It’s a serious indictment of something that this is the
situation. You’d think with so many software engineers involved
we’d all agree that something working isn’t a reason to not
maintain it, and we shouldn’t have to display how bad the
support need is for something like this.
You’d think that, but as an employee of another similar open source
software foundation representing projects relied on by many
billion-dollar/Fortune 50 companies, I can say without hesitation
that squeezing funding from those corporate purses is extremely
hard, and finding enough to pay (not even going rate) for just one
talented engineer is often insurmountable when you take the other
costs of operating a non-profit into account. It’s much easier to
get interested companies to pay someone directly (i.e. assign one of
their employees to you), but more often than not you’ll see them get
promoted or reassigned into another division the moment you’ve
finished training them up to do the tasks you need; and then you’re
back at square one again.
Thing is, this situation has only been getting worse… again not
just for Python, but everywhere in open source. It’s a classic
Tragedy of the Commons: companies are unlikely to fund open source
communities that are critical to their own business because “someone
else will do it,” so it ends up falling on a handful of volunteers
and people donating their own time after hours because they’re
already being paid to work full time on other stuff. The few
companies who do donate get asked for more and more favors to make
up for all the ones that don’t, and execs/investors start to ask why
they bother to shoulder the load while their competitors are getting
a free ride. Every year I find myself wondering which companies are
just going to stop sponsoring our community infrastructure efforts,
and whether we’ll be able to find enough new donors to take their
place. It shouldn’t be like this, and I get the impression most
users are comfortably oblivious to the problem until it critically
impacts something they rely on.