Python is for everyone: Join in the PSF year-end fundraiser & membership drive!

The Python Software Foundation (PSF) is the charitable organization behind Python, dedicated to advancing, supporting, and protecting the Python programming language and the community that sustains it. That mission and cause are more than just words we believe in. Our tiny but mighty team works hard to deliver the projects and services that allow Python to be the thriving, independent, community-driven language it is today. Some of what the PSF does includes producing PyCon US, hosting the Python Package Index (PyPI), supporting 5 Developers-in-Residence, maintaining critical community infrastructure, and more.

Python is for teaching, learning, playing, researching, exploring, creating, working– the list goes on and on and on! Support this year's fundraiser with your donations and memberships to help the PSF, the Python community, and the language stay strong and sustainable. Because Python is for everyone, thanks to you.

There are two direct ways to join through donate.python.org: 

• Donate directly to the PSF! Your donation is a direct way to support and power the future of the Python programming language and community you love. Every donation makes a difference, and we work hard to make a little go a long way.
• Become a PSF Supporting Member! When you sign up as a Supporting Member of the PSF, you become a part of the PSF, are eligible to vote in PSF elections, and help us sustain our mission with your annual support. You can sign up as a Supporting Member at the usual annual rate ($99 USD), or you can take advantage of our sliding scale option (starting at $25 USD)!

 

>>> Donate or Become a Member Today! <<<

 

If you already donated and/or you’re already a member, you can:

• Share the fundraiser with your regional and project-based communities: Share this blog post in your Python-related Discords, Slacks, social media accounts- wherever your Python community is! Keep an eye on our social media accounts to see the latest stories and news for the campaign.
• Share your Python story with a call to action: We invite you to share your personal Python, PyCon, or PSF story. What impact has it made in your life, in your community, in your career? Share your story in a blog post or on your social media platform of choice and add a link to donate.python.org.
• Ask your employer to sponsor: If your company is using Python to build its products and services, check to see if they already sponsor the PSF on our Sponsors page. If not, reach out to your organization's internal decision-makers and impress on them just how important it is for us to power the future of Python together, and send them our sponsor prospectus.

 

Your donations and support:

• Keep Python thriving 
• Support CPython and PyPI progress 
• Increase security across the Python ecosystem 
• Bring the global Python community together 
• Make our community more diverse and robust every year

 

Highlights from 2025:

• Producing another wonderful PyCon US: We welcomed 2,225 attendees for PyCon US 2025– 1,404 of whom were newcomers– at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in beautiful downtown Pittsburgh. PyCon US 2025 was packed with 9 days of content, education, and networking for the Python community, including 6 Keynote Sessions, 91 Talks, including the Charlas Spanish track, 24 Tutorials, 20 Posters, 30+ Sprint Projects, 146 Open Spaces, and 60 Booths! 
• Continuing to enhance Python and PyPI’s security through Developers-in-Residence: The PSF’s PyPI Safety and Security Engineer, Mike Fiedler, has implemented new safeguards, including automation to detect expiring email domains and prevent impersonation attacks, as well as guidance for maintainers to use more secure authentication methods like WebAuthn and Trusted Publishers. The PSF’s Security Developer-in-Residence, Seth Larson, continues to lead efforts to strengthen Python’s security and transparency. His work on PEP 770 introduces standardized Software Bill-of-Materials (SBOMs) within Python packages, improving visibility into dependencies for stronger supply chain security. A new white paper co-authored with Alpha-Omega outlines how these improvements enhance trust and measurability across the ecosystem. 
• Adoption of pypistats.org: The PSF infrastructure team has officially adopted the operation of pypistats.org, which had been run by volunteer Christopher Flynn for over six years (thank you, Christopher!). The PSF’s Infrastructure Team now handles the service’s infrastructure, costs, and domain registration– and the service itself remains open source and community-maintained. 
• Advancing PyPI Organizations: The rollout of PyPI Organizations is now well underway, marking a major milestone in improving project management and collaboration across the Python ecosystem. With new Terms of Service finalized and supporting tools in place, the PSF has cleared its backlog of requests and approved thousands of organizations—including 2,409 Community and 4979 Company organizations as of today. Hundreds of these organizations have already begun adding members, transferring projects, and subscribing to the new Company tier, generating sustainable support for the PSF. We’re excited to see how teams are using these new features to better organize and maintain their projects on PyPI.
• Empowering the Python community through Fiscal Sponsorship: We are proud to continue supporting our 20 fiscal sponsoree organizations with their initiatives and events all year round. The PSF provides 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status to fiscal sponsorees such as PyLadies and Pallets, and provides back office support so they can focus on their missions. Consider donating to your favorite PSF Fiscal Sponsoree and check out our Fiscal Sponsorees page to learn more about what each of these awesome organizations is all about!
• Serving our community with grants: The PSF Grants Program awarded approximately $340K to 86 grantees around the world; supporting local conferences, workshops, and community initiatives that keep Python growing and accessible to all. While we had to make the difficult decision to pause the program early to ensure financial sustainability, we would love to reopen it as soon as possible. Your participation in this year’s fundraiser fuels that effort!
• Honoring community leaders: The PSF honored three leaders with Distinguished Service Awards this year. Ewa Jodlowska helped transform the PSF into a professional, globally supportive organization. Thomas Wouters has contributed decades of leadership, guidance, and institutional knowledge. Van Lindberg provided essential legal expertise that guided the PSF through growth and governance. Their dedication has left a lasting impact on the PSF, Python, and its community. The PSF was also thrilled to recognize Katie McLaughlin, Sarah Kuchinsky, and Rodrigo Girão Serrão with Community Service Awards (CSA) for their outstanding contributions to the Python community. Their dedication, creativity, and generosity embody the spirit of Python and strengthen our global community. We recognized Jay Miller with a CSA for his work to improve diversity, inclusion, and equity in the global Python community through founding and sustaining Black Python Devs. We also honored Matt Lebrun and Micaela Reyes with CSA's for their efforts to grow and support the Python community in the Philippines through conferences, meetups, and volunteer programs.
• Finding strength in the Python community: When the PSF shared the news about turning down a NSF grant, the outpouring of support from the Python community was nothing short of incredible. In just one day, you helped raise over $60K and welcomed 125 new Supporting Members- in the week after, that number jumped to $150K+ and 270+ new Supporting Members! A community-led matching campaign and countless messages of support, solidarity, and encouragement reminded us that while some choices are tough, we never face them alone. The PSF Board & Staff are deeply moved and energized by your words, actions, and continued belief in our shared mission. This moment has set the stage for a record-breaking end-of-year fundraiser, and we are so incredibly grateful to be in community with each of you. 

