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Wow, I had no idea this was the situation.

Is it possible that this move to the PSF is good then? Is Reitz involved in the project at all now?

As a side anecdote, from my own experience with bipolar friends and family that kind of private manipulation + large-scale deception seems sadly familiar. I'm not sure if it's a feature of bipolar disorder or if it's a sad coincidence in our experiences.

>Is Reitz involved in the project at all now?

Judging by the commit history and the README.md, with his name in fancy cursive on top of the PSF logo, this seems to be the Kenneth Reitz Show featuring PSF at best.

>He was deluged with donations from both individuals and large companies like Microsoft, Google, Slack, etc., and the fundraiser total quickly reached ~$30k.

Off topic, but the total looks disgustingly low, if companies like Microsoft, Google, and Slack have donated. Shame on them, they could splurge some more for the FOSS they use...

>On March 15 2018, he contacted me to talk about the fundraiser. He told me he was uncertain what to do with this amount of money – he said his original goal was just to raise $5k to buy a computer. Privately, I was skeptical that the $5k computer had anything to do with Requests. Requests is a small pure-Python library; if you want to work on it, then any cheap laptop is more than sufficient. $5k is the price of a beefy server or top-end gaming rig. But I figured that even if he spent $5k of the money on some unrelated computer, we could call that compensation for his past work, and it would still leave ~$25k to fulfill the promises he'd made in the fundraiser. And this was clearly a great opportunity to build some amazing new stuff. So I didn't say anything about the computer.

Until here, and if it's his project/fundraiser, it's his call. He could have spent it all on blow, and as long as he delivers the end result he raised funds for, it would be totally fine.

What he actually did in the end however (not work at all for the project and expect the volunteer to do it for free while he kept all the money) is a no go...

I’ve heard extremely similar kinds of toxic things about the Anaconda / numpy world too.

Ranging from bizarre religion issues in the workplace to top-down bullying. Not the same e.g. no similar rumors about misused grants or donations, but a lot of creepy comments about management behavior in and around numfocus / anaconda / etc.

links/sources please? Interesting to say the last
What's the relevance between the git history linked to here and the article you linked to?
From the headline I assumed Kenneth "donated" it to get away from all the (entirely self-caused) drama and lay low to rebuild his reputation.

Instead I see he is still on the project, his name is even the first in the README (before the PSF is mentioned). Does he now have a position in PSF? Because that's just inviting problems given his past behaviour.

The git history linked is created by the person is who the article talks about.
Sure, but dredging up a negative article about Kenneth that has nothing to do with a messy git history feels like a witch hunt to me.
This seems like a fitting snippet in relation to a messy git history (full of README changes).

"But none of the money was available to fulfill those commitments; instead, he was going to wait for me to implement the new features for him, and then he needed the entire $28k to pay for writing documentation for my features."