Maintaining the Foundations of Python & Cautionary Tales
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Welcome to the real python podcast. This is episode two hundred twenty eight. How do you build a sustainable open source project and community? What lessons can be learned from python history and the current mess that the wordpress community is going through?

This week on the show, we speak with paul average from jeep, right about navigating open source funding and the start of the python software foundation, paul's ban and organizer in the python community. Almost from the beginning, he shares how the project is 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 board press community. We discuss the potential problems of having a benevolent dictator life. We also dig in the sponsorship models and ways to get companies to give back to the open source projects that they rely on.

This episode is sponsored by century a century. We don't just build tools. We use them to debug our tRicky as slowdowns here, the whole story later in the episode, and find others like IT at blog dot century dot I O. All right, let's get started.

The real python podcast is a weekly conversation about using python in the real world. My name is Christopher Bailey, your host. Each week, we feature interviews with experts in the community and discussions about the topics, articles and courses found a real path on dot com after the park cast, join us and learn real world python skills with the community of experts at real python dark com. Hey, paul, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. It's funny. I was talking with jody and she's like, oh, you get ta be with him today. He are hello to you.

Yeah, that has been a while. I think he is on in february. So it's been quite a while since we've talked and hopefully be coming on soon here at end the year. And it's always excited to talk her.

So were actually connected for me. IT was, I think, the first packet after, yeah, the pandemic, and he had just been with us for like seven minutes, so really two weeks or something yeah. And SHE SAT down with you, and the two of you just hit IT off and charge IT all kinds of cool things.

That was great. Yeah, you and dad left the table. That was so funny. That was great. I back on twenty twenty two.

And yeah, she's been on the show a whole bunch and it's always one having around the show. So thanks for connecting us there. The jet brain's connection, my pleasure. So what thing I thought about starting with an I mentioned to this before, we got going as I, instead of doing lots of backgrounds and like how people got into programing, been very interested in how people got involved in open source and contributing to projects and stuff like that because I feel like it's a different angle and it's also something that I feel like a lot of beginners and in your into people are wondering what their next step is to maybe get in to that and what are potential on rap. So maybe you could talk about europe story briefly about how do you got involved in open source?

Sure is is super fun. And actually else go to the end and say that's why you do IT because it's super fun, right? IT was a nineteen ninety two, and I just gotten gotta booted from navy flight school.

I to find something else to do. And I was working for a guy whose job was the navy internet manager OK. And I was helping find kind of services to put on the fifty six k backbone that i'm .

think early, early international.

Maybe in one day, the guy who ran the domain for navy dot mill, step aside me, and I will my chair back and I said, hey, can I have W, W, W dot, navy dot mill? And he said, what's that? And so IT wounded up, being like one of the first two hundred websites back then. No, getting you emailed timna sly and say, can you put .

me on the list?

Greeter has a similar story about five thon, and I needed a scripting language, was IT gonna do see, was IT gonna bash. And I got this vivid memory of going to the bookstore. M, for most of your listers, books are these things that exist.

You got what store you can look at, right? right? And there was a book on perl. I got a super vivid memory of, like, picking the book and flip clip lip, oh, hello, put IT right back up. And at that time you could download a postscript file for the python toil.

And just immediately found love felt like a fit my brain couple years later, out of the navy. And there's a meet up november one thousand nine hundred and ninety four. First meet up.

The greeter did. okay. And so what got to mean, everybody now back to the how I got an open source.

They're all smart. I'm not. So I kind of a got involved on organizing. Oh, cool.

And this is something that we all of us empathy talk about is there's lots of ways to be valuable to the open source. W, yeah, in one of the big ones, we all talk about documentation. And another big one is organizing. Helping with conference is running meet ups being the kind of person that glows people together is a great and needed skill in a population full of some of the the people who don't have .

all those skills ah outreach .

may not either string in in Frankly, what they're good at is like the golden goose. So let's to support them doing the really important time. So that was kind of my on tray was an untraditional path in the open source. And IT really was fun in that first third of python years. Learned a lot. And as python really took off, getting back to your question, I learned a lot that there's this orchestra has a lot of different instruments in IT yeah and we need lots of different kinds of people, lots of different kinds of personalities in different geographic areas around the world.

I feel like one is people like is in between all those things like I definitely like obviously have a podcast. I like talking to people. I like learning, you know, their stories and conveying them to other people. But I really I feel like i'm that person that can translate for a lot of people and feel like that's a really unique thing. That, well said, is good.

I want to say that about you, that you're kind of like a story teller for all of us. And we need to keep our shared history, shared culture stitched together during the days of media growth yeah so that we pop out the other sides still feeling good about who we are .

yeah yeah so I wanted, have you come on and and you kind of propose this? So what current events sort of topic that happening in the world and there's a lot of turmoil, if you will, in the open source community, probably the largest bonfire is what's happening with the word press right now. And I don't know if you wanted explain IT or I could try to do a short sops of IT. Yeah, it's it's definitely a drama and this is going to come out a little late. So I I don't know what will have happened.

You know in the time between us you're going to a page yes.

yes. And that's why not gna go too deep in IT. The problem is if it's confusing and probably my definitions are not going na be perfect.

So i'm sorry you don't miss that. You need to send emails to me directly about clarifying these things because it's all PHP and right. So or I guess there maybe a fork, which is an interesting one rino.

