[pid-1]

> Backed by the Zig Software Foundation, the project is financially sustainable. These core team members are paid for their time: (lists five people)

That's quite impressive. For comparison, Python had 2 full time paid devs in 2019 (not sure about now).

[samwillis]

I suspect some of this comes down to how larger donations are made. For Python they have often had people working at companies donating time on their employers books to the development of it.

GVR for example works for Microsoft and has worked at Dropbox and other places, but spends much of his time on Python. So he isn't listed as an employee of the foundation, but at times is full time.

If a company donates employee time they have more influence on the project than donating cash to pay for development.

The fact that Zig had the cash donation to do it this way is brilliant, and probably a better model.

[kristoff_it]

We're also pretty efficient, more than 90% of the donated money is used to pay developers (the rest goes to administrative costs, CI infrastructure, etc).

[the_mitsuhiko]

More important than the number is that the foundation actually pays the core developers. Python suffers from having almost exclusively volunteer work and those volunteers often are not interested in solving the problems of the foundation or community (eg: packaging etc.).

The most the PSF could do is “bolt on” a developer to solve packaging in yet another non embraced and supported way.