Comment by tomComb
2 days ago
You are right, it is. But it would be a mistake for us to use this opportunity to attack them for it.
We should applaud their donation today, and at another time assess the meager contributions of many companies that should be shamed.
Every single financial institution on Wall Street, the City of London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Dubai and so on, uses Python. Very few contribute.
I've worked at a few that use the 'mold' linker to dramatically reduce their build times. Again, very few contribute. In this particular case, I managed to get one former employer to make a donation.
But the list goes on.
Short arms, deep pockets, as the saying goes.
It’s interesting to see everyone advocate for open source software with permissive licenses, then get mad when companies use them.
If python wants to require money for updates or for customers over $X in revenue, they can!
If companies don’t want to donate, they don’t have to just as python contributors don’t have to if they’re annoyed at how it’s used.
very easy way to make bank would be to support extended security updates for old versions of python
a couple of paid engineers could support every previous version essentially forever
Money has limited impact and has all sorts of drawbacks.
A more impactful change from firms might be to celebrate and reward community contributions of their own employees. This can establish a more productive culture than just money. If an engineering company is willing to donate money (yay!), perhaps consider making sure that employees are celebrated for contributions they make in a manner that is similar to how we currently celebrate monetary transactions.
For an example of the opposite, Google laid off their entire Python team, something that also made HN front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40171125