The money was raised specifically to support development of requests 3
> [Reitz] announced that work had begun on "Requests 3", that its headline feature would be the native async/await support I was working on, and that he was seeking donations to make this happen.
It's not so much that PSF needed to be used, as that there needed to be some accountability as to how those funds were used.
> [Reitz] chose a fundraiser structure that avoids standard accountability mechanisms he was familiar with. He never had any plan or capability to deliver what he promised. And when I offered a way for him to do it anyway, he gave me some bafflegab about how expensive it is to write docs. Effectively, his public promises about how he would use the Requests 3 money were lies from start to finish, and he hasn't shown any remorse or even understanding that this is a problem.
It sounds like a great deal of the work being done on requests is done by volunteers but the funding only goes to support Reitz
> I think a lot of people don't realize how little Reitz actually has to do with Requests development. For many years now, actual maintenance has been done almost exclusively by other volunteers. If you look at the maintainers list on PyPI, you'll see he doesn't have PyPI rights to his own project, because he kept breaking stuff, so the real maintainers insisted on revoking his access. If you clone the Requests git repo, you can run git log requests/ to see a list of every time someone changed the library's source code, either directly or by merging someone else's pull request. The last time Reitz did either was in May 2017, when he made some whitespace cleanups.
The issue is not so much that money is being made, but the way that it is done and the lack of accountability
> I don't have any objection to trying to make money from open-source. I've written before about how open-source doesn't get nearly enough investment. I do object to exploiting volunteers, driving out community members, and lying to funders and the broader community. Reitz has a consistent history of doing all these things.
NO WHERE that I can see did Reitz say he would hire NJS to do some work. Is Reitz even setup properly to report for taxes or withold taxes on amounts paid to NJS, check paperwork for work eligiblity etc? Would this even be allowable if requests is not a business, or would deductions be disallowed as non business (ie, a payment to NJS -> subject to tax to both Reitz and NJS potentially?).
If you as a donor want full charitable compliance using PSF you would ask to give through them - and perhaps more would have been given if PSF had been an option.
I don't even see NJS on the requests contributor list:
https://github.com/psf/requests/blob/master/AUTHORS.rst
Finally, requests 3 has a number of features.
> And on a more personal level, I felt his interactions with me were extremely manipulative. I felt like he tried to exploit me, and that he tried to make me complicit in covering up his lies to protect his reputation. I was extremely uncomfortable with the idea of going along with this, but he created a situation where my only other options were to either give up on working on async entirely, or else to go public with the whole story, at potentially serious cost to myself.
> Ultimately, I decided to speak out because I care deeply about the Python community and its members. If one of our community's most prominent members freely lies to donors and harms volunteers, and if we all let that go without saying anything, then that puts everything we've built together at risk. And I'm in a better position than many to speak up.
The intent seems not to be trying to get people to blacklist or dogpile on Reitz, but to simply make people aware of the issues so they won't get caught off guard.
> This is the classic "missing stair" problem. Those in the inner circle quietly work around the toxic person. Outsiders come in blind. I'm pretty well-connected in the Python world, and I came in blind.
> Since this is the internet, I have to say explicitly: Please do not harass or abuse Reitz. That's never appropriate
The takeaway here appears to be "never work for free". If NJS has worked on his own project, controlled by him alone, this wouldn't have happened. If you donate a bunch of work to an open source project, then... well... the source is open.
And is it impossible that KR is doing an order of magnitude more work on the requests projects, with a much longer track records and raised the money directly to himself (and so has to pay taxes potentially on it) such that using it to support his work on requests is unreasonable?
The link to support requests (which is a great piece of software) is here:
https://cash.app/$KennethReitz
Note: This is NOT a charitable donation, it is a gift to an individual. These are not tax deductible under US law.
Njs has a long attacking blog post saying this needs to go through PSF (huh?) and that they should be getting most of this money not the person the funds were directed towards (it's not clear how much they've actually contributed to requests over time). This supposedly also may trigger folks who have also suffered from "gaslighting".
Supporting the developer of a piece of software does not, as far as I know, require that they sign up to handle it on a charitable basis. A big todo is made about the "large" amount raised. The amounts is 33K. To be frank, this is almost zero in tech land at least in the bay area and requests is a very highly used project. I was literally expecting something like 300K or even $1M - silly kickstarter projects raise for more and deliver nothing. Requests has already delivered a lot of utility.
Just a bit of perspective from someone who wasn't familiar with this "fiasco".