> 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.

Nodding along with everything you wrote here, but one minor point for anyone who might read the bylaws and get confused. https://www.python.org/psf/bylaws/

> Section 5.15. Limits on Co-affiliation of Board Members. No more than one quarter (1/4) of the members of the Board of Directors may share a common affiliation as defined in Section 5.14.

The PSF allows three board members to share an affiliation, 13 seats * 0.25 ~= 3.25. T

BH, that's one too many, and I helped write/recommend the original language. When I was on the board, three felt like too many, even though everyone was wonderful, and it was Google, not Microsoft, that hit the limit.

The DSF (Django Software Foundation) recently adopted a two-person limit, which I recommend more boards consider.