Many of the comments here are disappointing. Regardless of your opinion of the PSF or its leadership, you should be opposed to this kind of clawback threat because it nakedly represents an attempt to place a non-profit in a double bind: even attempting to comply with these requirements would allow a politicized IRA to claim that the PSF is failing to uphold its stated mission.
Organizations should avoid funding by the government whenever possible. It creates incentives for the organization to align with the politics of the government. I am all for this outcome, as it’s a net win for PSF and any organization that can fund itself
But if they don't get it from the government, they'll get it somewhere else, and then that will create incentives for the organization to align with the politics of whoever gives them the money. There's no escaping the implicit dependence that comes with accepting money.
I think we just need to reduce the amount of discretion involved in government action of all kinds.
Regardless of how you feel about the nature of government funding, you should be able to cogitate a strong argument for the U.S. government not playing “gotcha” games with its funding.
Yes, outcomes like these are the best way to avoid dependency on a central authority. I’m more for moving away from the ability of such authorities to exercise such power, rather than hoping they don’t abuse it. They certainly will eventually
It wasn't exactly the Streisand effect, but I remember thinking the whole flourishing of trans rights and acceptance between 2017 and 2021 never would have happened if Hillary had won. Is there a name for this phenomenon?
Did both parties implicitly understand up until 2017 that going too hard too fast is counterproductive?
2014 was years before it became a mainstream cry to treat trans women as cis women. I didn’t really hear or notice this until the late 2010s.
I also believe the trans community hurt itself and its own members by pushing this narrative/falling into this trap, though things like the bathroom bill made it inevitable?
Perhaps it’s old fashioned, but what I believe is an acknowledgement and celebration of differences. What the new generation pushed is hiding those differences; by pretending there are none.
It’s much harder to argue against “let’s all agree we’re all human and make this work”.
In the past no one cared about cis or trans because it didn't matter, but they found how it could be used for political leverage to divert attention away from more important things like the actual quality of work.
I don't understand the implication of your first sentence.
The NC Bathroom Bill passed in March 2016, and it had an immediate flurry of corporate backlash that lasted to the partial repeal in 2017. The bill was part of a growing amount of anti-trans rhetoric (and legislation) from the Republicans starting a few years before. But it was the first bathroom bill AFAICT.
Are you saying that the Republicans would have been less likely to pass that bill under a Clinton presidency? If so, what's the extraordinary evidence for that?
Alternatively, if you are saying they would have been more emboldened to pass it, are you suggesting that the backlash would have been smaller under a Clinton presidency? That's in the realm of possibility, but again what's the evidence here? Obama had already shifted to supporting gay marriage before the relevant Supreme Court case (probably due to Biden's gaffe of pre-emptively announcing his own support for it). So I just don't see why you would assume a Clinton presidency would effectively muzzle support for trans rights in this case, or have any effect whatsoever on the NC Bill and its aftermath.
Software quality has been on a downhill trend that's steepened noticeably in the past ~15 years. Doesn't take a genius to put two and two together and see what's really happening but they'd rather we ignore the politically inconvenient elephant in the room.
Your downvotes don't matter, we see the truth regardless.
In the brief reading of the article that I had time for, I couldn't find the exact reason why the grant was rejected. Does anti-DEI automatically mean discrimination? Call me naive, but as far as I can see, DEI isn't necessary for a volunteer project. Why does it matter how many of a project's contributors are transgender?
The PSF withdrew their application for the grant from the US government after being presented with terms that included "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws", which conflicts with their mission statement: "The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers."
It's not just about transgender people. When you have a tech organisation and say "all our members are old white guys... maybe there's something that keeps others away from us? let's make sure there are no barriers", you're engaging in DEI.
Remember when the government went anti-DEI crazy and started covering displays of influential women and people of colour at places like NSA? That kind of decision maker may be handling the PSF's grant.
Would everyone agree with that definition, though? It seems like discussions around DEI tend to go in circles, because proponents see bad implementations as not really DEI, and opponents see good implementations as not really DEI either.
I recently read in the local news that some city department, in order to comply with anti-DEI stuff, was changing its name to remove the word 'diversity'... and nothing else. DEI has no legal definition. It feels like the new "woke", where the actual meaning is irrelevant, and its only real purpose is tribalistic social signalling.