I just heard of them going to make IT be jb script to anyway. So part of the wordpress drama is there's wordpress dot org, which is sort of the wordpress foundation that is supporting the continued development of wordpress as a platform. They are the open source maintainer of lots of things.

H, I don't even haven't done the deep research, but i'll include a link where IT kind of gets into this. I got a probably three different verger articles that kind of go a look at further there. A good research.

I feel like they do do their research. Matt mullen weg is the cofounder of the organization there and that's where IT is kind interesting because he has a for profit business that's called word press to com, which is a hosting business for wordpress sites. And the name of that company that is sort of the umbrella for that is called automatic IT spelled with an extra tea matt uh in the matmos n wog h part name there um which I just learned.

So anyway, you have those two entities and i'd kind of known about that for a long time. Along comes another organization that's i'm not sure how long theyve been around. That's another researching I haven't done, but they're called W P engine.

They don't explicit say what the W P stands for, but this is a hosting exactly IT is a word press hosting site and they have investors. Silver light, I think, is one of the sort of VC sort of investors type of thing. And matt was going to go to this conference and then wrote this blog post and basically got very, very mad at wp engine that they were not giving back to the wordpress community.

He himself champions our company automatic devotes four thousand hours a week toward the open source project. That is where Price and these guys are coming along and they're sort of in writing on the good tails and so forth. So the next step is not just being angry about IT, but him starting to make manuvers that are literally cutting off than being able to access parts of word press on or which is where how the plugins are and things like that and having automated that are saying things like you have to check mark this boxes says you are not involve the wp engine in any way to able to access .

the which is crazy even right for his own employees yeah if you're .

and if you're in an outside person, but you're just an open source person, you've been contributing plugins and insurance d and on the side, maybe you do jobs. We all do that you developers and some things involved with A B P engine. Like why should that person get in between there? Like how does that get into the whole thing? So it's a very, very messy situation, and the fire is still raging in lot ways.

In fact, there's mutimer lawsuits from both sides on the thing. I don't know how to shake out, but it's there have been other sort of flames in the open source community over the last several years. And I can kind of feel like a general frustration from some maintainers that, hey, open source takes more than just, you know, free energy from all these developers. IT requires maintenance and bugg reports and sofa th and a large corporate entities are going to just take .

that free loaders .

and and use IT. IT feels like there's not this pushing poland and and i've talked about this a handful of times on the show and I feel it's really important. I've had conversations with somebody from tide lift and the only source initiative, and I ve talked to individual developers like Russell kiss ki.

We talked about IT very early on about bear and him just saying I can only do this part time here and i've wanted do more with IT and then him in a later interview talking about how, hey, he's now got funding to be able to work full time on this and how he has, you know, a support from anaconda, which is really cool. And I know that we've champion the psf getting funding from a variety of different organization. So it's interesting time.

And so I feel like you have this really interesting background when you sent me this email like saying, hey, i've been involved in organizing things like the python software foundation, which I I didn't know what that will be. Fancy talk about the plan foundation so i'm intrigued to like learn like, okay, well, how do you organize those things? But more importantly.

How do we structure them in and protect them in a way that they can be sustained? And then maybe we who knows how far this conversation can go. These things typically want to keep IT on our, but I know we can talk for a long china about IT.

And you guys that jet brains are also have some things you probably want talk about to that, that you are doing your job of giving back to the community. So what are you missed in there? Hit most the points.

I think you did he especially the summary of what's going on in wordpress really does get to the nub of the thing sort of speak yeah and then a lot of things flow out of that. But IT helps us focus, keep the main thing, the main thing yeah.

And one thing I wanted to mention is this how big work presses. I think a lot of python people may not know if they never looked at IT.

but it's forty three percent of all websites. It's t it's like everyone talking about jobs gpp framework that drivers gpp ramework and jay query sit now they're saying, hello, I like five war zero OS on my downloads than you do so right, right, you cute over there the corner for this this thing going on with word press.

One thing that i'd like to perhaps be a little contrary on is kind of quit judgment and whose the heroes and who's the violence yeah, i'm pretty sure that who we all think is the violin is the value. okay. But maybe there is kind of a deeper point about open source and money and who feeds the cow and who milks the cow? sure.

And how to do that fairly. And I I take that analogy about the cow all the way back to my experiences in one hundred and ninety eight when we took venture capital funding and learn some lessons about all of this. Yeah, and you mentioned that IT has come up in the last few years of stuff.

You see these things amazon would do like take multiple data storage projects and just kind of like some I fork them not obey the copyright, right? Because they're not actually distributing of fork. They're just found a loophole with the hosting thing and then people have to do self defense by coming up with a new license to prevent that.

And there is all this stuff that doesn't really help the actual code. And this is where I see the main thing. The main thing.

All of us in athon need to realize that there's more involved than oh, owner open source license. We're safe. no. Yeah, there's a lot more that goes into the whole product, not just the product. Things like tradeMarks and contribute license agreements and patterns and assignments are all these other kinds of things.

And that really gets into my point about who's the woman, who's the hero, is that maybe there was this kind of really legitimate cry of outrage of you or milk in the cow. You're not give, you're not feed in the cow, right? And the fact that the guy crying out about this has a few hundred million in the bank yeah feel on IT. But there is there is a point that helps us lead into a discussion about python.

