The PSF’s Grants Program is a key plank in our charitable mission to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers. After much research, input, and analysis, we are pleased to share a PSF Grants Program 2022 & 2023 Transparency Report. The report includes context, numbers, analysis, and a proposed path forward. It also includes a supplemental analysis of several specific grant applications for which we were requested to share more information. We feel it is important to ..read more

PSF Board elections are a chance for the community to choose representatives to help the PSF create a vision for and build the future of the Python community. This year there are 3 seats open on the PSF board. Check out who is currently on the PSF Board. (Débora Azevedo, Kwon-Han Bae, and Tania Allard are at the end of their current terms.) Board Election Timeline Nominations open: Tuesday, June 11th, 2:00 pm UTC Nomination cut-off: Tuesday, June 25th, 2:00 pm UTC Voter application/affirmation cut-off date: Tuesday, June 25th, 2:00 pm UTC Announce candidates: Thursday, June 27th Voting start ..read more

  2023 was an exciting year of growth for the Python Software Foundation! We’ve captured some of the key numbers, details, and information in our latest Annual Impact Report. Some highlights of what you’ll find in the report include: A letter from our Executive Director, Deb Nicholson Notes from Our PyCon US Chair, Marietta Wijaya, and PSF Board of Director Chair, Dawn Wages Updates on the achievements and activities of a couple of our Developers-in-Residence, Łukasz Langa and Seth Larson—and announcing more members of the DiR team! An overview of what our PyPI Safety & Security Eng ..read more

The PSF is pleased to announce its fourth batch of PSF Fellows for 2023! Let us welcome the new PSF Fellows for Q4! The following people continue to do amazing things for the Python community: Jelle Zijlstra Github, Quora Thank you for your continued contributions. We have added you to our Fellow roster online. The above members help support the Python ecosystem by being phenomenal leaders, sustaining the growth of the Python scientific community, maintaining virtual Python communities, maintaining Python libraries, creating educational material, organizing Python events and conferen ..read more

The Python Software Foundation is pleased to announce our participation in co-starting a new Open Initiative for Cybersecurity Standards collaboration with the Apache Software Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, other code-hosting open source foundations, SMEs, industry players, and researchers. This collaboration is focused on meeting the real challenges of cybersecurity in the open source ecosystem, and demonstrating full cooperation with and supporting the implementation of the European Union’s Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). With our combined efforts, we are optimistic that we will reach our g ..read more

The PSF received an open letter asking us, amongst other things, to look into some of our recent grant decisions and make recommendations to the PSF Board for improving the Grants Program. We contracted Carol Willing, of Willing Consulting, to do this work in the form of a retrospective. Carol’s scope included reading through mailing lists, examining Board and Grants Working group norms, creating a comprehensive timeline, conducting interviews, documenting findings, and offering recommendations for the future. In the retrospective Willing contextualizes the PSF Grants Program as part of the w ..read more

We launched the Python Package Index (PyPI) in 2003 and for most of its history a robust and dedicated volunteer community kept it running. Eventually, we put a bit of PSF staff time into the maintenance of the Index, and last year with support from AWS we hired Mike Fiedler to work full-time on PyPI’s urgent security needs. PyPI has grown enormously in the last 20+ years, and in recent years it has reached a truly massive scale with growth only continuing upward. In 2022 alone, PyPI saw a 57% growth and as of this writing, there are over a half a million packages on PyPI. The impact PyPI has ..read more

Earlier this week the White House published a report recommending the use of memory-safe programming languages to eliminate an entire class of vulnerabilities affecting software. The report quotes claims from large software producers like Google and Microsoft which estimate that 70% of vulnerabilities affecting software are due to memory-safety issues. Back in December of 2023, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) published a report that included a list of memory-safe programming languages, among them was the Python programming language. The Python Software Foundation’s ..read more

Our Security Developer-in-Residence, Seth Larson, has been working to improve the management of vulnerabilities for Python users. Seth has championed progress on this goal in a variety of areas: Authorizing the Python Software Foundation as a CVE Numbering Authority (CNA) to publish CVE IDs and records Revitalizing the security advisory mailing list (security-announce@python.org) Migrating all historical vulnerabilities to the Open Source Vulnerability format (OSV) and having the records indexed into the global OSV database With the release of CPython 3.12.2, the next step of the Python Soft ..read more

In October 2023, we acknowledged the situation surrounding DjangoCon Africa and noted our intent to make ongoing improvements to the Grants Program. We also recognize that we are in a new world of hybrid programming since the onset of the pandemic which comes with different funding and cost challenges. One step we are taking to refresh the Grants Program (we’ll be reporting on other steps soon) is to establish PSF Grants Program Office Hours. The office hours will be hosted on the Python Software Foundation Discord once a month at 2-3PM UTC (9AM Eastern) on the third Tuesday of the month. (Ch ..read more