#87 Guido van Rossum steps down

Sponsored by Datadog: pythonbytes.fm/datadog

Special guests:

• Brett Cannon: @brettsky
• Carol Willing: @WillingCarol

The topic: Guido steps down.

The announcement: Transfer of Power

Now that PEP 572 is done, I don't ever want to have to fight so hard for a PEP and find that so many people despise my decisions.

I would like to remove myself entirely from the decision process. I'll still be there for a while as an ordinary core dev, and I'll still be available to mentor people -- possibly more available. But I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL, and you all will be on your own.

After all that's eventually going to happen regardless -- there's still that bus lurking around the corner, and I'm not getting younger... (I'll spare you the list of medical issues.)

I am not going to appoint a successor.

So what are you all going to do? Create a democracy? Anarchy? A dictatorship? A federation?

I'm not worried about the day to day decisions in the issue tracker or on GitHub. Very rarely I get asked for an opinion, and usually it's not actually important. So this can just be dealt with as it has always been.

The decisions that most matter are probably - How are PEPs decided - How are new core devs inducted

We may be able to write up processes for these things as PEPs (maybe those PEPs will form a kind of constitution). But here's the catch. I'm going to try and let you all (the current committers) figure it out for yourselves.

Note that there's still the CoC -- if you don't like that document your only option might be to leave this group voluntarily. Perhaps there are issues to decide like when should someone be kicked out (this could be banning people from python-dev or python-ideas too, since those are also covered by the CoC).

Finally. A reminder that the archives of this list are public ( https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-committers/ ) although membership is closed (limited to core devs).

I'll still be here, but I'm trying to let you all figure something out for yourselves. I'm tired, and need a very long break.

--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

Why it happened?

• e.g. PEP 572 burn-out/treatment
• View the twitter thread on this announcement tweet

What this means?

• “keep calm and keep coding”

Is there a danger of Python losing its momentum from this?

What comes next?

• current state of the governance discussion

What needs to be done to reduce this kind of pressure?

Brett’s talk about setting open source expectations at PyCascades is very relevant.