Connecting the Dots: Understanding the PSF’s Current Financial Outlook

As the PSF heads into our end-of-year fundraiser, we want to share information to help “connect the dots” and show a more complete picture of the PSF’s current financial outlook. You’ve heard from us on subjects related to our financial position from several different angles recently (a list of those posts is below). We’ve prioritized proactive communications, because we believe in transparency, we have trust in our community, and we value keeping you informed— we know how invested in and impacted by our work you are. We now want to pull those threads together in order to create some shared clarity on the big picture, and, hopefully, inspire you to action to support our fundraising efforts.  

The dots

Many groups, organizers, and individuals in the Python community and beyond are experiencing the impacts of the current financial environment, including inflation, reduced sponsorship, economic pressure in the tech sector, and global/local uncertainty and conflict. Unfortunately, the PSF has felt these effects as well, in a number of ways. We’ve been doing our best to share how the current environment impacts our areas of service to the community as the PSF navigates these challenges over the past couple of years:

• PSF Grants Program Changes
• PyCon US 2025 Financial Transparency
• PSF Grants Program Pause
• Open Infrastructure is not Free Joint Statement 
• Our post on the Open Infrastructure is Not Free
• NSF Grant Application Withdrawal

To briefly summarize, the PSF’s assets and yearly revenue have declined, and costs have increased, while the demand and need for our work has continued to multiply. 

Historically, PyCon US has been a source of revenue for the PSF, enabling us to fund programs like our currently paused Grants Program. A PSF-run PyCon US is also an essential program for the PSF to deliver value to our sponsors. Unfortunately, PyCon US has run at a loss for three years—and not from a lack of effort from our staff and volunteers! Everyone has been working very hard to find areas where we can trim costs, but even with those efforts, inflation continues to surge, and changing US and economic conditions have reduced our attendance. Because PyCon US is still a 2000+ person event, we must secure venue contracts for event spaces that can accommodate that number of people, years in advance. Those contracts come with a lot of requirements, such as union labor, required vendors, and many more details (iykyk) that, in the end, amount to a hefty spend.

Meanwhile, Python usage has continued to surge (which is wonderful!), but rather than keep pace, corporate investment back into the language and the community has declined overall. The PSF has longstanding sponsors and partners that we are ever grateful for, but signing on new corporate sponsors has slowed. We have been seeking out alternate revenue channels to diversify our income, with some success and some challenges. PyPI Organizations offers paid features to companies (PyPI features are always free to community groups) and has begun bringing in monthly income. 

We’ve also been seeking out grant opportunities where we find good fits with our mission. We made it far along in one large U.S. Government grant process, but ultimately decided to withdraw our application because it conflicted with our values and mission. The community's supportive response to that decision has been heartening and brought in an unexpected surge of material support totaling $135K+ USD from 1400+ donors, which includes 270+ new PSF members! The PSF is astounded and deeply appreciative at the outpouring of solidarity in both words and actions. This remarkable show of support reminds the us of the community’s strength, and reinforces our resolve in the decision to withdraw from the grant process, even as the $1.5M gap from the grant remains.

