragraph), or it involves other obligations like doing a doctorate which can be substantial distractions in their own right.

There are community concerns about how hiring core developers could create perceptions of unfairness, drive away volunteers, etc.

I think people are justifiably worried about the response to hiring people because there is a culture of everything having to be a zero-sum game in the Python community. Someone will gladly pipe up and say how their ultra-successful, heavily-promoted (at the expense of everything else even tangentially related) project is being undermined if the PSF opens its chequebook and it is not for their benefit. And there may actually be sponsors who don't want people to work on certain projects if those projects are in any way in competition with their products.

The PSF will have to face up to this eventually, though. The only question is whether it happens before its target audience have decided that they prefer something else.