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Well, i'm in trial. I know you want to tell the story of the zap because we discuss IT a long time ago that we might come on and talk about IT. So I think we'd have to leave IT a little abbreviated here, but i'm intrigued by IT because it's it's a name that I see in the background of some other projects, but I don't necessarily know that much about IT or the history there. And I think I might help us in, in the idea of like how do you structure IT .

and so forth and my goodness, the number of hours. But I love talking about this kind of stuff because I think it's important part of our shared history. And these things, as were pressures, are there is a thing python is hours.

That's kind of a central point here. Python is hours. It's not quote on what theirs you want to choose there to be. And we need to be good custodians of python. Here's an interesting point, you know, in some of these discussions on the way it's like who wants back on one hundred years now?

Yeah sure.

Free software foundation, specifically bradly coon at software freedom conservancy and aba mogin talking about conservative and thinking we like multiple generations into the future. Well, IT was all cute in the ninety nineties when the number of python people could fit in a moderate size color. C.

M, but now I thon is there for humanity. I mean, it's A B, F, D, yeah, yeah. And so we do have to be good custodians for IT. So which would like to go back and kind of talk about the genesis of some of these things, about the organizing a python.

Yeah, yeah. I definitely. I mean, I know we wanted to hit on why the python soft foundation is created. IT would be one of them, definitely basic protection of of this taking care of .

IT and the funny story of that first november and ninety four, which means that the first python event happened thirty years ago next month, is like, really cool. Yeah yeah. That the thing I participated was like starting to right by laws for freaking consorting about something that had, like, twenty people are like twenty people at this mean.

So that was like a total waste of time. IT was such a me thing to do to go waste everyone's time talking about something like that. But a couple of years later, I started to become a little more important and good to.

And the python team, i'll say, was at C. N R, I corporation for national research initials good as a lot of written history on this, so I won't labor too much of the point. It's a pretty fascinating time.

Maybe you share some links in the the yeah what .

he and the others were doing and how they were getting funded and stuff like that. And then IT became this time here, where conference were being organized. Also at C.

N. R, I was the outfit called four tech, which organized the world by web conferences and try to do quite professional grade conferences. I think they also might have organized the ietf beatings and some other big things, and they got involved to kind of professionalize the python comfort.

Okay, not that they have an invalid point. We called them spam one, spam two, spam three. That was the naming convention for the conference is back in the day, right? And so they got changed into, I think, I the international python conference and like the Prices went up and stuff like that.

That whole episode is actually a pretty interesting point for this discussion because during that time, we we crates something called the python software activity, PSA, which was the predecessor to the psf OK. But its real concept was consorting. What do you mean that the people that businesses that depended on Price on would come together OK for what purpose? Really, at the end the day, all setting the cost of python development, okay, but also provide representing their interests so that IT was safe to get their business on python.

And if they were going to use this, we need to make sure IT is continue to be developed, correct?

It's continued to be developed. But these other this whole product, W H O L E product, things he sings outside of the software that businesses depend on, you know, can I get illegal agreement? And i'm gonna suit for using this software? Okay, do you action python? Hh, that word sounds familiar. Can I use IT to team that what's going on here.

okay.

And that origin and story kind of even though the stakes were exceptionally small at the time, we were thinking about those kinds of things because those kinds of things are important. They're hard to put back in the bottle later, as most people found out with their triple license scheme like half a decade after that. So the p sa. Didn't work for a similar I I also had to give a cab. I'm even my version of the story.

sure.

and my version, the story, treat my trash. But it's also entertaining. I just want to to Carry out that no others involved, particularly greeter, will have a more definitive story because they saw IT much more closely.

But the development of python for cnr I in this pa that was happening, and then the growth of python, all kind of common hit with the python one point six, two point o double release, which is this interesting moment necessary, where they both kind of came out at the same time, timed with guidos exit from C N R I and going to with the pi on lab team into a california start up called be open OK in C N R. I wanted their name in the book. 嗯， and so when you fire up the interpreter and do credits, you'll see, see in ized name.

Okay, because they were paying for the python team and felt that they had intellectual property rights over work, product OK and then be open. Asked for the same thing about nine months after the be open thing. Um we had our company.

We gotten our last round of twelve and a half million and good to and team came to work for us. And when during the employment contract talk we put into the employment contract, our name is never going to appear. And anything that you can find from the interpreter product OK, that the work product of python was, even if we paid, if they did IT on the clock, is theirs.

I bring this up because a similar thing was happened in same time the the experience from the python software activity and the initial python conference, kind of corporate sing premature ally, the conference got out of the way. And the first thing that happened was a python software foundation, the kind of controller for my company was the original treasure, and kind of sprung ing into existence. But greg stein and I were the two bootstrap officers board members. Okay, you've got to have something that creates the something.

In order to have a foundation.

you need the thing that makes the foundation factory. yeah. OK. right. So the P. S.

APP sprung into existence, and IT was a shoe fit the right foot. Cause IT was about owning the work product of python. OK, collectively, right for humanity.

The work product of python dug tradeMarks. right? Hard problem. International jurisdiction of tradeMarks that is complex. Your only hope is to pay an agency who has the legal experience in all these jurisdictions.

Isn't that something that is really to ugly head in in the E U. Recently, right? With sort of regulation of of software and security and things like that were cycle who owns that he is responsible for yeah it's been interesting.

Yeah because the mission statement, I don't know IT IT remained the same or has been modified, but the python software foundation mission statement is the mission of the python software foundation is to promote, protect an advanced a python programing language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of python programmer. Well said that be with that. Was that the original?

I don't know if that was the original doubt IT, that sounds .

pretty good.

