How do you build a sustainable open-source project and community? What lessons can be learned from Python’s history and the current mess that the WordPress community is going through? This week on the show, we speak with Paul Everitt from JetBrains about navigating open-source funding and the start of the Python Software Foundation.

Paul has been an organizer in the Python community almost from the beginning. He shares how the project has navigated through multiple sponsors. We talk about the early governance models and the formation of the Python Software Foundation.

We contrast this journey with the current drama unfolding in the WordPress community. We discuss the potential problems of having a benevolent dictator for life. We also dig into sponsorship models and ways to get companies to give back to the open-source projects they rely on.

This episode is sponsored by Sentry.

Course Spotlight: Using pandas to Make a Gradebook in Python

With this course and Python project, you’ll build a script to calculate grades for a class using pandas. The script will quickly and accurately calculate grades from a variety of data sources. You’ll see examples of loading, merging, and saving data with pandas, as well as plotting some summary statistics.

Topics:

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:01:55 – Meeting Jodie Burchell at PyCon 2022
00:02:51 – A non-traditional path into open-source
00:07:09 – The current turmoil around WordPress
00:13:49 – Keeping things fair in the age of extraction
00:16:03 – Sponsor: Sentry
00:17:07 – Early Python organizing history and conservation
00:20:41 – The Python Software Activity precursor to PSF
00:24:14 – Creating the Python Software Foundation
00:27:24 – Keeping the perfect distance of business and project
00:28:13 – Who gets to capture the value from open-source?
00:31:07 – Sponsorships becoming more common
00:33:24 – BDFL to a steering council
00:34:58 – Video Course Spotlight
00:36:16 – What is Plone?
00:38:11 – Starting in Python and finding community
00:50:07 – Companies contributing
00:53:16 – Examples of how JetBrains contributes back
00:55:41 – Understanding the support system
00:58:09 – Talking to decision makers
01:00:07 – Python 1994 talk and continuation
01:01:49 – What are you excited about in the world of Python?
01:03:06 – What do you want to learn next?
01:04:17 – How can people follow your work online?
01:07:16 – Thanks and goodbye

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