By accepting the grant they are giving themselves a legal responsibility to “not do DEI” where the government arbitrarily decides what DEI is. Even something like employing a trans software engineer or talking about the impact Python is having in POC communities could be considered reason to go after PSF legally or rescind the grant. It’s just not worth the risk for the reward.
That’s really the problem: the grant comes with vague terms covering the entire organization, which could be arbitrarily redefined at any time in the future. It’s like signing a contract to deliver a product without any clauses protecting you if the client keeps changing their mind.
Naming things is hard. Yet we deal with lots of other vague concepts without losing our minds. There are some extreme voices, but somehow I've never heard anyone actually digging deeper into the issues to describe dei as just tribalistic signalling. When you strip out everything else, maybe that's a sign you lost all nuance?
In development we'd just accept it as normal to say "Putting each literal value in its own module is not a reasonable application of modular design." without claiming that the name "modular design" is now misunderstood and irrelevant.
> It's not just about transgender people. When you have a tech organisation and say "all our members are old white guys... maybe there's something that keeps others away from us? let's make sure there are no barriers", you're engaging in DEI.
Yeah and that's obviously problematic, because the common way that's implemented is a either a whole lot of strange brainwashing courses or active discrimination against "old white guys".
> the common way that's implemented is a either a whole lot of strange brainwashing courses or active discrimination against "old white guys"
Are the common, strange brainwashing courses in the room right now?
This is obviously a bad faith take - trying to prevent anyone from even saying, let alone promoting, diversity because sometimes people discriminate (which is already illegal) is absurd even without acknowledging that discrimination happens already. This argument looks a LOT like "keep discriminating against people that aren't like me".
Constructive criticism for good faith people out there reading this who are concerned about "DEI" causing discrimination -- acknowledge all discrimination is bad and take a real stab at working on it as a whole. If your only "attempt" to prevent discrimination is speaking up against people trying to include more diverse sets of people in programming communities then you're doing it wrong (and showing your ass).
> It's not just about transgender people. When you have a tech organisation and say "all our members are old white guys... maybe there's something that keeps others away from us? let's make sure there are no barriers", you're engaging in DEI.
I would like to see this kind of thing treated, socially and legally, as equivalent to saying "This tech organization has a lot of Jews... can we do something about that?" (Indeed, many of the exact same people who are classified as white men who are disproportionately present in tech organizations by DEI advocates are also Ashkenazi or Sephardic Jews, and the DEI advocates are treating their white male identity rather than their Jewish identity as politically salient). If some organization refuses to refrain from treating the disproportionate presence of white men in some organization - or the assumed disproportionate presence of white men - as a problem, I think it's reasonable for the US federal government to refuse to give them grant money.
You must understand the difference between those two statements, I refuse to believe that you do not, so this response is more aimed toward people that might not realize what you’re doing here. There is a vast difference between “all” and “a lot of”.
To solve the “all” problem, none of those people need to be removed from the organization. It merely states that diversity is good. To solve the “a lot of” problem necessitates getting rid of those members.
This is fundamentally why one is discriminatory and the other is not.
Yes, once we end up in a situation where majority of companies are run by Jews and alternatives are worse, it's harder to function in the society as not a Jew, we're facing decades long discrimination in different aspects of life, and individual action in response to incidents of discrimination is not enough... then I sure hope dei will concentrate on societal change to help non-Jews.
it the previous hn post, tbe major topic was that the government could claw back its money with any flimsey premise, about anything the organization does or people related to it do, and not specific to the project the grant was for
like, somebody going to a "women in tech" conference could result in suddenly having to find millions in cash to pay back the government.
Guido has been fairly vocal about mentoring exclusively women in Python, because he's of the opinion that they need the help much more than men as far as breaking into the industry.
But admitting in public that you are giving preferential treatment to anyone other than white men is an instant rage-boner for the Trump administration.
> But admitting in public that you are giving preferential treatment to anyone other than white men is an instant rage-boner for the Trump administration.
Admitting in public that you are giving preferential treatment to white men is an instant rage-boner for most of Trump's opponents and also every previous US presidential administration and prestigious institution for as long as I've been alive. If individuals in their private capacity want to do preferential treatment for specific demographic categories, they can do so; but I don't want them to get government grants that comes out of my taxes for it.
Please please please insist your government money stop being spent for all the other discrimination going on. I don't think python grants should be anywhere near the top of that list.
The government shouldn’t be spending itself further into unsustainable debt. And state funding of private organizations will always be subject to the politics of the state, leaking those policies into the organizations they fund. Avoiding both is a net win for everyone, so this is a great outcome.
