National Science Foundation (NSF) had offered $1.5 million to address structural vulnerabilities in Python and the Python Package Index (PyPI), but the Foundation quickly became dispirited with the terms of the grant it would have to follow.
“These terms included affirming the statement that we ‘do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion], or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws,’” Crary noted. “This restriction would apply not only to the security work directly funded by the grant, but to any and all activity of the PSF as a whole.”
Congratulations for having a real spine and showing the world that money isn’t everything
Thank you python team
Good for them. It is good to see people do something right for once.
In 2 days the White House will order every companie to stop using python because of woke or something
Imagining all the llm dorks suddenly trying to learn typescript over the weekend
It makes me very happy to think about
Or trying to control their mice population. Wait what?
Or OpenCL.
To them I say “good luck, fuckers”
How is it legal to basically say “We’ll give you some money if you promise to keep the blacks out of your organisation”
You frame it as “don’t discriminate based on skin color, as in don’t hire a black person because they’re black” while not saying any more of the quiet part out loud.
In a perfect world where nobody doing the hiring was ever even a little subconsciously racist, that would be perfectly reasonable, yeah.
Though that said we end up with a lot of nuance in the real world. Let’s say there’s a traditionally marginalised, opposed racial group. Let’s say times have changed somewhat and people suddenly accept them.
Well, the generational and cultural weight is still going to have a lasting effect even if times have changed, and it may be more difficult for people from that group to afford a good education, good job, good home, etc.
The point being that even if we all stopped being racist today and hired purely based on how good an employee someone will be, we’re likely still unknowingly skewing our decisions based on past social racial issues.
I’m probably not putting it very well but hopefully you get the idea! It’s probably pretty common knowledge anyway I guess haha, seems pretty obvious to me and I don’t even think about this stuff much :-)
Anyway, point is, we do still need to work as a society on ensuring diversity and fairness even when we’re not racist at all - I think the saying might be “Equity over Equality”, or such?
Obviously the USA Government are fascists, so they’re more interested in wiping out groups they don’t like, but they’re just another in a long line of evil governments that will eventually fall, no point thinking too deeply about why they’re being evil. They’ll eventually die off as all fascist regimes do. Hopefully we won’t have to fight a World War against them this time.
For context, I am an old white man engineer. I’ve worked in large and small companies over my career. Almost without fail, even with DEI policies in place, a non-white person or woman still had to be 10x more qualified than their white male counterparts to be hired. Once in the organization, they were generally put into some dead end role while far less qualified white men were advanced to higher positions. When I worked in the bible belt southeastern USA, you had the added factor of protestant christians ruling the roost too.
That’s depressing, but at least there were people like yourself who understood the backwards injustice of it all.
Some people and places have to be kicked and dragged into the modern day, alas.
Because conservatives convinced people that DEI was literally about filling a quotas at the cost of competency, because “controlling the narrative”.
“We’ll give you some money if you promise to keep the blacks out of your organisation”
I suppose that this would be against the other part, the one relative to the federal anti-discrimination laws.
To make matters worse, the terms included a provision that if the PSF was found to have voilated that anti-DEI diktat, the NSF reserved the right to claw back any previously disbursed funds, Crary explained.
Likely why it was not accepted
Fucking hell, good for the PSF for maintaining their values. I’ll make a donation when I get paid. I’m sure they would appreciate it if any one else can spare a dollar or two.
https://psfmember.org/civicrm/contribute/transact/?reset=1&id=2
Edit: Added donation link
This should be the top comment. Now, excuse me. I’ve got a donation to go make.
ETA: Done. I felt dirty using Paypal, but I was being lazy, right up until Paypal barfed up some error saying “This credit card can’t be used something something blah blah blah. Let’s try a different one.” In response to which I suddenly found the energy to go find the checkbook and an envelope.
In response to which I suddenly found the energy to go find the checkbook and an envelope.
Who on Earth actually still uses checks? Is it
20051995?My wife’s uncle wanted a paper trail for things like paying the gardener, who didn’t have a way of doing cards anyway.
I bet if they solicit crowd funding to replace this grant they’d easily surpass its dollar value.
Is there an existing way to donate to the Python Foundation?Never mind, answered my own question: https://www.python.org/psf/donations/
Thanks for doing the research for us lazy folks, donation sent!
Go team snake 🐍
It’s a purchase of No DEI, not a donation.
Especially in light of how incompetent this administration is, and how bad it is at clearly communicating ideas, they made the only sensible choice. Maybe there’s more details in the grant terms itself, but from the article it looks like it just says “don’t advance or promote DEI”, and without explicitly defining what they mean by that they are setting up a trap.
PyPI is smart not to take the money.
For the record, it also say that they should not violate any anti-discrimination federal laws.
Discrimination in the name of anti-discrimination
what would happen if they took the money and didn’t comply?
The way it’s written it’s impossible to know if you’re complying or not. They might have just said “don’t be woke” or “don’t piss us off”.
Trump’s bullshit already violated those laws though. Repeatedly.
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
Political commissars will be present at all meetings.
