[Animats]

PyPy will remain a free and open source project, but the community's structure and organizational underpinnings will be changing and the PyPy community will be exploring options outside of the charitable realm for its next phase of growth ("charitable" in the legal sense -- PyPy will remain a community project).

In other words, volunteers can contribute but others get to monetize?

People like you helping people like us help ourselves - Processed World.

[james412]

The idea of competent volunteers contributing is wonderful as a hypothetical, but if such things existed in reasonable numbers then this funding issue would likely be moot in the first place.

The reality is that the PyPy folk (all single-digit-number of them) have fought tooth and nail to keep the project going for well over a decade. I can't begin to imagine how much highly skilled labour has been poured in by such a small concentration, all for little more than praise and repute on a handful of IT forums.

Give them a break

[no_wizard]

In essence these projects live and die with funding. Donations just aren’t enough to pay the bills for full time developers there isn’t any real alternative.

I wish there was more corporate giving to foundations that could handle this sort of thing but we never built that culture in software unfortunately.

I don’t think it’s fair to frame this negatively at all, really misses the nuance of these situations

[R0b0t1]

I do think he captured it quite well -- that they are leaving it as a community project but only directly monetizing it for some people feels, well, wrong? It might be more neutral if they allocate funds for bounties and let anyone claim them, with the core developers obviously being able to address most bounties the fastest.

[pjmlp]

Alternatively FOSS generation could pay for their tools instead of expecting free beer everywhere, then such projects wouldn't need these kind of gymnastics.

[ed_elliott_asc]

Imagine that your main source of income is trying to implement something faster than some random person on the internet - that wouldn’t be fun.

What if you work on something but just before you finish someone else submits the same code.

What if their code is bug ridden but gets the bounty, that would be frustrating.

[__s]

No need for it to feel wrong

There are a few people who basically run PyPy development. They can do as they please. It's open source, so if you're so against it, you can make a "nobody profits" fork. Most outside contributions to open source projects are made by people who wanted to scratch an itch & then let the existing maintainers maintain that improvement. Their reward is the great software. This is still there so long as PyPy commits to remaining freely available

[R0b0t1]

Commercializing the project proper seems incorrect. If they want to take on consulting due to their experience that seems far better.

I never said nobody can make money.

[kubanczyk]

Enough said: "nobody profits" fork is the solution. /s

[Kednicma]

To add some substance, I used to have PyPy commit ability. I also have contributed almost no code to PyPy. This isn't for lack of wanting; my project has produced several interesting RPython modules which could plausibly be shared with other folks. It's because PyPy's core contributors, the dozen or so post-academic compiler engineers, are incredibly prolific and skilled compared to the rest of the contributor base. They outproduce me. Compare: One person implemented PyPy's massive-subset-of-Python typechecker, one person produced Nuitka's broken typechecker, and a small community team produced MyPy's conservative typechecker. The PyPy version's by far the best, including translation to C and a JIT generator and allowing nearly any sort of codegen to a high-level GC'd Java-like data model.

The tragedy is that the Python ecosystem broadly doesn't use PyPy and doesn't contribute much to it, neither code nor cash. Our compiler engineers are just as good as the folks working on CPython (and there's some overlap), but don't enjoy the powerful deep-pocketed corporate support.

[newen]

I imagine companies have made at least millions from using PyPy. And the core developers have not seen much of that monetization.