Our 2024 Annual Impact Report provides a window on the current economic outlook for the PSF, with a loss in net income and a dip in the growth of assets in 2024. Because we have so few expense categories (the vast majority of our spending goes to running PyCon US, the Grants Program, and our small 13-member staff), we have limited “levers to pull” when it comes to budgeting and long-term sustainability. As you can see from the categories mentioned, each of these expense areas leads directly to the services we provide the community. Additionally, we have several sources of assets with donor restrictions (i.e. earmarked funds), meaning we can’t shift those funds to cover other areas of need. 

 

What does this mean? 

Overall, the PSF is facing significant financial challenges, but we are actively monitoring the situation and taking action where we can. This post is our way of “raising the flag” early and calling in the community proactively. We currently have more than six months of runway (as opposed to our preferred 12 months+ of runway), so the PSF is not at immediate risk of having to make more dramatic changes, but we are on track to face difficult decisions if the situation doesn’t shift in the next year. 

What we’re doing

Based on all of this, the PSF has been making changes and working on multiple fronts to combat losses and work to ensure financial sustainability, in order to continue protecting and serving the community in the long term. Some of these changes and efforts include:

• Pursuing new sponsors, specifically in the AI industry and the security sector
• Increasing sponsorship package pricing to match inflation
• Making adjustments to reduce PyCon US expenses
• Pursuing funding opportunities in the US and Europe
• Working with other organizations to raise awareness
• Strategic planning, to ensure we are maximizing our impact for the community while cultivating mission-aligned revenue channels

The PSF’s end-of-year fundraiser effort is usually run by staff based on their capacity, but this year we have assembled a fundraising team that includes Board members to put some more “oomph” behind the campaign. We’ll be doing our regular fundraising activities; we’ll also be creating a unique webpage, piloting temporary and VERY visible pop-ups to python.org and PyPI.org, and telling more stories from our Grants Program recipients. 

What you can do

So, what can you do to help us gain sponsors to ensure critical infrastructure, our community, and more can stay supported and sustainable?

1. If your company is using Python to build its products and services, check to see if they already sponsor the PSF on our Sponsors page.
2. If not, reach out to your organization's internal decision-makers and impress on them just how important it is for us to power the future of Python together, and send them our sponsor prospectus.
3. Point out the various benefits they will receive from sponsoring the PSF. Mention that PyCon US 2026 is coming up next spring, where they can connect with the community, recruit, and understand the current direction of the Python language!
4. Remind them to reach out to sponsors@python.org if they have any questions or would like a walk-through of our sponsorship program.

As the PSF prepares for our end-of-year fundraiser, we want to emphasize the importance of our community's support. Your relentless passion for Python and our community, along with your individual donations, memberships, stories, advocacy, and more, all make a huge impact and keep our tiny-but-mighty PSF team inspired. Keep your eyes on the PSF Blog, the PSF category on Discuss, and our social media accounts for updates and information as we kick off the fundraiser this month. Your boosts of our posts and your personal shares of “why I support the PSF” stories will make all the difference in our end-of-year fundraiser. 

If this post has you all fired up to personally support the future of Python and the PSF right now, we always welcome new PSF Supporting Members and donations. If you have questions about the PSF’s current financial outlook, the steps we’re taking, or how you can get involved, we welcome you to join the PSF Board Office Hours, join the conversation on Discuss, or email psf@python.org. As ever, we are incredibly grateful to be in community with each of you, and we’re honored to have your support. 

Improving security and integrity of Python package archives

Security and integrity of the Python packaging ecosystem is critical, and the smallest unit of a packaging ecosystem is a "package". Python packages use existing archive formats like ZIP and tar to distribute Python projects to their users. Archives seem simple on the surface, but many ZIP and tar features can be abused to confuse implementations into seeing different contents of the same archive.

These vulnerabilities affect the "integrity of the ecosystem" if tools can't agree what a package contents actually are. This can cause many downstream issues, such as vulnerability or malware scanners giving different results from the package when installed on disk.

The Python Software Foundation Security Developer-in-Residence, Seth Larson, published a new white paper with Alpha-Omega titled "Slippery ZIPs and Sticky tar-pits: Security & Archives" about work to remediate 10 vulnerabilities affecting common archive format implementations such as ZIP and tar for critical Python projects.

The white paper highlights how the PSF maintained Python Package Index (PyPI) can be used to protect insecure implementations of archives preemptively, whether their vulnerability status is known or unknown, by coordinating disclosures with other packaging tools. 

 

The white paper details potential future work to shore up the security of ZIP and tar implementations that are in widespread use, such as the zipfile and tarfile module in the Python standard library. The white paper also makes recommendations for packaging ecosystems regarding reproducible builds of archives.

If you rely on PyPI and the Python packaging ecosystem you can directly contribute to further security work done by the PSF by:

• Become a Member: When you sign up as a Supporting Member of the PSF, you become a part of the PSF. You’re eligible to vote in PSF elections, using your voice to guide our future direction, and you help us sustain what we do with your annual support.
• Donate: Your donation makes it possible to continue our work supporting Python and its community, year after year.
• Sponsor: If your company uses Python and isn’t yet a sponsor, send them our sponsorship page or reach out to sponsors@python.org today. The PSF is ever grateful for our sponsors, past and current, and we do everything we can to make their sponsorships beneficial and rewarding.

