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I'm finding it difficult to understand why anybody thinks supporting Python2 should be done by volunteers?

What's "in it" for the volunteer? How much "fun" does "Supporting an old language where the original developers have moved on to a newer and more interesting version of the language, but there's a bunch of complaining people who still want the old language to be supported but they aren't offering to pay for it" sound? I'd rather sit in the park reading a book or walk a dog or something.

I mean, there's still people taking on COBOL contracts, because businesses consider their COBOL code to be important enough to keep maintained. But they sure as hell aren't "volunteering". They're getting paid rates that even bay area twenty-something FAANG-ers would be impressed by.

If Blackrock or The Vanguard Group or equivalent decided they needed continued Python2 support because it was a critical dependency on their ETF platforms (and they'd been foolish enough to not heed the "Goddamn it, just fucking upgrade to Python3 already!" advice from the core team for about a decade), I'm sure they could whip out their chequebooks and agree to a rate that Guido himself would agree support Python2 for them. But I'd hope and expect Guido (or whoever in the core team would be suitable candidates to do this work) to hold out for genuinely life-changing numbers of zeros on those cheques.

And if nobody is offering to write those cheques? Well maybe that says something about the seriousness of their complaints?



> I'm finding it difficult to understand why anybody thinks supporting Python2 should be done by volunteers?

I 100% agree. I was just responding to the parent post.




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