Comment by jacobian
2 days ago
> I'm sure you'd agree that the president of the board is ultimately "above" the chief executive if push ever came to shove, at least on paper.
That is not true of the PSF, nor of many (most?) other US nonprofits. Not on paper, and not practically speaking. The director reports to the board, but officers have little to no unitary power. You can go read the PSF’s bylaws if you like, and if you do you’ll see that officers, including the president, can do very little without a board vote. And because of aforementioned policy, that’s a max of two votes from people employed by a single company.
Also, like, do you know anything about Dawn? She’s been serving the Python community waaaay longer than she’s worked for Microsoft. Questioning her ethics based on absolutely nothing is unfounded and, honestly, pretty fucked up.
There’s this pernicious lie that Microsoft is somehow controlling the PSF. It’s based on about as much evidence as there is for Flat Earth, yet here it is again. At best, repeating this lie reflects profound ignorance about how the PSF actually functions; at worst it seems like some kind of weird disinfo campaign against one of the most important nonprofits in open source.
Nodding along with everything you wrote here, but one minor point for anyone who might read the bylaws and get confused. https://www.python.org/psf/bylaws/
> Section 5.15. Limits on Co-affiliation of Board Members. No more than one quarter (1/4) of the members of the Board of Directors may share a common affiliation as defined in Section 5.14.
The PSF allows three board members to share an affiliation, 13 seats * 0.25 ~= 3.25.
BTH, that's one too many, and I helped write/recommend the original language. When I was on the board, three felt like too many, even though everyone was wonderful, and it was Google, not Microsoft, that hit the limit.
The DSF (Django Software Foundation) recently adopted a two-person limit, which I recommend more boards consider.
A) I'm assuming you meant "TBH", but please correct me if I have an acronym to learn.
B) Hacker news is crazy -- I didn't expect to spawn a thread that would get responses from actual board members, ex- or otherwise! I'd like to take a brief moment deep down into this thread to echo what I said to Simon above: thanks for giving your valuable time to help grow the best programming language & community to ever exist :)
...ok I guess I grant that technically the leader of the board is not the board itself, but that feels a bit pedantic. A prime minister/speaker of the house/etc. isn't the unitary executive of that chamber wielding absolute power, but they are still obviously the leader.
I assume you have more experience than me in corporate governance, but this is such a fundamental truth that I've just gotta stick to my guns. The executives serve at the pleasure of the board. That's what the board is.
Well, besides the compliments I paid her above, no I do not. I don't think you're right to be offended at the implication that anyone could be coerced into putting their 6-figure job ahead of the non-profit they serve in the right circumstances, but TBH the worry of unconscious bias is just as real and doesn't require any ethical breaches.
As I said above: I don't think there's evidence of any significant conflicts of interest so far, either from Microsoft, Anaconda, or any other firm. That said, I hope I can at least convince you that comparing concerns about corruption to a belief in a trivially-false scientific claim is going too far:
The fact of the matter is that the senior-most member of an important non-profit was/is employed in a lucrative, full-time, relatively open-ended role by a firm whose profits depend directly on the work of that non-profit. There's no accusations in that statement, and thus no room for it to be written off as a conspiracy theory.
In terms of why it matters: wouldn't it at least deserve a raised eyebrow if, say...
- The chair of the WHO was employed by J&J?
- The chair of the ACLU was employed by a political party?
- The chair of Make-A-Wish was employed by a Hollywood agency?