The Security Developer-in-Residence position is sponsored by Alpha-Omega. If you'd like to support improving Python at the ecosystem-scale contact sponsors@python.org to discuss sponsoring a Developer-in-Residence position. 

 

Open Infrastructure is Not Free: PyPI, the Python Software Foundation, and Sustainability

In September, the Python Software Foundation (PSF) co-signed the Open Infrastructure is Not Free: A Joint Statement on Sustainable Stewardship Letter published by the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) as a steward of the Python Package Index (PyPI). As a follow up, I would like to share a bit more about the concerns expressed in this letter as they relate to our community and the PSF.

History and Current Conditions

PyPI (and Python) have continued to experience effectively exponential growth in usage over the past decade, from October 2018 to the present. This is clear in our telemetry: 

 

Daily requests over time for PyPI's services, showing a trend line starting in 2018 in the millions, reaching 2-3 billion per day at present.

This growth has been met with persistent and growing investment by the PSF. Starting with the hire of a full-time Director of Infrastructure in June 2018, as well as ongoing costs associated with operating PyPI and managing relationships, grants, and sponsorships that support it.

At present, the PSF employs personnel and pays operational costs to keep PyPI online, reliable, secure, and supported to meet the modern expectations of the Python community globally. While we are very fortunate to have long-term partnerships with Fastly, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Datadog, Sentry, depot, and PagerDuty that help us to develop, test, host, operate, monitor, and respond to incidents for PyPI, we still pay monthly fees for things like our support inboxes and other infrastructure.

The largest cost for the PSF is staffing. The PSF staff who support PyPI include:

• Ee Durbin (myself), Director of Infrastructure
• Jacob Coffee, Infrastructure Engineer
• Maria Ashna, PyPI Support Specialist
• Mike Fiedler, PyPI Safety and Security Engineer

While our Safety and Security Engineer role is funded via a grant from The Linux Foundation’s Alpha-Omega project, all others are paid for from the PSF’s general fund, which comes from our sponsorship program and individual contributions.

These roles ensure that the expectations of our community are met when it comes to reliability and availability of the infrastructure and systems that run PyPI. They also ensure responsiveness to both critical support concerns, such as account recovery and project ownership, and to security incidents and malware, as well as continuing improvements to PyPI’s security stance overall.

We fulfill these roles and operate PyPI as a free resource for Python developers to find, install, and publish their open source projects in pursuit of our mission. This will not change, but we do believe that there are concrete ways that our community can help to support us. We also believe that there are changes that we can make to help guide PyPI and the PSF to long-term sustainability, commensurate with the value and usage of for-profit companies.

While we echo the statement from the open letter, “This is not (yet) a crisis.”, we also believe that “it is a critical inflection point” as we look to the future of the sustainability of PyPI and the PSF.

What Needs to Change

We are aligned with the OpenSSF letter on their three key points, but would like to say more about how they relate to PyPI:

Commercial and institutional partnerships

In 2024, the PSF and Fastly signed and announced a five-year agreement under Fastly’s Fast Forward program. This is a fundamentally different kind of commitment from others that we rely on to operate PyPI (and the rest of the Python Software Foundation infrastructure).

We feel very fortunate to have long-term recurring partnerships with other providers, but the annual renewal cycles do come with overhead and risk. While we work incredibly hard to use donated credits and services as efficiently as possible¹, a critical in-kind sponsor choosing not to renew would require precious engineering resources to prepare for and complete a migration to another provider or cost the PSF tens of thousands of dollars a month during an interim period to pay outright.

As an organization, we will seek to establish similar long-term agreements with our infrastructure partners.

Value-added capabilities & tiered access models

Having users pay for PyPI usage is something we cannot, and will not do. As we stated when we originally announced PyPI Organizations, paid features must remain opt-in, and core features for publishing and installing projects will remain free.

However, we do recognize that corporate publishers have been a large driver of the growth in the resources needed to serve PyPI. As we continue to develop PyPI Organizations features, providing these publishers with higher quotas will allow for the usage they drive by publishing large files to PyPI to be paid for.

In general, our roadmap for PyPI Organizations will focus on value-added features that benefit Companies as well as Community projects alike, while continuing to provide those features to Community organizations at no cost.

How You Can Help

If you or your team install from PyPI for development, continuous integration testing, or deployment, please take time to review the ways in which your tooling utilizes caching, and implement as much of it as possible when installing from free package repositories. PyPI itself heavily utilizes caching when installing our own dependencies, leveraging Docker cache mounts and pip’s internal caching to reduce usage and increase speed of builds, not only for our Python dependencies but npm and apt as well. This shared responsibility for usage is one that we all should bear, rather than treating package repositories as a limitless resource.

