Paul Boddie's Free Software-related blog
Paul's activities and perspectives around Free Software
Leaving the PSF
It didn’t all start with a poorly-considered April Fools’ joke about hosting a Python conference in Cuba, but the resulting private mailing list discussion managed to persuade me not to continue as a voting member of the Python Software Foundation (PSF). In recent years, upon returning from vacation, discovering tens if not hundreds of messages whipping up a frenzy about some topic supposedly pertinent to the activities of the PSF, and reading through such messages as if I should inform my own position on the matter, was undoubtedly one of the chores of being a member. This time, my vacation plans were slightly unusual, so I was at least spared the surprise of getting the bulk of people’s opinions in one big serving.
I was invited to participate in the PSF at a time when it was an invitation-only affair. My own modest contributions to the EuroPython conference were the motivating factor, and it would seem that I hadn’t alienated enough people for my nomination to be opposed. (This cannot be said for some other people who did eventually become members as well after their opponents presumably realised the unkindness of their ways.) Being asked to participate was an honour, although I remarked at the time that I wasn’t sure what contribution I might make to such an organisation. Becoming a Fellow of the FSFE was an active choice I made myself because I align myself closely with the agenda the FSFE chooses to pursue, but the PSF is somewhat more vague or more ambivalent about its own agenda: promoting Python is all very well, but should the organisation promote proprietary software that increases Python adoption, or would this undermine the foundations on which Python was built and is sustained? Being invited to participate in an organisation with often unclear objectives combines a degree of passivity with an awareness that some of the decisions being taken may well contradict some of the principles I have actively chosen to support in other organisations. Such as the FSFE, of course.
Don’t get me wrong: there are a lot of vital activities performed within the PSF. For instance, the organisation has a genuine need to enforce its trademarks and to stop other people from claiming the Python name as their own, and the membership can indeed assist in such matters, as can the wider community. But looking at my archives of the private membership mailing list, a lot of noise has been produced on other, more mundane matters. For a long time, it seemed as if the only business of the PSF membership – as opposed to the board who actually make the big decisions – was to nominate and vote on new members, thus giving the organisation the appearance of only really existing for its own sake. Fortunately, organisational reform has made the matter of recruiting members largely obsolete, and some initiatives have motivated other, more meaningful activities. However, I cannot be the only person who has noted that such activities could largely be pursued outside the PSF and within the broader community instead, as indeed these activities typically are.
PyCon
Some of the more divisive topics that have caused the most noise have had some connection with PyCon: the North American Python conference that mostly replaced the previous International Python Conference series (from back when people thought that conferences had to be professionally organised and run, in contrast to PyCon and most, if not all, other significant Python conferences today). Indeed, this lack of separation between the PSF and PyCon has been a significant concern of mine. I will probably never attend a PyCon, partly because it resides in North America as a physical event, partly because its size makes it completely uninteresting to me as an attendee, and largely because I increasingly find the programme uninteresting for a variety of other reasons. When the PSF members’ time is spent discussing or at least exposed to the discussion of PyCon business, it can just add to the burden of membership for those who wish to focus on the supposed core objectives of the organisation.
What may well be worse, however, is that PyCon exposes the PSF to substantial liability issues. As the conference headed along a trajectory of seemingly desirable and ambitious growth, it collided with the economic downturn caused by the global financial crisis of 2008, incurring a not insignificant loss. Fortunately, this outcome has not since been repeated, and the organisation had sufficient liquidity to avoid any serious consequences. Some have argued that it was precisely because profits from previous years’ conferences had been accumulated that the organisation was able to pay its bills, but such good fortune cannot explain away the fundamental liability and the risks it brings to the viability of the organisation, especially if fortune happens not to be on its side in future.
Volunteering
In recent times, I have been more sharply focused on the way volunteers are treated by organisations who rely on their services to fulfil their mission. Sadly, the PSF has exhibited a poor record in various respects on this matter. Once upon a time, the Python language Web site was redesigned under contract, but the burden of maintenance fell on community volunteers. Over time, discontentment forced the decision to change the technology and a specification was drawn up under a degree of consultation. Unfortunately, the priorities of certain stakeholders – that is, community volunteers doing a fair amount of hard work in their own time – were either ignored or belittled, leaving them confronted with either having to adapt to a suboptimal workflow not of their own choosing, as well as spending time and energy developing that workflow, or just quitting and leaving it to other people to tidy up the mess that those other people (and the hired contractors) had made.
