It was extremely suspect at the time, and the further away we get from it, the more blinkered and self-aggrandizing the people who supported the ban look.

In particular, the references by Brett Cannon and Emily Morehouse to the fact that they are not sharing the evidence that led to them deciding to suspend a foundational Python developer (and one in no small part responsible for the fun, inclusive nature of the early Python community) means the process is broken and they set themselves up for failure from the start.

I went to look for his blog and yeah, looks like he took it pretty hard https://tim-one.github.io/psf/. I don't know who did what, but certainly devoted a lot energy and health to try to clear his and others' names.

I'm one of them. It was disgusting frankly how they banned him for _alleged_ violations and never bother to provide and evidence of sort. Tim was just too nice, but if I were as popular as he was back then and a rather popular forum lodged such heavy accusations, I would be drafting defamation lawsuit in a heartbeat. Tim was just too nice of a gentleman to bother. As a senior programmer back then working in one of the major European's country ESPs designing sites, I quickly moved to PHP and never look back. Heck even today going to some of these websites designed 25 years ago, they still run PHP and are free of Python. And when I was handed redesign of at least 30 sites (in a span of 2 years), I took .py code and ended up with .php