Just as we intend to seek longer-term agreements with the providers we rely on to operate PyPI, we ask members of the community in organizations that provide such support to champion for similar long-term agreements with open source foundations and projects that rely on them for operations.

If your company publishes projects to PyPI, consider signing up for PyPI Organizations. The recurring revenue generated by Organizations is a key way that we hope to build a reliable and sustainable base for PyPI moving forward.

Even if any of those do not apply to you or your company, but you rely on PyPI, you can always:

• Become a Member: When you sign up as a Supporting Member of the PSF, you become a part of the PSF. You’re eligible to vote in PSF elections, using your voice to guide our future direction, and you help us sustain what we do with your annual support.
• Donate: Your donation makes it possible to continue our work supporting Python and its community, year after year.
• Sponsor: If your company uses Python and isn’t yet a sponsor, send them our sponsorship page or reach out to sponsors@python.org today. The PSF is ever grateful for our sponsors, past and current, and we do everything we can to make their sponsorships beneficial and rewarding.

_{1. Fun Fact: The Python Software Foundation’s AWS Open Source Credits usage has only grown 25% over the past 8 years, despite the explosive growth in usage of our services.}

A new PSF Board- Another year of PSF Board Office Hour sessions!

Greetings, Pythonistas- thank you so much for supporting the work of the PSF and the Python community! The newest PSF Board has decided to continue investing in connecting with the global Python community by running the PSF Board Office Hour sessions on the PSF Discord into 2026. 

We began running these sessions in September 2024, and they have proven to be a great method for the community to connect with the board and vice versa. The sessions have provided the PSF Board and Staff the opportunity to hear what our community is up to and what challenges they are facing, as well as receive invaluable feedback about how the PSF can continue to improve our service to the Python community. 

What are the PSF Board Office Hours?

During the PSF Board Office Hours, you can participate in a text-based live chat with PSF Board Directors. This is a chance to connect, share, and collaborate with the PSF Board and Staff to improve our community together. Occasionally, we will have dedicated topics such as PyCon US and the PSF Board Elections for the office hour sessions. 

Here is some of the work that we collaborate with staff and volunteers on:

• Promotion and outreach for the Python programming language
• Supporting local Python communities
• Organizing PyCon US
• Diversity and Inclusion in our community
• Support handling Code of Conduct issues within our communities
• Furthering the mission of the PSF

Unless we have a dedicated topic for a session, you are not limited to talking with us about the above topics, although the discussions should be focused on Python, the PSF, and our community. If you think there’s something we can help with or we should know, we welcome you to come and talk to us!

Joining the office hours

The office hour sessions will take place on the PSF Discord server in the #psf-board channel. If you are new to Discord, make sure to check out a tutorial on how you can download the app and sign up for free– then join us on the PSF Discord! To make the office hours more accessible, the office hours will be scheduled at alternating times, so no matter where you are based, you can find a time that is most convenient for you! Here is a list of the dates and times:

• November 4th, 2 pm UTC
• December 9th, 9 pm UTC
• January 13th, 2 pm UTC 
• February 10th, 9 pm UTC
• March 10th, 1 pm UTC 
• April 14th, 9 pm UTC
• May 12th, 1 pm UTC 
• June 9th, 9 pm UTC
• July 14th, 1 pm UTC 
• August 11th, 9 pm UTC
• September 8th, 1 pm UTC 
• October 13th, 9 pm UTC

Each session lasts for an hour. Sessions after October 2026 will be announced in the future.

Who will be at the office hours?

Some board members of the PSF will be attending each office hour, as well as members of the PSF Staff. The list of the current PSF Board Directors can be found on our website. We are passionate Python community members who are excited to listen, help, and provide support to you. We are happy to follow up with you if there are any issues we cannot address immediately during the office hour sessions. As always, you can email us at psf-board@python.org with inquiries, feedback, or comments any time. 

The PSF has withdrawn a $1.5 million proposal to US government grant program

In January 2025, the PSF submitted a proposal to the US government National Science Foundation under the Safety, Security, and Privacy of Open Source Ecosystems program to address structural vulnerabilities in Python and PyPI. It was the PSF’s first time applying for government funding, and navigating the intensive process was a steep learning curve for our small team to climb. Seth Larson, PSF Security Developer in Residence, serving as Principal Investigator (PI) with Loren Crary, PSF Deputy Executive Director, as co-PI, led the multi-round proposal writing process as well as the months-long vetting process. We invested our time and effort because we felt the PSF’s work is a strong fit for the program and that the benefit to the community if our proposal were accepted was considerable.  

We were honored when, after many months of work, our proposal was recommended for funding, particularly as only 36% of new NSF grant applicants are successful on their first attempt. We became concerned, however, when we were presented with the terms and conditions we would be required to agree to if we accepted the grant. These terms included affirming the statement that we “do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.” This restriction would apply not only to the security work directly funded by the grant, but to any and all activity of the PSF as a whole. Further, violation of this term gave the NSF the right to “claw back” previously approved and transferred funds. This would create a situation where money we’d already spent could be taken back, which would be an enormous, open-ended financial risk.   

