I must be the only one in here who thinks $1.5M is a small sum compared to Anthropic's size and the amount of value they have gotten out of Python. Good press is cheaper than I thought.
Every single financial institution on Wall Street, the City of London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Dubai and so on, uses Python. Very few contribute.
I've worked at a few that use the 'mold' linker to dramatically reduce their build times. Again, very few contribute. In this particular case, I managed to get one former employer to make a donation.
Money has limited impact and has all sorts of drawbacks.
A more impactful change from firms might be to celebrate and reward community contributions of their own employees. This can establish a more productive culture than just money. If an engineering company is willing to donate money (yay!), perhaps consider making sure that employees are celebrated for contributions they make in a manner that is similar to how we currently celebrate monetary transactions.
It may not be enough, but I think it'd be more appropriate/constructive to point to other companies benefiting from Python that have never contributed, rather than saying one that contributed didn't do enough.
that was my first thought too, $1.5M is peanuts for Anthropic, however $1.5M is better than nothing, so it worth some PR too. Good they do, I think we have to encourage companies to do it, shaming will not help.