Funding supply chain security for one of the most popular open source ecosystems in the world isn’t even a rounding error on the budget.
The debt increases are a political choice: the budget was balanced at the turn of the century, which was used as the pretext for cutting taxes to a level which ensured the problems we’re seeing now based on highly unrealistic growth projections. Cutting all funding on open source, or science, or foreign aid, or even all of those combined is a drop in the bucket compared to our cost of healthcare being whole multiples higher than in our peer countries.
They announced grassroots donations for 10% of the total. That’s good, but still short of where it should be for something so popular.
I think of it like crime or natural disaster: a PyPI compromise could easily cause economic damages on the order of a bad storm or small terrorist attack. Collectively we spend billions trying to mitigate those societally rather than telling each person to defend themselves, and this feels like the same idea adapted to a different context.
Externalizing responsibility while taking the value of things and calling that a net win until the consequences come up seems short sighted.
Hopefully nobody else funds this critical infrastructure piece of both the government and private sector software world. Especially someone of a country/color/gender you don't like.
I think you’ve badly misread the numbers here: donors have only covered a small fraction of what this NSF grant would have covered.
(And of course, it should go without saying that relying on the public to react to the government’s capricious behavior does not make for a stable funding situation for a nonprofit.)
Yeah, after what they did to Tim Peters in recent times, I don't see myself donating.
Can you clarify what you’re referring to?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41234180
I wonder is this something all grants have now? edit: yep that seems to be the case https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/gc1-may25.pdf
Many of the comments here are disappointing. Regardless of your opinion of the PSF or its leadership, you should be opposed to this kind of clawback threat because it nakedly represents an attempt to place a non-profit in a double bind: even attempting to comply with these requirements would allow a politicized IRA to claim that the PSF is failing to uphold its stated mission.
Organizations should avoid funding by the government whenever possible. It creates incentives for the organization to align with the politics of the government. I am all for this outcome, as it’s a net win for PSF and any organization that can fund itself
But if they don't get it from the government, they'll get it somewhere else, and then that will create incentives for the organization to align with the politics of whoever gives them the money. There's no escaping the implicit dependence that comes with accepting money.
I think we just need to reduce the amount of discretion involved in government action of all kinds.
> But if they don't get it from the government, they'll get it somewhere else
It's not an equal comparison. The biggest governments in the world don't need anymore consolidated power.
> I think we just need to reduce the amount of discretion involved in government action of all kinds.
This we both agree on.
This is exactly what set OpenBSD back in the early 2000s.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/defense-agency-pulls-openbsd-f...
Maybe that $500k that was earmarked for OpenSSL vulnerability testing would have found Heartbleed.
Regardless of how you feel about the nature of government funding, you should be able to cogitate a strong argument for the U.S. government not playing “gotcha” games with its funding.
Yes, outcomes like these are the best way to avoid dependency on a central authority. I’m more for moving away from the ability of such authorities to exercise such power, rather than hoping they don’t abuse it. They certainly will eventually
Good for them. This admin can take their money and go fuck themselves.
It wasn't exactly the Streisand effect, but I remember thinking the whole flourishing of trans rights and acceptance between 2017 and 2021 never would have happened if Hillary had won. Is there a name for this phenomenon?
Did both parties implicitly understand up until 2017 that going too hard too fast is counterproductive?
I don't think this timeline is quite accurate - the 'transgender tipping point' Time magazine cover was in May 2014.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_tipping_point
Disagree.
2014 was years before it became a mainstream cry to treat trans women as cis women. I didn’t really hear or notice this until the late 2010s.
I also believe the trans community hurt itself and its own members by pushing this narrative/falling into this trap, though things like the bathroom bill made it inevitable?
Perhaps it’s old fashioned, but what I believe is an acknowledgement and celebration of differences. What the new generation pushed is hiding those differences; by pretending there are none.
It’s much harder to argue against “let’s all agree we’re all human and make this work”.
In the past no one cared about cis or trans because it didn't matter, but they found how it could be used for political leverage to divert attention away from more important things like the actual quality of work.
I don't understand the implication of your first sentence.
The NC Bathroom Bill passed in March 2016, and it had an immediate flurry of corporate backlash that lasted to the partial repeal in 2017. The bill was part of a growing amount of anti-trans rhetoric (and legislation) from the Republicans starting a few years before. But it was the first bathroom bill AFAICT.
