On 31 August 2016 at 19:33, M.-A. Lemburg <m...@egenix.com> wrote:
> On 31.08.2016 10:43, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
>> On Wed, 31 Aug 2016 10:31:12 +0200
>> "M.-A. Lemburg" <m...@egenix.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> I am thinking of Python users out there who are running on LTS
>>> OS releases simply because their IT doesn't let them run anything
>>> else.
>>
>> There is a solution nowadays, which is to use Anaconda (or Miniconda).
>
> Sure, or use ActivePython or eGenix PyRun :-)
>
> But is that really what we want to tell people ?

I'm personally entirely comfortable with it, as large organisations
running community supported code without investing back into the
upstream community accordingly is currently a major problem in the
Python ecosystem - many technical folks find it easier to reach out to
the open source community for better support than they do to go into
battle with their own Finance departments to argue for appropriate
investment in managing their supply chain. Unfortunately, while that's
an entirely understandable reaction to an all too common form of
organisational dysfunction, it's also a major contributor to community
volunteer burnout.

Accordingly, we need more of these organisations to either fund paid
upstream development directly (e.g. by assigning their own staff to do
it or hiring existing core developers), or else for them to start
paying commercial redistributors, and making it clear that they expect
those redistributors to fund ongoing upstream development and
maintenance activities on their behalf. For folks that are already
paying commercial redistributors, we need them to be asking pointed
questions of their support managers, like "We're paying you for
commercial CPython support, so why don't you have anyone assigned to
work on it full time?"

Adopting that strategy isn't without its risks - some organisations
may react by banning the use of Python entirely and go looking for a
less assertive community (or one with better established funding
sources), rather than finding ways to pay for suitable infrastructure
support arrangements. However, hopefully folks within such
organisations will understand their political environment well enough
to know whether or not they need to stay under the executive radar.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncogh...@gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
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