Understandably, the volunteers quit, leaving a gap in the Web site functionality that took a year to reinstate. But what was most disappointing was the way those volunteers were branded as uncooperative and irresponsible in an act of revisionism by those who clearly failed to appreciate the magnitude of the efforts of those volunteers in the first place. Indeed, the views of the affected volunteers were even belittled when efforts were championed to finally restore the functionality, with it being stated by one motivated individual that the history of the problem was not of his concern. When people cannot themselves choose the basis of their own involvement in a volunteer-run organisation without being vilified for letting people down or for “holding the organisation to ransom”, the latter being a remarkable accusation given the professionalism that was actually shown in supporting a transition to other volunteers, one must question whether such an organisation deserves to attract any volunteers at all.
Politics
As discussion heated up over the PyCon Cuba affair, the usual clash of political views emerged, with each side accusing the other of ignorance and not understanding the political or cultural situation, apparently blinkered by their own cultural and political biases. I remember brazen (and ill-informed) political advocacy being a component in one of the Python community blogging “planets” before I found the other one, back when there was a confusing level of duplication between the two and when nobody knew which one was the “real” one (which now appears to consist of a lot of repetition and veiled commercial advertising), and I find it infuriating when people decide to use such matters as an excuse to lecture others and to promote their own political preferences.
I have become aware of a degree of hostility within the PSF towards the Free Software Foundation, with the latter being regarded as a “political” organisation, perhaps due to hard feelings experienced when the FSF had to educate the custodians of Python about software licensing (which really came about in the first place because of the way Python development had been moved around, causing various legal representatives to play around with the licensing, arguably to make their own mark and to stop others getting all the credit). And I detect a reluctance in some quarters to defend software freedom within the PSF, with a reluctance to align the PSF with other entities that support software and digital freedoms. At least the FSF can be said to have an honest political agenda, where those who support it more or less know where they stand.
In contrast, the PSF seems to cultivate all kinds of internal squabbling and agenda-setting: true politics in the worst sense of the word. On one occasion I was more or less told that my opinion was not welcome or, indeed, could ever be of interest on a topic related to diversity. Thankfully, diversity politics moved to a dedicated mailing list and I was thereafter mostly able to avoid being told by another Anglo-Saxon male that my own perspectives didn’t matter on that or on any other topic. How it is that someone I don’t actually know can presume to know in any detail what perspectives or experiences I might have to offer on any matter remains something of a mystery to me.
Looking through my archives, there appears to be a lot of noise, squabbling, quipping, and recrimination over the last five years or so. In the midst of the recent finger-wagging, someone dared to mention that maybe Cubans, wherever they are, might actually deserve to have a conference. Indeed, other places were mentioned where the people who live there, through no fault of their own, would also be the object of political grandstanding instead of being treated like normal people wanting to participate in a wider community.
I mostly regard April Fools’ jokes as part of a tedious tradition, part of the circus that distracts people away from genuine matters of concern, perhaps even an avenue of passive aggression in certain circles, a way to bully people and then insist – as cowards do – that it was “just a joke”. The lack of a separation of the PSF’s interests combined with the allure of the circus conspired to make fools out of the people involved in creating the joke and of many in the accompanying debate. I find myself uninterested in spending my own time indulging such distractions, especially when those distractions are products of flaws in the organisation that nobody wishes to fix, and when there are more immediate and necessary activities to pursue in the wider arena of Free Software that, as a movement in its own right, some in the PSF practically refuse to acknowledge.
Effects
Leaving the PSF won’t really change any of my commitments, but it will at least reduce the level of background noise I have to deal with. Such an underwhelming and unfortunate assessment is something the organisation will have to rectify in time if it wishes to remain relevant and to deserve the continued involvement of its members. I do have confidence in some of the reform and improvement processes being conducted by volunteers with too little time of their own to pursue them, and I hope that they make the organisation a substantially better and more effective one, as they continue to play to an audience of people with much to say but, more often than not, little to add.
I would have been tempted to remain in the PSF and to pursue various initiatives if the organisation were a multiplier of effect for any given input of effort. Instead, it currently acts as a divider of effect for all the effort one would apparently need to put in to achieve anything. That isn’t how any organisation, let alone one relying on volunteer time and commitment, should be functioning.
A Footnote
On political matters and accusations of ignorance being traded, my own patience is wearing thin indeed, and this probably nudged me into finally making this decision. It probably doesn’t help that I recently made a trip to Britain where election season has been in full swing, with unashamed displays of wilful idiocy openly paraded on a range of topics, indulged by the curated ignorance of the masses, with the continued destruction of British society, nature and the economy looking inevitable as the perpetrators insist they know best now and will undoubtedly in the future protest their innocence when challenged on the legacy of their ruinous rule, adopting the “it wasn’t me” manner of a petulant schoolchild so befitting of the basis of the nepotism that got most of them where they are today.