Are you saying that the Republicans would have been less likely to pass that bill under a Clinton presidency? If so, what's the extraordinary evidence for that?
Alternatively, if you are saying they would have been more emboldened to pass it, are you suggesting that the backlash would have been smaller under a Clinton presidency? That's in the realm of possibility, but again what's the evidence here? Obama had already shifted to supporting gay marriage before the relevant Supreme Court case (probably due to Biden's gaffe of pre-emptively announcing his own support for it). So I just don't see why you would assume a Clinton presidency would effectively muzzle support for trans rights in this case, or have any effect whatsoever on the NC Bill and its aftermath.
Edit: clarifications
> Did both parties implicitly understand up until 2017 that going too hard too fast is counterproductive?
Of course they did, as they do now, it's game politics 101, it's all in the game plan.
>Did both parties implicitly understand up until 2017 that going too hard too fast is counterproductive?
Politicians know this, people don't necessarily.
The wall and the egg phenomenon?
I've been really sad to see Python's stance on this. It really shows that management is out of touch with reality.
God forbid they stand up for people and fight for an inclusive work environment. How dare they!
Inclusive of idiocy?
Software quality has been on a downhill trend that's steepened noticeably in the past ~15 years. Doesn't take a genius to put two and two together and see what's really happening but they'd rather we ignore the politically inconvenient elephant in the room.
Your downvotes don't matter, we see the truth regardless.
Yeah brother! If it weren’t for all these blacks and womens we’d be in software utopia.
In the brief reading of the article that I had time for, I couldn't find the exact reason why the grant was rejected. Does anti-DEI automatically mean discrimination? Call me naive, but as far as I can see, DEI isn't necessary for a volunteer project. Why does it matter how many of a project's contributors are transgender?
The PSF withdrew their application for the grant from the US government after being presented with terms that included "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws", which conflicts with their mission statement: "The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers."
[1]: https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-funding-statement.h...
It's not just about transgender people. When you have a tech organisation and say "all our members are old white guys... maybe there's something that keeps others away from us? let's make sure there are no barriers", you're engaging in DEI.
Remember when the government went anti-DEI crazy and started covering displays of influential women and people of colour at places like NSA? That kind of decision maker may be handling the PSF's grant.
Would everyone agree with that definition, though? It seems like discussions around DEI tend to go in circles, because proponents see bad implementations as not really DEI, and opponents see good implementations as not really DEI either.
I recently read in the local news that some city department, in order to comply with anti-DEI stuff, was changing its name to remove the word 'diversity'... and nothing else. DEI has no legal definition. It feels like the new "woke", where the actual meaning is irrelevant, and its only real purpose is tribalistic social signalling.
By accepting the grant they are giving themselves a legal responsibility to “not do DEI” where the government arbitrarily decides what DEI is. Even something like employing a trans software engineer or talking about the impact Python is having in POC communities could be considered reason to go after PSF legally or rescind the grant. It’s just not worth the risk for the reward.
That’s really the problem: the grant comes with vague terms covering the entire organization, which could be arbitrarily redefined at any time in the future. It’s like signing a contract to deliver a product without any clauses protecting you if the client keeps changing their mind.
Naming things is hard. Yet we deal with lots of other vague concepts without losing our minds. There are some extreme voices, but somehow I've never heard anyone actually digging deeper into the issues to describe dei as just tribalistic signalling. When you strip out everything else, maybe that's a sign you lost all nuance?
In development we'd just accept it as normal to say "Putting each literal value in its own module is not a reasonable application of modular design." without claiming that the name "modular design" is now misunderstood and irrelevant.
> It's not just about transgender people. When you have a tech organisation and say "all our members are old white guys... maybe there's something that keeps others away from us? let's make sure there are no barriers", you're engaging in DEI.
Yeah and that's obviously problematic, because the common way that's implemented is a either a whole lot of strange brainwashing courses or active discrimination against "old white guys".
> the common way that's implemented is a either a whole lot of strange brainwashing courses or active discrimination against "old white guys"
Are the common, strange brainwashing courses in the room right now?
This is obviously a bad faith take - trying to prevent anyone from even saying, let alone promoting, diversity because sometimes people discriminate (which is already illegal) is absurd even without acknowledging that discrimination happens already. This argument looks a LOT like "keep discriminating against people that aren't like me".
