That's pretty obvious. The question was, who are these people, specifically, and why they were chosen and given that much power. I mean, I can see the names, but while I don't have to be told who Tim Peters or Guido van Rossum are, I have no clue who these guys are and what their actual contributions are.

Gregory P. Smith Emily Morehouse Barry Warsaw Thomas Wouter

I've worked with gps and twouter before at Google; they were two of the leaders of the python ecosystem. twouter is a highly technically skilled contributor- when I found a 2 bugs in the Python runtime, he was the person who helped me fix them (bug 1: RPC calls from C++ to Python delivered during interpreter shutdown caused crash, bug 2: importing the same library twice with two different names caused crash) upstream.

gps apparently is a core contributor to cpython but I he did mainly administrative work afaict when I was at Google. From what I can tell, gps is the primary instigator in this incident.

Barry Warsaw: was lead maintainer of jython, I think also involved in the guts of cpython for some time.

Emily Morehouse: I hadn't heard of her before but it looks like she is a core python developer: https://emilyemorehouse.com/blog/015-my-path-to-becoming-a-p... who implemented some key PEPs.

That's what happens when Googlers have power these days. They are so used to censorship being forced down their throats at Google that it seems super normal for them to do it everywhere.

In line with the trends, as the grandparent said. People who claim tolerance are intolerant

There is an election process, and all core python team members vote on the SC (https://peps.python.org/pep-8105/#results) for a 1-year term.

Greg, Thomas, and Barry are all old guard (20+ years as core devs), Emily and Pablo are relatively more recent, but still have 5+ years as core devs and are I believe more actively doing python feature development. All of these folks have served on the steering council before, some for 3-4 years.

Guido has served on the SC before, but has been stepping back recently.

I don't have a factual answer for you (be interested in one, too), only a cheek-in-tongue one: It's like politics, the only thing you have to do to get elected is to get people to vote for you. And often the vote is only among people who _want_ to be elected (and in a position of power), massively reducing the pool of good candidates.

> The question was, who are these people, specifically, and why they were chosen and given that much power.

They are core developers elected by an internal process among the developers. See PEP 13 for details: https://peps.python.org/pep-0013/#the-steering-council

> I have no clue who these guys are and what their actual contributions are.

Barry Warsaw (https://barry.warsaw.us) is another of the "old guard" who can be pictured standing next to Peters and GvR fairly easily. He gained the title of "Friendly Language Uncle For Life" (FLUFL), and has previously been the project lead for Mailman and lead maintainer for Jython. He was the release manager for Python 2.2 (as far as I can tell, the first time this position existed), 2.6 and 3.0, and shared the role for 2.3. His name is all over 2.x-era process documentation. Prior to GvR's actual retirement in 2018, there was an April Fools' Day announcement of his resignation in 2009, authored by Barry Warsaw and Brett Cannon. This was accompanied by a hidden option (still available!) which changes the `!=` syntax to `<>`. Refs: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4007289/ ; https://peps.python.org/pep-0401/ .

Emily Morehouse (https://emilyemorehouse.com/) was the PyCon co-chair for 2019 and chair for 2020 and 2021. She has done project management for Axios and mentoring for PyLadies (https://discuss.python.org/t/steering-council-nomination-emi...).

Gregory P. Smith has been a core dev since about 2003 and has notably worked on `hashlib` and `subprocess` (https://discuss.python.org/t/steering-council-nomination-gre...).

Pablo Galindo Salgado (https://github.com/pablogsal) was the release manager for 3.10 and 3.11, and Thomas Wouters was/is the release manager for 3.12 and 3.13. Wouters has also previously served as a PSF Board member and was a PSF founder (https://www.python.org/nominations/elections/2020-python-sof...).