Yeah yeah. definite. And just to say that by the time that happened in really at that point, all the eggs are in the committee basket, as represented by guy dom, the group that got py on back on track, or equal heroes in the whole story.

right? Defending trademark takes money. Where is the money gonna come from? Well, if you have a volunteer run conference, IT can make some money, and you can go solve problems of the comments.

And maybe the pairing of those two that really are the secret to python success beyond the engineering of python, is that by thon went into the commons, okay, and the commons was able to administer IT. Back in those days, I gave talks on open source business models. I actually, I gave a talk titled funding the perfect beast, because that done, hindi song was popular at the time.

OK. And a venture capital conference, they put me up in the risk letton. sanfords. Isco, never been. That's a nicer talk.

I've ever been sure. So this is late nineties.

This would be like .

ninety nine.

yeah. OK. From a kind of business model perspective, one of the things that I talk to my find, make a little bit attention.

Get back over the word pressing. Our company is called digital creations, our open source software called zap. Okay, I D oh my god, this is an an emerging.

I had a slight called the perfect distance, and I said that the project in the company need to be a perfect distance apart. Okay, it's too far away. No one will believe it's sustainable. But if it's too close, people will think. Their volunteer shields working for a VC, the helicopter .

prepared .

of perhaps .

something.

yeah. But when we got our third round and they installed a grown up C E O, the first thing I did was changed the name of the company to match the name of the product out.

And really.

that gets into what's going on here with the worst ss thing, is that there are these assets that are valuable that aren't the software. Who gets that? Where's that value capture?

Who gets to capture that value is IT proportional to the people who put in the value. Should we ask questions like that? Or is that open source and people can do what they want?

What is being late to programing and being late to open source meeting over the last five years and a little bit longer IT just fascinates me to no end the amount of effort that people have volunteered into existence.

Yeah.

I always wondered in the back of my mind, at what point does that graciousness and and willing to do this, like where does IT eventually like cardle or fall apart or whatever? And and so i've been very, very intrigued by reaching out, getting corporate response or ship for things like developer and residence and all these other kinds of interesting things that been happening there.

And so I have i'm answering the question, but I really intrigued by a lot of what's happening. And i'd like the structure of the python software foundation, how it's not a company. Know in a way, and it's kind of protecting this thing that I am very intrigued, I want to protect, and i'd like that other things like the jingo foundation and the forth try to model that in a similar way.

There's some huge projects to set an episode very talked about all the different things that are using jane today based upon a recent article that you guys had about janee project ideas, a jet brains there. And it's just fascinating to me like that balancing act. And I worry, I guess, about a lot of the stuff of people ripping up stakes and saying you can use this thing anymore, or potentially doing something malicious that is used, wait down in the dependency tree in all these things that we've seen.

And as you know, people at the end of the thing that as a teacher, wanting people to be informed about these things and be cautious about these things and being aware of IT, and I haven't done a story about uv yet, and that's another one where I feel there's some nervous is there because that is a company. And what does that mean? What is a long gevalia? What is, you know, are are they gonna? I believe there are venture back that I don't know that for sharing, they are okay.

So when did they get upset and want to change things and want to put their features in? Because, you know, they feel things and when does IT become could procure and stuff like that. So those are my ideas on IT. You know, I think i'm just muddy the waters a little of bit, but those are my concerns, and hence why I want to talk about this stuff.

I'll pick one of the things you said first and talk on that had a little bit because I think IT becomes the answer to what you said second. OK, the word thing is doing some heavy of thing because that's kind like pull out of my book, but 是 companies .

like jet .

brains give back to open source。 Give back to open source in a variety ways. It's really cool what's being done. They could just be a venture that looks at python the way a coal miner looks at a mountain. But we've got some companies in the python ecosystem like jet brains. They kind of realized where in IT together, right? And the only the reason we're making running because that things popular, true less that things unpopular.

bad news for us, who's gonna a tool to use IT, right? The demand .

for cobo ID is it's not not peaker. And so these various ways that jet brains gives back are kinds interesting to me. And then you also mention like visionary sponsor, which was the very first I think he was google, and they had a problem they wanted solved, but they wanted to solved collectible.

Because if they solved IT themselves, they weren't actually solving the problem you going to solve. IT up string. yeah. And so these efforts to solve collective problems with money from entities that have a financial interest becomes the winning formula. Only if you've got a viable P, S, F, OK in particular, if you've got executive director that's hustlin chasing our money, closing the deal yeah getting the signature on the check and then following through to keep that spots are happy yeah I feel like that's such .

a key thing that I always here kind of on the side like what do we do? What we protect the trademark of of python and and it's like I see how that could get mad muddy when you start accepting outside funds.

So well, sad that very, very good point is that even if these mega courts give money out of beneficence, where's the hidden and agenda? Yeah and so going through the p sf kind of money on set a little bit because people trust the P S. Because I have agency and that by voting and and we know them and we know what they're about.

right? Even the shifts of the last several years of the P S F to uh have a steering council and things like that had have moved away from what was a pretty common thing for big software projects of this benevolent dictator, which we're math fits on that veterum right now where the penev Lance is. But yeah, that's kind of an interesting thing where you'd kind of wonder, like, okay, when does that person become a tire and when did they get upset in some way and so forth and .

which is the natural course of huge of source projects.

