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Comment by 0x27135614 | Hacker News Reader

python-dev is a repressive organization run by those who put themselves up for election and get 30 out of 90 votes.

Inexplicably, the elected "leaders" also have/had positions at Google, Microsoft, RedHat and Bloomberg (the Googlers may have been fired this year).

The council prosecutes those who contradict the hierarchy and have an own opinion. Tim Peters has contradicted the council on many occasions. The council is unable to summarize even simple mail conversations, disregards historical context, applies the CoC selectively and does not shy away from defamation.

The council censors and does not let the accused defend themselves.

Tim Peters is the good guy here. Intelligent, non-threatening and easy to deal with. Like in the Soviet Union, these qualities make him a threat to the system.

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This is open source. The traditional remedy to some disagreement over project managemeng is to fork. If everyone agrees the fork wins, if the CoC people are in the right the fork dies. The great thing about free software is you can vote with your feet when it comes to management issues.

> if the CoC people are in the right the fork dies.

I would disagree with that part. Forks are highly difficult. OpenBSD succeeded, so did the gcc fork that was sponsored by Cygwin but then merged back into mainline gcc. Otherwise?

Then, the council owns the entire marketing organization PSF, which owns the conferences, which means undesirables can and will be deplatformed.

It is much much harder to do a successful fork in 2024 than it was in 2005. Open source is corporate now, and the employees will stick with the official version and not the fork.

I think you could literally write an XPython fork that is 2 times faster, has a 100% compatibility but would still be marketed out of existence.

If Python had a free standard, it might be possible. But that will not happen.

Besides from anything about CoC, your understanding of Python fork is extremely wrong. There were numerous forks and reimplementations of Python over past two decades, some of which are mature enough to be widely known to the Python community, and yet none of them were able to fully dethrone CPython because:

- Python turned out to be annoyingly dynamic, in contrast with usual instincts. This meant that even CPython itself had to sacrifice some edge-case compatibility for every release.

- Moreover, Python C API was also hard to change without breaking some extensions, which are ironically why Python got popular in the first place! Many alternative mechanisms, notably HPy, were proposed but they all fell short of replacing the current C API. Nowadays CPython is more willing to get rid of as many internal but publicly exposed APIs as possible though.

- Python has a free standard, it's located at https://docs.python.org/ and is enough to implement something that resembles Python. You probably meant the sort-of-formal standard (which also mean many different things), but the mere existence of such "standard" doesn't mean anything, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40519050

Yes it is that simple and it’s also not. You need financial muscle behind the fork. E.g deno vs node, valkey vs redis, etc.

The discussion got heated but I think Tim Peters is arguing for a more stringent suspension rule as opposed to a simple majority vote. CoC violations are serious and should be debated better than just setting up a vote. The debate should be publicly discussed and the findings and reasons published as well.

Why is there opposition to that?

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