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are core to the PSF’s values, as committed to in our mission statement: 

The mission of the Python Software Foundation is 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.

Given the value of the grant to the community and the PSF, we did our utmost to get clarity on the terms and to find a way to move forward in concert with our values. We consulted our NSF contacts and reviewed decisions made by other organizations in similar circumstances, particularly The Carpentries.  

In the end, however, the PSF simply can’t agree to a statement that we won’t operate any programs that “advance or promote” diversity, equity, and inclusion, as it would be a betrayal of our mission and our community. 

We’re disappointed to have been put in the position where we had to make this decision, because we believe our proposed project would offer invaluable advances to the Python and greater open source community, protecting millions of PyPI users from attempted supply-chain attacks. The proposed project would create new tools for automated proactive review of all packages uploaded to PyPI, rather than the current process of reactive-only review. These novel tools would rely on capability analysis, designed based on a dataset of known malware. Beyond just protecting PyPI users, the outputs of this work could be transferable for all open source software package registries, such as NPM and Crates.io, improving security across multiple open source ecosystems.

In addition to the security benefits, the grant funds would have made a big difference to the PSF’s budget. The PSF is a relatively small organization, operating with an annual budget of around $5 million per year, with a staff of just 14. $1.5 million over two years would have been quite a lot of money for us, and easily the largest grant we’d ever received. Ultimately, however, the value of the work and the size of the grant were not more important than practicing our values and retaining the freedom to support every part of our community. The PSF Board voted unanimously to withdraw our application. 

Giving up the NSF grant opportunity—along with inflation, lower sponsorship, economic pressure in the tech sector, and global/local uncertainty and conflict—means the PSF needs financial support now more than ever. We are incredibly grateful for any help you can offer. If you're already a PSF member or regular donor, you have our deep appreciation, and we urge you to share your story about why you support the PSF. Your stories make all the difference in spreading awareness about the mission and work of the PSF. 

How to support the PSF:

• Become a Member: When you sign up as a Supporting Member of the PSF, you become a part of the PSF. You’re eligible to vote in PSF elections, using your voice to guide our future direction, and you help us sustain what we do with your annual support.
• Donate: Your donation makes it possible to continue our work supporting Python and its community, year after year.
• Sponsor: If your company uses Python and isn’t yet a sponsor, send them our sponsorship page or reach out to sponsors@python.org today. The PSF is ever grateful for our sponsors, past and current, and we do everything we can to make their sponsorships beneficial and rewarding.

Announcing Python Software Foundation Fellow Members for Q3 2025! 🎉

The PSF is pleased to announce its third batch of PSF Fellows for 2025! Let us welcome the new PSF Fellows for Q3! The following people continue to do amazing things for the Python community:

Abhijeet Mote

LinkedIn

Abigail Afi Gbadago

LinkedIn, Website 

Becky Smith

LinkedIn, Bluesky, Mastodon, GitHub 

Christopher Bailey

Dawn Wages

Leah Wasser

Website, Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, GitHub

Maaya Ishida

Mason Egger

Website, Twitter, LinkedIn, GitHub

Miguel Grinberg

Website, GitHub

William Vincent

Website, LinkedIn, GitHub

 

Thank you for your continued contributions. We have added you to our Fellows Roster.

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 conferences, starting Python communities in local regions, and overall being great mentors in our community. Each of them continues to help make Python more accessible around the world. To learn more about the new Fellow members, check out their links above.

Let's continue recognizing Pythonistas all over the world for their impact on our community. The criteria for Fellow members is available on our PSF Fellow Membership page. If you would like to nominate someone to be a PSF Fellow, please send a description of their Python accomplishments and their email address to psf-fellow at python.org. Quarter 4 nominations will be in review soon. We are accepting nominations for Quarter 4 of 2025 through November 20th, 2025.

Are you a PSF Fellow and want to help the Work Group review nominations? Contact us at psf-fellow at python.org.

CPython Core Dev Sprint 2025 at Arm Cambridge: The biggest one yet

Guest blog post authored by Diego Russo, Python Core Developer and Principal Software Engineer at Arm. 

Sprint overview

For one week, Arm’s Cambridge headquarters became the heart of Python development. Contributors from around the world came together for the CPython Core Developer Sprint. It was the largest gathering in the project’s history, with 35 core developers and 13 invited guests collaborating in person. 

Unlike a conference, the sprint is a working retreat. There are no spectators or formal keynotes, just space for deep technical debate, design, coding, and consensus-building. 

The sprint offers a rare chance for real-time dialogue. Ideas can be sketched on whiteboards, trade-offs debated face-to-face, and tricky issues given momentum.