I think, okay, yes, I don't have the arc of history as well to be able to see like you, but i've heard other communities falling in that way like maybe is a ruby that had a similar thing over last several years. But yeah, it's kind of while and hopefully we can keep our own internal fires a limited we definitely had stories that bubbled up here and there, but that seems like there's at least ways that we you have released valves and other things to can keep IT.

yes. So a governance model doesn't have to be perfect but when IT gets IT wrong, IT needs to able to correct and that's a Better measure yeah of a governance model yeah but I think really just kind of we should all pause for a moment. I used to say this about plan back in the day.

The plan is democracy. The software, valuable, but like the plan foundation, is the instrument of the software, is an equal achievement. The P, S, F, equal achievement. The jingle soft frenna's equal achievement.

对。

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Check out the video course. You could find a lake in the shower notes where you can find IT using the enhance search tool on real python outcome. I feel you know, I don't have as much familiar with alone.

I don't want you want to briefly describe the project. I know you're very involved with that. And I feel like it's jumping off of your history as though a little a bit again, we might have have a separate episode dives difference to these things.

But what is the right I will limit IT to just the scope at this conversation. It's a community run open source content management system, and I have been involved in at least a decade. They just had a really neat profile of global footprint of small businesses and independent consultants.

And from the very beginning, the founders acted collectively. okay. And then the founders, the part of the scene, and they keep on cooking. And so we'd organized into a foundation with help from other mogin. The kind of lesson applies to these others as well, like the psf. And I also want to talk a little bit about the the founder part that you said, remember back oh guys, i've just say two thousand seven maybe is when greeter was at google and APP engine OK and even then he was starting to delegate and kind of get out of the depart in B, D, F, L. Sure, sure, dictator. And I I said to him at that early time that this is actually hacked of an achievement that you, that python can continue without you because of what you you're consciously making IT possible for python to go on now through turbulent circumstances that became in in the war as Operator, that became a little more urgent a number of years later. And if for those that remember when we do said, i'm out, he also said, and i'm not choosing what's next, you ve figured out, what do you think of that was that was not like a brilliant move.

I literally got into python right as this was happening. Uh, I was very interesting to me was my first python job. And so I would be listening to like talk python and like, oh, this is happening and this is happening and I was very intrigued at at the time, and I did one of my first courses was on python three eight.

And one of the announcements was that, uh, we now have a steering council. And so I got to talk a little bit about that in the course. And so I did a little research about like, oh, they needed this new model and they kind of built IT up and and to me, a lot of the planning that went into IT, a lot of thought went into IT, like where we're to know, limit, amount, time that people can be on this thing.

I think that can be good. I like the idea of, uh, councils. There have been modern political nonsense going ourselves.

I don't think lifetime things are good. I think there should be limits. Personally, I think it's important to change out things. There can be no waves and directions one way the other that things way. But I feel like in general, I can course correct, especially if there paying attention to the community and you know what this projects force. So I I think it's a good idea and I think that was a good move.

What you just subscribe as more art than science, something they can bend without breaking. Yeah true. I'm reading and listening this a really long podcast series on the french revolution. And let's just say they struggled to settle on the governance.

Yeah, certain things are sharpened on the way.

Certain things are sharpened. Yes, there is a different code on a duck.

yes. So bringing .

this back to the P, S, F and kind of them execution model. H, that s, the P, S, F is a viable instrument of collective will. IT staff.

IT has money. You can set goals. You can achieve things.

Here's one I want you can. Yes, I worked to you. okay. Can I make you do so? Can you do like the oral history of, like, pie ladies and jane girls?

In jesica, a color decided to make pic on the instrument of gender diversity and python. In the course of, like, three years, IT went from three percent of the speakers were women to like, thirty percent. And IT just feels like IT wasn't accidental. IT was intentional.

IT was focused, intentional work. Yeah.

and IT needed someone who was going to make that happen no matter the odds in money.

yeah. I I had a reason talk with the jay meller, you know, about black python davin, right? And the reaction we are often for from developers is like, why do we need to have teams and why do we need have sides? And like, I am interested in in growing the diversity of things.

I've tried to do that on my show. It's a hard thing. I think an oral history would be fascinating. I don't know if I could could do I like a side series about that, but I I would be interested in talking to those people.

I I also talked to one of organizers, the pack on africa, actually two over a couple of times has talked marlin and the night and so many on recently to talk about IT. And that's fascinating. You know, again, them struggling to just get IT going again, you know, they give me hope.

yes. So yeah, I mean, i'd like talking to organizers. I don't know if it's a popular topic for my listeners. I wonder that sometimes, like, I wonder how much of that is there.

I definitely know you as an organizer, I find IT fascinating to talk to people who want to bring people together and and organic that way. So yeah, but it's I think it's an important part of any organization to see that. And when people say I feel welcome going to a pack on, I feel like I can belong here, or just from the outside.

I said this when I started, I was learning several languages. I had learned c qual. I was learning java script, and I was learning stuff in the only like community I would see.

And this was through podcasts, through organizations, through other things. I immel noticed like, this seems like a friendly language. I do not think I put my finger on IT, you know. But like, I feel like good people that talk about IT are excited about IT and interested in IT.

And I go and i'd look at java h script stuff and which just like, I don't know, he was like this low level of upset at this and they were just not they were like, you're wrong. He's wrong. Everybody is wrong.

