On 5 April 2018 at 07:58, Jannis Gebauer <ja.geb@me.com> wrote:

What if there was some kind of “blessed” entity that runs these services and puts the majority of the revenue into a fund that funds development on PyPi (maybe trough the PSF)?

Having a wholly owned for-profit subsidiary that provides commercial services as a revenue raising mechanism is certainly one way to approach something like this without alienating sponsors or tax authorities (although it may still alienate the vendors of now competing services). It would require a big time commitment on the PSF side to get everything set up though, as well as interest from key folks in joining what would essentially be a single-language-focused start up in an already crowded cross-language developer tools marketplace. When the PSF as a whole is still operating with only a handful of full or part time employees, it's far from clear that setting something like that up would be the most effective possible use of their time and energy. At a more basic level, that kind of arrangement technically doesn't require anyone's blessing, it could be as straightforward as downstream tooling vendors signing up as PSF sponsors and saying "please allocate our sponsorship contribution to the Packaging WG's budget so that PyPI keeps operating well and the PyPA tooling keeps improving, increasing the level of demand for our commercial Python repository management services". Historically that wouldn't have helped much, since the PSF itself has struggled with effective project management (for a variety of reasons), but one of the things I think the success of the MOSS grant has shown is the significant strides that the PSF has made in budget management in recent years, such that if funding is made available, it can and will be spent effectively. Cheers, Nick. P.S. PyPA contributors are also free agents in their own right, so folks offering Python-centric developer workflow management tools or features may decide that it's worth their while to invest more directly in smoothing out some of the rough edges that currently still exist. It's a mercenary way of looking at things, but in many cases, it is *absolutely* possible to pay for the time and attention of existing contributors, and if you can persuade them that your proposals are reasonable, they'll often have an easier time than most convincing other community contributors that it's a good way to go :) -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia