Is pants still largely a Twitter project?

No. Twitter has been maintaining a fork of the 1.25 branch for their internal use. https://toolchain.com has been providing the vast majority of the work that's bringing 2.0.0 to life.

Oh hmm, is the plan to offer paid support for pants?

We're actually hoping to provide paid cloud support for the most part. Remote caching, remote execution, aggregated analytics for builds, etc in the near term. Longer term plugins that access cloud services that do hard work offline in the realms of third party dependency analysis and code analysis, etc.

Do you know why twitter decided to switch from pants to bazel?

Have they?

They announced that few month ago. They will switch to bazel from pants. They are in the process in doing that as far as I know.

If I had to guess, it's because they're moving towards languages that aren't python

Yeah the vast majority of Twitter’s code is Java and Scala, with a small bit in Python. Pants’s v1 support for JVM was not great, whereas it’s bread and butter for Bazel. They’re slowly migrating the next year to Bazel.

For Pants v2 we decided to focus, at least initially, on Python support, since it's a much bigger user base than Scala, and the existing tooling is poor to nonexistent. And since Bazel's Scala support is solid, it made sense for them to pursue that.