And I like, what is this like I don't even know who to trust and and I don't feel like I want to be engaged in this community and maybe it's change. I don't know. I haven't been focused on IT because I was like, I like this thing and i've focused on IT since then. So but it's interesting how programing language can have a culture, but I can, and in takes work, which is kind of hidden. So you .

mentioned about jane black paths does and path on africa. And the jane conference, I got to hang out with all of them, and I got to say, he gave me the same kind of feeling I had at that meet up in one thousand and ninety four. Like, this is a cool place, and I think something cools gonna happen here.

And yeah, those those people are the right people. They're just so energizing IT IT puts gas in your take to hang out with valdan, Monica, N. J.

And all of them. Yeah, yeah. And you you're right about telling the stories. We need to know who we are. We need know why we are and providing a place break canon very famously yeah says, come for the language day for the community bret really is probably my he grow of piton and just, I admire that guy I love .

talking to, so want to talk to yeah.

he's famous for saying that. But we had, let's say, like six seven pythons ago. We do didn't want to do the keynotes. So we did a panel discussion, python ninety ninety four about that first meet up. We are we don't bearing jim volt from zab and Robin Frederick who are all there that meet up.

And James said something that I think really gavan ized that there is a question about python had this reputation, and as the friendly place to go, you went the perl and hung out with a Pearl people. And then, like, I need to take a shower. This growth, I think, come over to kite on and everyone is not like super happy to have you and all that stuff. And you made the point that python is warm and human because greeter is warm and human of .

that founder energy.

sure. yeah. And just set the tone from the beginning, and then the next generation of heroes kind of adopt that tone. And then the next out, out, out and IT has seen to work again.

I know have very I have little experience in communities of other programing languages and and but i'm intreat by them just even sometimes just like watching the conversation around things, you know the the websites and other things that as they discuss off and it's kind of amazing that is held and with this insane growth, no good the welcoming of all these other communities because like you think about data science and you think about universities and all these different places that are using in in that sort of interest.

And even though they pulled python in a lot ways, trying to pull in these other directions and have developed some of their own tools, the people that have talked to you that are more on that side of things still love the language and are still interested in in contributing back some other things. Sometimes those ideas don't always work, I think. But I appreciate that you. So it's kind of wild just to watch now. And i'd like talking to mean, one of things i've been interested in much more lately is just how are people using the language and and i've been trying to find more of those stories and more of those people get them as guests on the show.

And I have a historical example to reinforce the point you're making about pite on preserving inside identity with this influx of data sciences who really are quite different than develops. Yeah yeah, somewhere around ninety and ninety nine house, say maybe two thousand. There was one of the international python conferences. Okay, in early in Virginia, okay, snowed .

leg.

How key bridge america. The most famous thing from that was I got Randy push the last lecture guy.

the guy, a famous .

dying of cancer, and spends a year, current gmail, go around giving lectures. He gave the keynote and Alice a visualization project in python, really famous, actually, apple pole for this point. He had this big, this slide with a big circle.

In a tiny circle, the big circle was ninety nine percent and little circle was one percent. And he's like, this little circle is joel, the big circles, everybody else. And you think it's fine to have variable names with different cases to be significant in the rest of them? Like I did not know what you're talking about. Yeah and but for the point was we had a separate track for zap. Okay, the zap track and is pretty big or at that particular conference .

or at that .

particularly conference for the two offices after that, IT was pretty big. And a lot of new people in IT, actually, some of them went on to become fairness in the world, python, but kind of the president was said, was there in another room? They're not us.

They're not. Thanks on there's up OK. We probably had a women.

But the day of science, people have, despite me, even more different than the old people. Yeah, have matrix later. And pretty iceing under the world of python.

Yeah yeah. That one example I had recently after look up the episode, including the show notes, but there was a recent tool for kind of quickly building web apps and so forth. And I was using their particular way of writing python, and I had to specify multiple times.

This is not going to look like pep to you. It's going to look really weird and know Chris for trudeau is is as much for background to me, which is fantastic for me all the time. He's like, yeah, they're functional people. They right they write things in a functional way and so they're structuring stuff in this way. And even just like know the casing of IT doesn't matter because IT works in python, but it's gonna look weird and and I could feel like this thing like i'd like seeing IT, but I don't know i'm going to right didn't like that because that looks weird. IT looks for .

and you know it's always been fascinated me that the first argument to a method doesn't have to be called self, okay, but everybody does.

That could be whatever you like to go. Yeah, it's just a standard. One of things that we talked about here is getting into this idea of how companies can contribute. What sort of those agreements look like in the protection of your trade market, protection of of your of your open source project. And we watched google, but cash has been a whole bunch like math.

They've been very involved with, with the helping with the gill and so forth and microsoft literally helping with the faster python project with greeting and eric and brand and all these different people. So it's been kind of fascinating. What are the kinds of things that, that you guys are doing at cheap? Because you said that you guys are very interested in contributing.

right? And this is a good point to bring up because kind of hard to compare to like these fortune one hundred megacles who have this shirt, a lot of resources, but medium size companies can be part of this as well because they're invested as well. Yeah like century has some interesting things and interesting approaches to giving back open source.

And we eject rains have done in a lot of things over the years, most recently is open CD. Probably the reason why you and I talking because, well, we're just announcing a relationship as sponsorship relationship. I'm going to be on a weapon or with them, okay, talking about what we do.