What happened

The week included technical presentations, collaborative work, and community events. Talks and presentations were grouped around key themes:

• JIT and performance
• Ken Jin Ooi – Building a Community Around the JIT Compiler and demo of the new C API
• Antonio Cuni – Tracing JITs in the Real World, highlighting challenges such as trace blockers, control flow, and async behavior

• Packaging and distribution
• Russell Keith-Magee – Managing Cross-Platform Wheel Builds
• Brett Cannon – Precompiled Binaries from python.org

• Language design and standards
• Steering Council – PEP 793 and abi3/abi3t/abi4
• Matthew Parkinson – Designing Deep Immutability

• Ecosystem and infrastructure
• Brett Cannon – WASI Update
• Hood Chatham – Upstreaming the Pyodide FFI
• Gregory P. Smith – Claude Code and Agents for Good in OSS

• Lightning talks
• Guido van Rossum – A New Python History Project
• Ee Durbin – PSF Infrastructure Next Gen
• Steve Dower – Python Install Manager
• Larry Hastings – A Missing Fundamental Data Structure
• Adam Turner – Bring Out Yer Dead (Issues)
• Greg Smith – Async Exception Group Tracebacks

• Arm contributions
• James Greenhalgh – Arm Neoverse: Overview
• Martin Weidmann – A Brief History of the Arm Architecture
• Peter Smith – Compilers, ABI, and Optimizations

The program also included a Q&A with the Steering Council, where Barry Warsaw and Emily Morehouse joined remotely. It also featured a mentorship discussion led by Tania Allard on how to welcome and support new contributors.

 

Beyond presentations, the sprint fostered hands-on collaboration. Developers had advanced JIT planning, explored progress on free threading, and discussed improvements to documentation and translations. They also strengthened testing and CI across platforms, and refined governance and contributor onboarding processes.

Antonio Cuni highlighted real-world JIT pitfalls, which informed many of these discussions.

Finally, the sprint included community activities that helped balance the technical intensity with moments of connection. The Python Guild at Arm hosted an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session, giving local engineers the chance to interact with core developers.

A formal dinner at Jesus College reflected Cambridge traditions, while a punting trip on the River Cam offered a relaxed opportunity to connect outside of work.

A Team Effort

The Python Software Foundation coordinated the event, making the sprint possible. We thank Phyllis Dobbs for managing the RSVP process and the travel grants that enabled many contributors to join us in Cambridge.

Hosting the CPython Sprint at Arm’s Cambridge offices shows a shared commitment and we send huge thanks to everyone at Arm who made the sprint possible. Arm shares, 

“Hosting the latest CPython sprint was more than providing a venue. It was an investment in strengthening one of the most influential open-source communities. Python’s reach is vast, and ensuring its modern components run smoothly on Arm platforms helps the language stay inclusive and performant across architectures. Hosting the sprint gave Arm a way to give back, reinforce bonds with the core team, and invest in Python’s future.”

The Arm Software Communities team led the effort from start to finish, handling logistics, sponsorship, and every detail that kept things running smoothly. Their support, along with the help of Central Engineering, Facilities, Workplace, People, IT, Developer Marketing, and the Python Guild organizers, ensured a successful and well-organized week for all participants. 

Finally, a huge thank you to all the attendees who traveled from across the world to spend a week in Cambridge. Some came from nearby in the UK and neighboring countries. Many others journeyed across Europe, several crossed the Atlantic, and a few took long-haul and even ultra-long-haul flights of more than 10,000 km. That dedication and commitment to the Python community is what truly made this sprint special.

Organizing a sprint of this scale takes many hands. From sponsors to volunteers, organizers to attendees, everyone contributed in their own way. This sprint was a reminder that Python is more than a programming language. It is a community that works together, supports one another, and achieves more as a team than any individual could alone.

Conclusion

The sprint was widely regarded as a success. Attendees described it as productive, well-organized, and an excellent community experience. Even so, some aspects could have been improved, and these are valuable lessons to take forward for future events. 
Sessions such as the Steering Council Q&A, the mentorship discussion led by Tania Allard, and the lightning talks stood out as highlights. They reinforced the value of bringing the community together in person.

Python is undergoing important technical transitions. Sprints like this accelerate evolution, resolve difficult challenges, and align the community. The concentration of expertise enabled focused, collaborative progress. The ripple effects of this sprint will shape code, discussion, and design decisions for months to come. We look forward to coming together again as a community.

Announcing PSF Community Service Award Recipients!

The PSF Community Service Awards (CSA’s) are a formal way for the PSF Board of Directors to offer recognition of work which, in its opinion, significantly improves the Foundation's fulfillment of its mission and benefits the broader Python community. These awards shine a light on the incredible people who are the heart and soul of our community– those whose dedication, creativity, and generosity help the PSF fulfill its mission. The PSF CSAs celebrate individuals who have been truly invaluable, inspiring others through their example, and demonstrates that service to the Python community leads to recognition and reward. If you know of someone in the Python community deserving of a PSF CSA award, please submit them to the PSF Board via psf@python.org at any time. You can read more about PSF CSAs on our website. 

