I enjoyed reading this perspective, but I think it left out some crucial information. My thesis here is that the PSF - already woefully underfunded, with PyPI kept afloat by a massive in-kind donation that gets to stay off the books - grossly misallocates the funding it does receive. Further, there are obvious and serious gaps in the consideration they pay to the moral values they profess to hold most dear.
> The PSF currently employs 12 full-time staff members. Members of the board do not directly manage the activities of the staff—in fact board members telling staff what to do is highly inappropriate. Instead, the board is responsible for hiring an Executive Director—currently Deb Nicholson...
Ms. Nicholson is listed as both a board member and a staff member, and also an officer. Another staff member, Olivia Sauls, is also listed as an officer. Between officers, the board and staff, I count 25 unique individuals, who are presumably all paid.
> Many PSF activities are carried out by these volunteers, in particular via Work Groups.
The membership of these Work Groups also has heavy overlap. For example, four members of the Code of Conduct Work Group are on the Board as well - including Ms. Nicholson.
It's also worth noting that members of Work Groups are not necessarily elected. For example, the cited charter for the new "User Success" Work Group doesn't provide for the addition or removal of members at all, even though it's intended to operate perpetually. The Code of Conduct Work Group appoints its members, who may apply by private contact.
> You can see how that money has been spent in the 2023 Annual Impact Report.... The most significant categories of expenditure in 2023 were PyCon US ($1,800,000), our Grants program ($677,000), Infrastructure (including PyPI) ($286,000) and our Fiscal Sponsorees ($204,000)—I’ll describe these in more detail below.
I can't readily find these numbers in the report, but I can find that staffing for 2023 cost a total of about 1.3 million.
(The report for this year is, for some reason, only available in PDF format. Others pointed out that this was not great for accessibility - supposedly a core value of the PSF and several Work Groups - and this was agreed about, and then as far as I can tell nothing was done.)
> More recently, the PSF has started employing Developers in Residence to directly support the work of both the core Python team and initiatives such as the Python Package Index.
To my understanding, there are currently three of these: Łukasz Langa - the individual who implemented my ban from the Python Discourse forum - since 2021, and Petr Viktorin and Serhiy Storchaka since January.
That makes 28 likely people on the payroll by my count. Other core developers - dozens of them - operate purely on a volunteer basis. (In talks at PyCon, Raymond Hettinger used to joke about Guido van Rossum offering to double his $0 salary.)
> PyPI’s numbers are staggering. Today there are 570,000 projects consisting of 12,035,133 files, serving 1.9 billion downloads a day (that number from PyPI Stats). Bandwidth for these downloads is donated by Fastly, a PSF Visionary Sponsor who recently signed a five year agreement to continue this service.
Per the report, this amounts to over 600 petabytes of network traffic from PyPI per year. This would cost about 12 million dollars a year - nearly triple the operating budget - at market rates (https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/).
My experiments suggest that about a quarter of this could be eliminated simply by enabling and then mandating the use of LZMA (XZ) compression for sdists and wheels (which currently must both use ordinary Gzip compression). There is support for LZMA in the Python standard library. (The one-time cost of recompressing existing archives should be minuscule in comparison - granted that LZMA is computationally expensive, but currently the daily download volume is on the order of dozens of times the entire repository size.)
> The annual US Python Conference—PyCon US—is a big part of the PSF’s annual activities and operations. With over 3,000 attendees each year (and a $1.8m budget for 2023) running that conference represents a full-time job for several PSF staff members.... the importance of PyCon US to the Python community is such that the PSF is happy to lose money running the event if necessary.
Also for a sense of scale: the PyCon US Youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@PyConUS) has about 29k subscribers and a total of 1.35 million views across all videos. For comparison, that's not many more people than those taking the JetBrains Python developer survey each year (e.g. https://lp.jetbrains.com/python-developers-survey-2023/ claims 25k), and less than a sixth as many views as for the question "How do I list all files of a directory [in Python]?" on Stack Overflow (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3207219/). But perhaps "the Python community" (with inclusivity as a core value) is meant to represent a much smaller group than Python developers in general.