And that's another example of a governance model that should be celebrated. But you know what's Better than celebrating IT supporting IT? Yeah because we're all in this together. And so those they get we've been talking for most of the time about those they get value should give value yeah that complicated that .

makes us to you I think its gets complicated in sort of the corporate. Hierarchy and who makes that decision? And people understanding that, yes, it's free to use this thing. And the problem is it's never relate to those, well.

people that have the .

first train. Yes, IT is free that we can use this thing. But how does IT sustain how the support? If we decide to do this thing, we should make sure it's .

there because the second group says, so what you're saying is I can actually not cut this check .

yeah in the the checked .

does a get up yeah I agree with you that that that distinction between the beevers and the players, that's a big in these that's like seven or chart levels in some companies yeah yeah.

I mean, I think that happens so often. Now I feel like that happening. A liver with A I like going away. It's kind of scaring me that the idea that we can just take all this stuff and it's like, okay, well.

yeah you know .

like what what are you willing to destroy just to have this thing in extraction yeah .

and this sort of .

extraction and yeah and I just feel like there's a lot of unsustainable greed and some of these shrink that is scary. I'm not saying as much of that as well as open source. But but yeah, there is a need to understand that there needs to be a Better definition of like, well, how do you at a as a person works for a company? Explain that two people like, what's what's a good short explainer?

So for me at jet brains, you know where are, I guess, so good way. That was where big, medium size cover OK. That's a good way to that.

We have lots of ID. We have lots of community stuff like that. But for the world of athon, it's kind of call the different kinds of things were doing doing this open C V thing. Really proud of that.

We have for a number of years done the D, S, F campaign and the p sf campaign, where for a period time there's a fundraiser, you get pie charm at a discount and the money goes to the fine. yeah. And for the dsf for a while, I was like a lot of their annual al income sure would really help.

obviously .

helped us as well. Now we have these other places where we just like that, trying to get anything in return. We're just trying to be the good guys.

An example that's close to my heart is jane Miller gave the keino a pack on this year. Yeah black python. Debs had its one year birthday, and we had a birthday party in the pyro bus.

Let's go play music, got photos, all like honey stuff, watching balloons. The balloons got us in trouble with conference for something. You had to go forgetta land last morning.

Yeah, need special equip.

I know there was just one belonging wasn't supposed to get away, but ultimately the balloons gonna, but that's the kind of thing we're gave a donation to black pants on. Those try to be like one of the first ones to give money so that jake, I didn't say, hey, they gave money. Why don't you give money?

two. And this is a thing.

a thing. Everybody give money to black midland. So those are different kinds of things to do.

Some of them are like really premeditated, take a big infrastructure and signal. And other ones are just like, hey, you're valuable. Here's a little something yeah yeah.

I wonder sometimes it's just like the stress of the maintaining an an open source project. I mean, I mention how some projects are getting some support. Tide lift is interesting organization. I still don't completely understand everything that's happening there. And the open source initiative is another one that's again, trying to connect people, you know and and also one of the things that that goes back to this quit proof thing.

I know, I know i'm been saying that a lot, sorry, but I feel like a corporation says, oh, well, now we have a direct lying to that project and we can get our stuff fixed and we can get our issues dealt with. And so worth and that can be part of that in kind of an interesting way. The direct assumption though, IT shouldn't be there.

There should be definitely some kind of a rules and guard rails. And so more around what that involves. I you have any experience with that? sure. okay. I skipped to the .

end of the movie and say you are exactly right. okay. Back when we had so and we were consulting company, the theory with massive scare clothes around IT was ah we will do things on consulting gigs that fund at the advance of the platform.

Okay, pretty interesting formula. Everybody wins. The customer wins because the last thing they want is to be the owner of some intellectual property OK.

But they have to maintain into a believe, and they barely understand, right? Funny enough, IT was difficult to explain this to customers. They wanted to, they wanted to own what they paid for.

but who own software at all?

I tried to saying this is an enacted .

light building. Let's just so funny, like in the world of video games, that i'm in into this old idea of do you even own the game? And if IT is a online hosted thing, you know like like when you've paid whatever amount.

So it's kind like, well, you need to just think of IT more as an experience and how much time you invested. And I think it's a good value and generally, but I know that you know how the people are like, well, we need to preserve these things. You kind of going back to that conversation and like make sure that the stuff is uh, maintained in a certain way. So we well, we had on a lot of different things. I is anything that you want to touch on. I don't know if there's like advice or things that we want to share here at the end to say along with the hey, you shouldn't into you if you work for a company, you know that hey, maybe you shouldn't figure out out that you can you donate money and keep these things going, not only the python sort for a foundation, but maybe even other smaller projects that that you are using the tools of and and make them keep going because that I know that, that's happening more and more like the pilot project or other kinds of your things that are or organizing in a way, the gene of software foundation, obviously, and plan and so forth. Do you have other advice that you could say, hey, if you have the year of the person with the per staring, what you can say to them.

sir? L, i'll give one particular story and then use my standard close out to kind of reference the point you're making. One of my great friends and business partner, Chris, lives floor that way. okay?

The creator of tons of software that people depend on, including the thing that SAT inside docker for many years as the orchestrator of docker called supervisor, well, tons of other things and never got the money. He deserved these other companies. Yp, he's the author of pm.

Pier, mid powered yell and read IT and some other things. And the money never flowed back to. And that was when I started to think this open source business model thing was kind of following apart even as consulting IT was hard to get the value extractors to contribute back to the gold gods .

yeah as to say the word is truly extraction. It's just like so what .

i'll say with kind of my standard clothes and then make the point that you're making is in my python hundred and ninety four talk, I talk about the first third of python and then the middle third of python is when the psf I pike on arrive money started coming in. Gender diversity happened in this big new population here, really exciting growth. And then the third third is kind of the arrival of data science. Now the falling in this is that there is a third, third. So in my mathematical university, third, there's a fifth, third.

