"Create their own version" means they pay for it, just not by giving money or time to the people who are doing the main project. If Apple, Google etc are paying

"Create their own version" means they pay for it, just not by giving money or time to the people who are doing the main project. If Apple, Google etc are paying for their own NTP and SSL versions, that's clearly because it's important to them in some way. If nobody affected by python2 is going to pay for a python2-fork, python2 must not actually be very important. And yes, PSF might have all the brain trust now, but it's not like a big company whose continuity-of-business really depended on python2 wouldn't attempt to acquire this expertise in some fashion. "Acquire" meaning something as simple as picking a few engineers on staff and saying "learn everything you can about this so we can maintain our own version."