Constructive criticism for good faith people out there reading this who are concerned about "DEI" causing discrimination -- acknowledge all discrimination is bad and take a real stab at working on it as a whole. If your only "attempt" to prevent discrimination is speaking up against people trying to include more diverse sets of people in programming communities then you're doing it wrong (and showing your ass).
> It's not just about transgender people. When you have a tech organisation and say "all our members are old white guys... maybe there's something that keeps others away from us? let's make sure there are no barriers", you're engaging in DEI.
I would like to see this kind of thing treated, socially and legally, as equivalent to saying "This tech organization has a lot of Jews... can we do something about that?" (Indeed, many of the exact same people who are classified as white men who are disproportionately present in tech organizations by DEI advocates are also Ashkenazi or Sephardic Jews, and the DEI advocates are treating their white male identity rather than their Jewish identity as politically salient). If some organization refuses to refrain from treating the disproportionate presence of white men in some organization - or the assumed disproportionate presence of white men - as a problem, I think it's reasonable for the US federal government to refuse to give them grant money.
You must understand the difference between those two statements, I refuse to believe that you do not, so this response is more aimed toward people that might not realize what you’re doing here. There is a vast difference between “all” and “a lot of”.
To solve the “all” problem, none of those people need to be removed from the organization. It merely states that diversity is good. To solve the “a lot of” problem necessitates getting rid of those members.
This is fundamentally why one is discriminatory and the other is not.
Yes, once we end up in a situation where majority of companies are run by Jews and alternatives are worse, it's harder to function in the society as not a Jew, we're facing decades long discrimination in different aspects of life, and individual action in response to incidents of discrimination is not enough... then I sure hope dei will concentrate on societal change to help non-Jews.
In the meantime, let's keep to real examples.
You might find this video interview with our PSF executive director useful to better understand the issue at hand: https://youtu.be/Ac3H16pPLNI
it the previous hn post, tbe major topic was that the government could claw back its money with any flimsey premise, about anything the organization does or people related to it do, and not specific to the project the grant was for
like, somebody going to a "women in tech" conference could result in suddenly having to find millions in cash to pay back the government.
Guido has been fairly vocal about mentoring exclusively women in Python, because he's of the opinion that they need the help much more than men as far as breaking into the industry.
But admitting in public that you are giving preferential treatment to anyone other than white men is an instant rage-boner for the Trump administration.
> But admitting in public that you are giving preferential treatment to anyone other than white men is an instant rage-boner for the Trump administration.
And for half the hn readership, it appears
Admitting in public that you are giving preferential treatment to white men is an instant rage-boner for most of Trump's opponents and also every previous US presidential administration and prestigious institution for as long as I've been alive. If individuals in their private capacity want to do preferential treatment for specific demographic categories, they can do so; but I don't want them to get government grants that comes out of my taxes for it.
Please please please insist your government money stop being spent for all the other discrimination going on. I don't think python grants should be anywhere near the top of that list.
The government shouldn’t be spending itself further into unsustainable debt. And state funding of private organizations will always be subject to the politics of the state, leaking those policies into the organizations they fund. Avoiding both is a net win for everyone, so this is a great outcome.
Funding supply chain security for one of the most popular open source ecosystems in the world isn’t even a rounding error on the budget.
The debt increases are a political choice: the budget was balanced at the turn of the century, which was used as the pretext for cutting taxes to a level which ensured the problems we’re seeing now based on highly unrealistic growth projections. Cutting all funding on open source, or science, or foreign aid, or even all of those combined is a drop in the bucket compared to our cost of healthcare being whole multiples higher than in our peer countries.
And yet, this organization found a way to grow its funding base by avoiding government handouts. It’s a net win
They announced grassroots donations for 10% of the total. That’s good, but still short of where it should be for something so popular.
I think of it like crime or natural disaster: a PyPI compromise could easily cause economic damages on the order of a bad storm or small terrorist attack. Collectively we spend billions trying to mitigate those societally rather than telling each person to defend themselves, and this feels like the same idea adapted to a different context.
Externalizing responsibility while taking the value of things and calling that a net win until the consequences come up seems short sighted.
Hopefully nobody else funds this critical infrastructure piece of both the government and private sector software world. Especially someone of a country/color/gender you don't like.
I think you’ve badly misread the numbers here: donors have only covered a small fraction of what this NSF grant would have covered.
(And of course, it should go without saying that relying on the public to react to the government’s capricious behavior does not make for a stable funding situation for a nonprofit.)
More money to give to Tesla