I can't think of a way that this makes any difference, or see any reason why anyone should be bothered by python 2 support "ending". I don't even understand what this means, I mean it sounds like a scare tactic without substance. At the end of the day, if the PSF won't support it, I will (and I'll happily take the money for it).

Big companies aren't going to gamble their future without support. And they probably don't want to deal with a single guy they find on the Internet for security/bug fixes in a forked version of Python.

Your guesses are wrong.

Obviously when I say "I will support it", I don't mean myself, single-handedly. I mean my company. Or someone else's company. The point is, commercially speaking, nobody cares about official PSF support. The world will go on unaffected, with or without it.

And you're welcome to support IPython and matplotlib on Python 2 at the same time. We're just saying we're not going to do that, in the same way that the PSF will stop supporting Python 2. At some point, the cost of third party support outweighs the cost of moving to Python 3.

Can you clarify? Will these companies open source their support? Making a case for sticking with 2.x will be easier if there's one "official" repo. Otherwise, the number of patches and forks could quickly get out of hand.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but I find that very surprising. It's a far cry from the Enterprise Java consultant world I live in.

Sure, but PSF is not the equivalent of Oracle. If someone wanted a big enterprise to provide support they would use a language from a big enterprise. The difference between the PSF and another small company stepping up to provide support is negligible.