Wow, I didn't know you got a spot on the board, that's a great choice on their part! Thanks for giving your time.

Yes, I was talking about Wages -- the day-to-day is surely complex, but I'm sure you'd agree that the president of the board is ultimately "above" the chief executive if push ever came to shove, at least on paper. I will grant that I used "running", which is quite unclear in hindsight! "Responsible for" or "leading" seems more accurate.

She seemed great as policymaker and person, but when I last checked her job was literally to be Microsoft's Python community liason, and that just struck me as... dangerous? On the nose? Giving the reigns to someone from a for-profit, $1.5B corporation whose entire business depends directly upon the PSF's work also seems like an odd choice. Again, I'm sure they're great as an individual, and during normal operations there's no competing interests so it's fine. It's just...

I guess I just have a vision for the non-profit org guiding the world's most popular programming language that doesn't really mesh with the reality of open source funding as it exists today, at the end of the day; the "no 2 representatives from the same company" rule seems like a comforting sign that they(/y'all!) share that general philosophy despite the circumstances.

Us board members voted to put Dawn in that position.

The position doesn't have much additional power at all - the chair spends a little more time with the executive director and gets to set the agenda for the board meetings, but board actions still require a vote from the board.

If we felt like an employee of a specific company was abusing their position on the PSF board we would take steps to address that. Thankfully I've seen no evidence of that from anyone during my time on the board.

If anything it's the opposite: board members are very good about abstaining from votes that their employer might have an interest in.

> I'm sure you'd agree that the president of the board is ultimately "above" the chief executive if push ever came to shove, at least on paper.

That is not true of the PSF, nor of many (most?) other US nonprofits. Not on paper, and not practically speaking. The director reports to the board, but officers have little to no unitary power. You can go read the PSF’s bylaws if you like, and if you do you’ll see that officers, including the president, can do very little without a board vote. And because of aforementioned policy, that’s a max of two votes from people employed by a single company.

Also, like, do you know anything about Dawn? She’s been serving the Python community waaaay longer than she’s worked for Microsoft. Questioning her ethics based on absolutely nothing is unfounded and, honestly, pretty fucked up.

There’s this pernicious lie that Microsoft is somehow controlling the PSF. It’s based on about as much evidence as there is for Flat Earth, yet here it is again. At best, repeating this lie reflects profound ignorance about how the PSF actually functions; at worst it seems like some kind of weird disinfo campaign against one of the most important nonprofits in open source.