I enjoyed reading this perspective, but I think it left out some crucial information. My thesis here is that the PSF - already woefully underfunded, with PyPI kept afloat by a massive in-kind donation that gets to stay off the books - grossly misallocates the funding it does receive. Further, there are obvious and serious gaps in the consideration they pay to the moral values they profess to hold most dear.
> The PSF currently employs 12 full-time staff members. Members of the board do not directly manage the activities of the staff—in fact board members telling staff what to do is highly inappropriate. Instead, the board is responsible for hiring an Executive Director—currently Deb Nicholson...
Ms. Nicholson is listed as both a board member and a staff member, and also an officer. Another staff member, Olivia Sauls, is also listed as an officer. Between officers, the board and staff, I count 25 unique individuals, who are presumably all paid.
> Many PSF activities are carried out by these volunteers, in particular via Work Groups.
The membership of these Work Groups also has heavy overlap. For example, four members of the Code of Conduct Work Group are on the Board as well - including Ms. Nicholson.
It's also worth noting that members of Work Groups are not necessarily elected. For example, the cited charter for the new "User Success" Work Group doesn't provide for the addition or removal of members at all, even though it's intended to operate perpetually. The Code of Conduct Work Group appoints its members, who may apply by private contact.
> You can see how that money has been spent in the 2023 Annual Impact Report.... The most significant categories of expenditure in 2023 were PyCon US ($1,800,000), our Grants program ($677,000), Infrastructure (including PyPI) ($286,000) and our Fiscal Sponsorees ($204,000)—I’ll describe these in more detail below.
I can't readily find these numbers in the report, but I can find that staffing for 2023 cost a total of about 1.3 million.
(The report for this year is, for some reason, only available in PDF format. Others pointed out that this was not great for accessibility - supposedly a core value of the PSF and several Work Groups - and this was agreed about, and then as far as I can tell nothing was done.)
> More recently, the PSF has started employing Developers in Residence to directly support the work of both the core Python team and initiatives such as the Python Package Index.
To my understanding, there are currently three of these: Łukasz Langa - the individual who implemented my ban from the Python Discourse forum - since 2021, and Petr Viktorin and Serhiy Storchaka since January.
That makes 28 likely people on the payroll by my count. Other core developers - dozens of them - operate purely on a volunteer basis. (In talks at PyCon, Raymond Hettinger used to joke about Guido van Rossum offering to double his $0 salary.)
> PyPI’s numbers are staggering. Today there are 570,000 projects consisting of 12,035,133 files, serving 1.9 billion downloads a day (that number from PyPI Stats). Bandwidth for these downloads is donated by Fastly, a PSF Visionary Sponsor who recently signed a five year agreement to continue this service.
Per the report, this amounts to over 600 petabytes of network traffic from PyPI per year. This would cost about 12 million dollars a year - nearly triple the operating budget - at market rates (https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/).
My experiments suggest that about a quarter of this could be eliminated simply by enabling and then mandating the use of LZMA (XZ) compression for sdists and wheels (which currently must both use ordinary Gzip compression). There is support for LZMA in the Python standard library. (The one-time cost of recompressing existing archives should be minuscule in comparison - granted that LZMA is computationally expensive, but currently the daily download volume is on the order of dozens of times the entire repository size.)
> The annual US Python Conference—PyCon US—is a big part of the PSF’s annual activities and operations. With over 3,000 attendees each year (and a $1.8m budget for 2023) running that conference represents a full-time job for several PSF staff members.... the importance of PyCon US to the Python community is such that the PSF is happy to lose money running the event if necessary.
For a sense of scale, this is 200 times the grant that made DjangoCon Africa possible - though it ran into serious issues due to underfunding (https://pythonafrica.blogspot.com/2023/12/an-open-letter-to-...).
Also for a sense of scale: the PyCon US Youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@PyConUS) has about 29k subscribers and a total of 1.35 million views across all videos. For comparison, that's not many more people than those taking the JetBrains Python developer survey each year (e.g. https://lp.jetbrains.com/python-developers-survey-2023/ claims 25k), and less than a sixth as many views as for the question "How do I list all files of a directory [in Python]?" on Stack Overflow (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3207219/). But perhaps "the Python community" (with inclusivity as a core value) is meant to represent a much smaller group than Python developers in general.