Membership Vote

This morning, PSF Director David Mertz announced on the PSF Members' mailing list the opening of a vote. For those of you who have already self-certified as voting members, or if you are already a Fellow of the Foundation, you should have received the announcement in a private email.

This is our first stab at using the voting mechanism to get a sense of the larger membership's views on an issue currently under discussion (the non-binding poll), so we urge you to take a moment and make your voice heard.

To review your eligibility to vote and to see the certification form, please see my previous blog post Enroll as Voting Member or go to the PSF Website.

Here is the announcement:

Membership Vote for Pending Sponsors and Non-Binding Poll 

The candidate Sponsor Members listed below were recommended for approval by the Python Software Foundation Board of Directors. Following the ballot choices is a detailed description of the organization (the submit button is after the descriptions, so scroll down for it).
This election will close on 2015-03-26.
Sponsor Member Candidates

Bloomberg LP	yes	no	abstain
Fastly	yes	no	abstain
Infinite Code	yes	no	abstain

Non-Binding Poll on PyCon Video Sublicensing 

Purpose: The PSF Board of Directors is seeking the collective perspective of PSF Voting Members on the appropriate handling of video recording sublicensing for presentations at PyCon US. These videos are currently made freely available on Google's YouTube, and may be incorporated into other sites through YouTube's embedding features. There are no plans to change that arrangement, but a separate question has arisen that requires determining whether it would be appropriate to exercise the sublicensing rights granted to the PSF under the PyCon US speaker agreement. This part of the poll serves as a non-binding survey of PSF Voting Members, intended to help the Directors formulate a suitable policy in this area based on the way the PyCon US speaker agreement is generally perceived, rather than based solely on what it permits as a matter of law.
Background: A request has been made to the PSF to sublicense video recordings made at PyCon of speaker presentations. The license agreement signed by speakers gives the PSF the right to grant such sublicenses, however the Board of Directors is of mixed opinion about whether we should do so. The release form (i.e. license) agreed to by speakers is at https://us.pycon.org/2015/speaking/recording/ for reference. Note that YouTube is explicitly mentioned in the release as an example of such a sublicensee, and pyvideo.org has always been given this right (although they have only exercised it thus far by embedding YouTube hosted videos, not by mirroring content, and hence are not technically a sublicensee at this point). Embedding a video does not require a sublicense, only mirroring it does.
There are two axes along which the Board is divided. On the one hand, we are not unanimous about whether we should grant a sublicense to commercial entities which may benefit financially by providing local copies of these video recordings, and may even potentially grant such local access only to subscribers in some manner. In favor of granting such access, some Directors feel that the more widespread the mirroring, the better, regardless of the commercial or non-commercial nature of the hosting (i.e. as long as the gratis access is never removed, which is not being contemplated). In opposition to granting such access, some Directors feel that for-profit sublicensees will gain unfair commercial advantage by bundling PyCon videos with other content sold for profit. Potentially the PSF may require payment, and gain revenue, for granting these sublicense rights.
On the other hand, we are also not unanimous about whether—if we do grant sublicenses—we should do so only prospectively, once we can inform speakers of our intent prior to their talks, or whether we should exercise the rights given in speaker releases even retroactively for previous PyCons. While speakers have given such rights already in a legal sense, some Directors feel they may not have fully contemplated that grant at the time, and only going forward, with more explicit information about sublicensing intents of the PSF, should sublicensing be allowed to other entities.

Sublicense entities	Only YouTube (others embedding)	As many mirrors as possible	Only non-commercial mirrors
Sublicense timeframe	Prospectively only	Including retroactively	Not applicable

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Bloomberg LP
As the market data and analysis industry leader, Bloomberg LP provides a broad portfolio of innovations to our clients. Bloomberg's Open Market Data Initiative is part of our ongoing efforts to foster open solutions for the the financial services industry. This includes a set of published Python modules that are freely available to our clients at http://www.bloomberglabs.com/api/libraries/. In support of promoting further Python usage within the financial services industry, we have hosted a number of free public developer-focused events to support the Python ecosystem—including the Scientific Python community. Please refer to http://go.bloomberg.com/promo/invite/bloomberg-open-source-day-scientific-python/ and https://twitter.com/Mbussonn/status/533566917727223808. By becoming a member, we wish to further increase our support of the PSF in its mission to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language. 

Fastly
Fastly provides the PSF with unlimited free CDN services, a dedicated IP block, and hosted certificates. We also provide the PSF with free Premium Support. Over the last few months, Fastly’s comped services to the PSF totalled up to ~$20,000/month. In January 2015 alone, the PSF sent 1.7 billion requests and 132 TB through Fastly.
Python is a the go-to language at Fastly for building developer tools. Python allows Fastly to rapidly prototype and deploy novel protocols and services over multiple platforms, including devices like network switches, which are traditionally not programmable. Fastly relies on Python for data analysis and to dynamically reconfigure network switching and routing to steer every request to the closest available server. These tools are instrumental in helping Fastly reliably deliver more traffic in less time.

Infinite Code
Infinite Code is a software development firm with offices in Beijing, China and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. We are strong believers in Free/Open Source Software and the people centric principles of Agile Development. Our language of choice is Python for software development where possible. Our recent Python developments run the range from high volume, real money gaming platforms to massively parallel data gathering and transformation for large quantities of data. Our developers have been using Python since 2001.

I would love to hear from readers. Please send feedback, comments, or blog ideas to me at msushi@gnosis.cx.