They can exactly.

So in this fourth, third, there is going to be a new generation of heroes. Let IT be you in when it's listened to the end of this. yeah. Let IT be you get involved.

Ved, in its our job, the ones that were there before to make you successful and for you to have a canvas to paint your own dreams on, right? That said, pythons about to enter this phase where IT won't be like two to three, but IT will be a sort of like that. No gill free, threatening sob en interPeters jet may be more type handing these kinds of things. I can break a lot of packages.

Yeah, there's going to be to be a lot of support behind those changes.

indeed. And so if you've got money and you're shipping a python package and you go to these people in yalta and you don't have a check in your hand, I hope they give you the middle finger because you deserve IT.

right? yeah. why? Why can't my CoOperation keep using this thing? And yeah, yeah. So i'd like to ask everybody comes on the show a couple of questions here. What's something that get you excited about the world of python right now?

I hate be selfish, but okay, there's a pep pep seven fifty four template strings and it's largely jm Baker, uh, who was the maintained giant for a long time for wireless and good to and me and theyve pack in the SAndra and could die and IT just wrapped up a second round of review IT might .

might be three fourteen .

ago in three fourteen. okay. And the premise for me is to bring the developer experience of java script web development to python.

People who like tooling and want IT in HTML and other kinds of languages will feel like they don't have to leave python es together OK. That will be an interesting thing if we can point off and try. And jetson python can teleport man's web development story into this decade.

Yeah, the next one is what something that you want to learn next. This doesn't not to be about programme. You could be about anything that you feel like you want to learn next.

French, okay. I have a particular for highly important reason for that. I'll leave that out, but I will actually go back to programming. okay.

And related to like my dream thing with this pep seven fifty, the future python web development, I have a particular history that's interested really deeply in preventing ing that exact generation, that kind of thing. And i'm really interested in Jason blogs in sequel. I okay, returning them. No, do you know storing them, okay, indexing into the structure and efficiently retrieving and updating unstructured data.

That sounds fun. I mean, reading Simon willison .

and stuff constantly when I get into this.

yeah, yeah, that's not the persons I got to get on the show. Yeah, I definitely one of the .

biggest thinkers in python.

Yeah, yeah. The last thing I always want to talk about is how can people follow the work that you do? I feel like there's a variety of ways that that can happen here.

Frankly, I would prefer them to follow the newer generation of people. Okay, let's diversifier thinking. Let's create a information ecosystem in our community that is not gate kept by the big boys such as valuable sources such as sue. Okay, in real python, we're going to find ourselves in a year or two where the gatekeeper stopped sending people to us.

Yeah, yeah. I I gry yeah. And IT sure .

would be great if you know the what's the most valuable thing in python, where there's the software, there is the community, there is the foundation. But also, like this media empire, you know? Yes, based on whatever R, S, S.

Masted on whatever yeah yeah. Um I think that would be kind of a cool outcome. So let's all diversify our thing IT valid to puts out a newsletter which is really fun and cool to read.

So let's get out of our silos. Let's benefit from these other voices. Let's also give gratitude back to them. Let's amplify each other.

Yeah, I was on the periphery during the great blog, a songs, if you will, that happened, and all these kind of things bloomed. But I used to really enjoy going and hoping around and in the links to other stuff in south forth. And I was really very much saddened when these large companies basically said, come inside our little chief dom in and everything, you'll be great and will promote you and so forth.

And and then IT was all just a shame, yes, from the beginning and it's just sucks. It's just so sad. And I I am user a massed on like of all these things, the sort of federation idea. It's still working its way. sure.

But that is the place that I see the conversation here's like I see the court developers and other people talking and some of these other in, what if you want to call, you know, the people that are blumine aries in our industry are there. I just wish I could find some more of them. So please follow .

me because i'm .

trying to find more those voices, definitely to my information there. I don't know.

Are you user, unfortunately, i've reached when I kicked the twitter habit. Yeah, I was suddenly like, wow, I had so much time on my things now. Now, back to the point is checking master on constantly. I cut this great detox plant from tap pots.

And yeah, that's good. Ah cool. All right. Well, paul, it's been fantastic to talk to you. I've been waiting to do this for quite a while. So next coming on the show.

Thank you for having me I we of that age know that someone should start recording some of this because age is .

yeah ah yeah definitely. I've heard of oral histories on lots of other things and I I think I might be interesting to have a .

definitely a number of things that are just really fascinating OK.

Has he done them as a audio or is he .

mainly written? He was on lex fridman.

He's done writing. okay. yeah.

So I think he's been interviewed on the moral histories, okay. But I think that there's more that can be done. And certainly.

there was a lot of other players too, right?

That's exactly what I mean. Yeah, a lot of players, a lot of important people like all of the people from pie ladies well.

again, thanks. We're coming on the show.

Thanks for happy.

And don't forget our sponsor, century. At century, we don't just build tools. We use them to debug our trickey, read more chAllenging debugging stories, a blog, dot century dot I O.

I want to thank paul every for coming on the show this week, and I want to thank you we're listening to the real python podcast. Make sure that you cook that follow button in your podcast player. And if you see the subscribe button somewhere, remember that the real python podcast is really if you like the show, please leave us a review.

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