
Ask HN: Why is Python struggling to rasie funding? - dsr12
Hi,<p>I just came to know about a funding drive by Python Software Foundation. But it was disappointing to know that they are struggling to raise the required funding even though the target amount is just $20,000! I know a lot of large companies which are getting immense value by using Python and can easily make regular donations. But I am not sure why this is not the case.<p>Is it because we developers are not actively advocating to management to contribute funds to OSS projects? Is it because we are not aware that many of the OSS projects that we use are in need of funding? Will a website with the links to all OSS projects accepting donations help? I can build and lunch such a website. Please provide suggestions on how we can help amazing OSS projects like Python get well funded.<p>Please Donate: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.python.org&#x2F;psf&#x2F;donations&#x2F;2018-q2-drive&#x2F;
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eesmith
It's the free rider problem. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-
rider_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem)

I think people think that Python is well-funded because it is so widely used.
Why pay anything more that case?

See [https://www.fordfoundation.org/media/2976/roads-and-
bridges-...](https://www.fordfoundation.org/media/2976/roads-and-bridges-the-
unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure.pdf) which goes into the topic
in depth. At ~140 pages, it is not a short read.

Summary at [https://medium.com/@jayfresh/open-source-projects-are-a-
lot-...](https://medium.com/@jayfresh/open-source-projects-are-a-lot-more-
exciting-than-roads-and-bridges-4743948f82a6) . Posted several times to HN,
with little in the way of comments:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Roads%20and%20Bridges&sort=byP...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Roads%20and%20Bridges&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)
.

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Eridrus
I think your premise is wrong. The page you linked to alone mentions half a
million in revenue & grants.

The Wikipedia page links to a Guidestar report that notes 2.9M in revenue in
2015.

Python is valuable, but how valuable is the iterative development on the
actual core? There are still a lot of companies on 2.7 who have basically
decided that the last decade of Python work isn't really useful enough to even
do a free upgrade and are only starting to migrate now that all the libraries
are ending support.

~~~
suzuki
I think the invention of Python 3 was an unhappy thing. It seems true that
"there are still a lot of companies on 2.7" and it would be natural that they
think "the last decade of Python work isn't really useful".

The basic incompatibility between Python 2 and 3 comes from Unicode strings.
The design of Python 3 might be adequate ten years ago when there are many
character encodings in the world. However, they began to converge to UTF-8,
you know. It would be rational now to use byte strings transparently overall
just like in Golang. What people wanted would be a modernized Python that is
compatible with Python 2 and it would have been feasible.

~~~
jcrubino
Absolutely correct. Performance took a big hit in python 3 as well.

If users are performance bound through use-case, chances are they are using
pypy. If pypy3 is going to lag python3.6 + why upgrade at all. Pypy just got
numpy and pandas.

My sense is that Python 3 was redesigned with web-services in mind like
Youtube, when the highest code contributing use-case in python was science and
data pipeline related. The science users are all still using python, but only
in ways that Python 3 enhancements were not especially important for.

