[toyg]

Sure, call me when he accounts for that money. Note how he’s replied twice already without even trying to do it. Besides, it’s the author of urllib who is surprised, not toyg from HN.

If one fosters a personality cult, one should be ready to stand scrutiny.

[antt]

Why? For developing that library I'd be perfectly happy if he'd made a fund raiser then spend the money on hookers and blow.

God knows that happens enough in finance for much worse outcomes.

[eesmith]

And frankly, the person you are complaining about thinks essentially the same thing, writing "But I figured that even if he spent $5k of the money on some unrelated computer, we could call that compensation for his past work, and it would still leave ~$25k to fulfill the promises he'd made in the fundraiser."

The point wasn't specifically a complaint about spending $5K on a computer but more establishing a pattern of a lack of transparency which the author thinks has an overall negative effect on community-funded, multi-author/community-run open source projects in Python.

Also, as described, it sounds like Smith - an author of the networking package which Reitz was planning to use - presumably knows what hardware needed to develop and test the network layer.

[toyg]

We clearly have very different concepts of what "prompting for donations for project X" actually means.