On Friday, November 15, the board of the Foundation voted for Barry Warsaw to receive a Community Service Award for Q3 2013. Barry's involvement in the Python community recently reached a significant milestone, as he retired the Python 2.6 line with its final security release (2.6.9). Since 2007, Barry acted as the release manager for 2.6, an instrumental release for a number of reasons, including working with the 3.x line to backport many features. He was simultaneously the 3.0 release manager at that time, which saw its first release two months after 2.6 came out.
Barry's involvement in the community extends long beyond contributions to the CPython project, into his work on the GNU Mailman project. He earned the 2008 Antonio Pizzagati Prize for Software in the Public Interest for his work on Mailman, which has become the world's most popular mailing list software, seen all around the web. It's rare to find a mailing list out there that isn't managed by Mailman.
He has also been a contributor to the Debian and Ubuntu projects, recently becoming a Debian Member in June. He has spent a good bit of time on Ubuntu's shift to Python 3, mapping out dependencies and working with upstream projects to ensure a quality port of their codebase.
When he's not jamming on Python, he's jamming on a bass guitar. Check out some of his music here.
Congratulations, and thanks for all of your hard work!
