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On Fri, May 24, 2019, 08:08 Ben Cail <benjamin\_cail@brown.edu> wrote:
Why not have the PSF hire someone (or multiple people) to be paid to
work on the maintenance burden? This could be similar to the Django
fellows:
https://www.djangoproject.com/fundraising/#who-is-the-django-fellow. It
seems like a good thing for Django, and Python is used by many more
people than Django. Why not pay someone to do the work that others don't
want to do? The person in this position could be guided by the PSF
and/or the Steering Council, to do the work most necessary for the good
of the language as a whole (like maintaining old modules that other core
devs don't want to work on).
You could market it together with the maintenance burden: "you want to
use all these old modules, but we don't want to maintain them. So pay us
some money, and we'll hire someone to maintain them."
I think the basic idea here is a good one, but:
- transitioning from an all-volunteer project to a mixed paid-staff+volunteers project is a big step, and we'll need to take time to figure out what that would look like before people are comfortable with it.
- even if we have folks paid to help with maintenance, it won't mean we suddenly have infinite resources and can do everything. We'll still need to pick which things to prioritize. And I think if you asked 100 people to name the most critical issues facing Python today, most of them would not say "maintaining xdrlib".
-n