> They refused to invest in packaging to the extent that a separate company (astral) had to do it for them

uv didn't just happen in a vacuum, there has been lots of investment in the Python packaging ecosystem that has enabled it (and other tools) to try and improve the shortcomings of Python and packaging.

There's PEP 518 [1] for build requirements, PEP 600 [2] for manylinux wheels, PEP 621 [3] for pyproject.toml, PEP 656 [4] for musl wheels platform identifiers, PEP 723 [5] for inline script metadata.

Without all this uv wouldn't be a thing and we would be stuck with pip and setuptools or a bunch of more bandaid hacks on top making the whole thing brittle.

[1] https://peps.python.org/pep-0518/ [2] https://peps.python.org/pep-0600/ [3] https://peps.python.org/pep-0621/ [4] https://peps.python.org/pep-0654/ [5] https://peps.python.org/pep-0723/

Where are you getting these numbers? Looking at the PSFs Report for 2024 [0], 50% of their expenses went to pycon. Would you consider that outreach? I believe conferences are very important as part of the health of a language, and reading the definition of outreach[1], I would not classify the conference as that. The second highest amount of expenses (27.1%) went to (surprise!) "Packaging Work Group/Infrastructure/Other", i.e. pypi, pip etc... "Outreach & Education" was only 2.8% of 12.9% of expenses, i.e. 0.3612%, which is $17846 (actual dollars, not thousands like in the report.)

[0] https://www.python.org/psf/annual-report/2024/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outreach

I don't know much about the Linux Foundation if I'm being honest, even though I've been a 24/7 Linux user for decades, but they seemingly don't have the same image in the ecosystem, at least not close to how people see Mozilla today.

Why is that? Is there lessons to be learned from the Linux Foundation how to actually effectively and responsibly manage that sort of money, in those types of projects?