“The support from the Python community in response has been overwhelming,” Seth Larson told me last week. As the Python Software Foundation‘s (PSF) principal investigator for a $1.5 million grant National Science Foundation application, Larson had a front-row seat for the multiround, months-long vetting process — and to everything that happened next.

In short, the PSF turned the grant down after discovering new federal “terms and conditions” that would require them to end any programs promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) “during the term of this financial assistance award.” But a flood of new donations followed, and the PSF vowed to explore other funding options while remaining steadfast to their organizational values.

“It was so maddening to have to turn down work that would benefit everyone,” posted Loren Crary, PSF deputy executive director, on Reddit, “because they insisted on dictating what we do outside of the security project.”

Yet rejecting the grant created a surge in news coverage, thousands of upvotes on social media and an upswell of donations. Together, maybe that show of support forms a kind of collective answer — an example of how a community responds to a forceful outside attempt to challenge their culture.

By coming together.

Support From Guido — and Thousands of Others

“I was one of the board members who voted to reject this funding — a unanimous but tough decision,” wrote Simon Willison on his blog. “I’m proud to serve on a board that can make difficult decisions like this.”

And Python’s original creator, Guido van Rossum, even made his own post of support on X, formerly known as Twitter. “If you haven’t heard about this, kudos to the PSF for standing for its values (which are also my values).”

If you haven’t heard about this, kudos to the PSF for standing for its values (which are also my values).

**— Guido van Rossum (@gvanrossum), **Oct. 29, 2025

The day of the announcement, the PSF received about 300 new donations, Crary said — but then they’d kept coming. On Tuesday (Oct. 28), one Reddit user even complained their first try at donating was met with a timeout error — and Crary responded that apparently, “Our donation page got a little overwhelmed.”

Crary — who had also been the co-principal investigator on the withdrawn application — also acknowledged the supportive responses on Python’s official discussion forum, writing “We’re very grateful for the community’s support, which has been pouring in and has honestly been a little overwhelming.”

Throughout that week, Crary responded to several people who announced they were making donations to the PSF as a show of support. “I can’t tell you how much it has meant to see the community stand up with us today, after sitting with these tough circumstances for a while,” she said.

On Friday, less than two weeks after the announcement, the organization had seen some inspiring numbers, Deb Nicholson, PSF executive director, told TNS. “We’ve raised over $157,000,” including 295 new Supporting Members paying an annual $99 membership fee. And that’s just the beginning. “We know some donors are pursuing an employer match, and some community members have started their own matching campaign, which will also bump those numbers up.”

“It doesn’t quite bridge the gap of $1.5 million, but it’s incredibly impactful for us, both financially and in terms of feeling this strong groundswell of support from the community.”

“We zero percent expected a flood of support,” Crary added later, “and it’s been a huge deal for us.”

We love the values of open source and @ThePSF‘s commitment to their community. Please read and share their story.

**— Google Open Source (@GoogleOSS), **Oct. 27, 2025

Soon, the move had drawn news coverage from around the web. The conversation continued across several social media platforms. Their announcement also received 1,400 upvotes in Reddit’s Python subreddit and another 355 comments. It made the front page of Hacker News, drawing another 726 upvotes (along with 754 comments).

The PSF’s LinkedIn post about the decision began with this “TLDR” summary: “The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue.”

“In the end, it wasn’t a hard decision,” they wrote, saying they put their value (and community) first.

Within days, over 2,000 people clicked supportive “Reactions” on LinkedIn — with 361 reposts and 88 comments.

What Happens Next?

Larson had another message. “I’m proud of what our little team has been able to accomplish, even if it’s not the result we imagined when Loren and I started this project almost a year ago.

“Everything we’ve seen since we announced our decision has only confirmed my feelings that Python is an amazing community to be serving. I couldn’t be happier about that.”

But will the work still go forward for what that grant was meant to cover? With an annual budget of roughly $5 million, according to a recent blog post, the $1.5 million grant would’ve represented a 30% boost in funding (spread across over two years) — “easily the largest grant we’d ever received.”

As the group’s security developer-in-residence, Larson had hoped to use the grant to improve screening for attempted supply chain attacks on the official PyPI registry of Python packages. The PSF blog post says the plan was to build tools for automating package reviews “rather than the current process of reactive-only review.”

Larson told me last week that the grant they’d applied for “included funding for multiple contracted positions over the two-year work period.” Sadly, he told me, “The automated package reviewing pipeline as proposed in the grant has no timeline to be implemented given current circumstances.”

The larger open source community would’ve also benefited from the work, their blog post noted, since “the outputs of this work could be transferable for all open source software package registries, such as NPM and Crates.io, improving security across multiple open source ecosystems.”

But Larson told me that moving forward without the grant also leaves far less room for that “additional work required to create artifacts that are adaptable to more than one software ecosystem — like documentation showing design, operation, results and performance.”

And, “We’ll now have to balance the roadmap of work and maintenance on the Python Package Index (PyPI) and CPython with only existing security staffing. This leaves far less room for new large-scale projects.”

A Future With Funding?

Could that same security project still happen if new funding materializes? The PSF hasn’t entirely given up. “The PSF is always looking for new opportunities to fund work benefiting the Python community,” Nicholson told me in an email last week, adding pointedly that “we have received some helpful suggestions in response to our announcement that we will be pursuing.”

And even as things stand, the PSF sees itself as “always developing or implementing the latest technologies for protecting PyPI project maintainers and users from current threats,” and it plans to continue with that commitment. For example, it notes, PyPI today implements Trusted Publishing (a tightly scoped alternative to publisher-verifying API tokens), digital provenance attestations and the ongoing malware-blocking efforts of Project Quarantine.

The PSF also has ideas for increasing its other funding going forward. (“We’re looking at European grants, revenue sources that are tied to corporate usage, and increasing our individual giving program,” Nicholson told me.) “Ultimately, we do need some of these new revenue channels to pick up in order to continue serving our mission and the Python community the way we have been: Python and PyPI usage has grown steadily, especially since Python is essential to the recent explosion of the AI sector, while our funding has stayed essentially flat.”

But this latest show of community support is especially heartening, arriving in a time of inflation, tech-sector economic pressures and “lower sponsorship,” the PSF’s blog pointed out (along with the general uncertainty and conflict). Writing that the PSF “needs financial support now more than ever,” they’d urged readers to show their support by buying PSF memberships or making a donation, or by encouraging their company to become a sponsor.

“If you’re already a PSF member or regular donor, you have our deep appreciation,” they wrote, “and we urge you to share your story about why you support the PSF.”

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