The PSF Board is excited to announce three new CSAs, awarded to Katie McLaughlin, Sarah Kuchinsky, and Rodrigo Girão Serrão, for their contributions to the Python community. Read more about their contributions and impact below. 

Katie McLaughlin

Katie has been a tireless and dedicated member of the Python and Django communities for many years. They have served on the boards of both the DSF and PSF, including as PSF Communications Officer, and was named a PSF Fellow in 2018. Katie has played a big role in the Australian conference community– chairing DjangoCon AU 2017, PyCon AU in 2018 and 2019, and co-chairing PyCon AU 2021– and continues to support PyCon AU as an advisor.

A frequent speaker and keynote presenter at PyCons and DjangoCons around the world, Katie has worked to demystify Python website deployment, highlight the value of all kinds of open source contributions, and call out the impact of contempt culture on developer communities. They are also a regular at sprints, helping new contributors get started and improving onboarding through code and documentation. 

Sarah Kuchinsky

Sarah has been the driving force behind PyCon tutorials for many years, shaping them into the strong program they are today. She has brought skill, care, and consistency to the difficult work of selecting, organizing, and running tutorials, ensuring they provide meaningful learning experiences for attendees.

Beyond logistics, Sarah has a gift for spotting and nurturing talent. She has encouraged new volunteers to grow into leadership roles, building a resilient, collaborative committee that sustains itself year after year. Her outreach has kept reviewers engaged while also welcoming fresh voices, strengthening both the program and the community behind it.

The impact of Sarah’s work is felt by every instructor, attendee, and volunteer who has benefitted from PyCon tutorials, and the community is deeply grateful for her many years of leadership and care. Sarah was also the lead organizer for PyLadies Silicon Valley for over 5 years, is a SoCal Python Co-Organizer, and has contributed to a variety of open source projects.

Rodrigo Girão Serrão

Rodrigo Girão Serrão has made lasting contributions to the international Python community through his leadership, teaching, and generosity. He has helped organize PyCons in Portugal, supported the Python community across Europe, and spoken regularly at PyCons worldwide, making complex topics like descriptors clear and approachable.

Through his website mathspp.com, bootcamps, and self-published books, including the freely available Pydon’ts book, Rodrigo has worked to make Python more accessible and welcoming. His dedication to sharing knowledge and supporting others has had a wide-reaching impact, and the community is grateful for his many contributions.

Announcing the 2025 PSF Board Election Results!

The 2025 election for the PSF Board created an opportunity for conversations about the PSF's work to serve the global Python community. We appreciate community members' perspectives, passion, and engagement in the election process this year. 

We want to send a big thanks to everyone who ran and was willing to serve on the PSF Board. Even if you were not elected, we appreciate all the time and effort you put into thinking about how to improve the PSF and represent the parts of the community you participate in. We hope that you will continue to think about these issues, share your ideas, and join a PSF Work Group or PSF initiative if you feel called to do so.

Board Members Elect

Congratulations to our two new and two returning Board members who have been elected! 

• Abigail Dogbe
• Jannis Leidel
• Sheena O’Connell
• Simon Willison

We’ll be in touch with all the elected candidates shortly to schedule onboarding. Newly elected PSF Board members are provided orientation for their service and will be joining the upcoming board meeting. 

Thank you!

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank our outgoing board members. Kushal Das has been serving on the PSF Board for over ten years– WOW! Kushal has been a part of change after change for the PSF and Python community, serving in PSF Board officer positions, and we are incredibly grateful for his contributions. Dawn Wages quickly became an integral part of the Board during her tenure, stepping up as Treasurer and then Board Chair. Dawn helped guide us through a period of major change– navigating a difficult economy, adapting to the rise of AI, and supporting important shifts in our programs. Thank you, Kushal and Dawn, for your leadership and dedication to the PSF and the Python community. You will be missed and are deeply appreciated! 

Our heartfelt thanks go out to each of you who took the time to review the candidates and submit your votes. Your participation helps the PSF represent our community. We received 683 total ballots, easily reaching quorum–1/3 of affirmed voting members (929). We’re especially grateful for your patience with continuing to navigate the changes to the election processes and schedule, which allows for a valid election and a more sustainable election system.

We also want to thank everyone who helped promote this year’s board election, especially Board Members Cristián Maureira-Fredes and Georgi Ker, who took the initiative to cover this year’s election and produced informational videos for our candidates. This promotional effort was inspired by the work of Python Community News in 2023. We also want to highlight the PSF staff members and PSF Board members who put in tons of effort each year as we work to continually improve the PSF elections.

What’s next?

If you’re interested in the complete tally, make sure to check the Python Software Foundation Board of Directors Election 2025 Results page. These results will be available until Nov 11, 2025.

The PSF Election team will conduct a retrospective of this year’s election process to ensure we are improving year over year. We received valuable feedback about the process and tooling. We hope to be able to implement more changes for next year to ensure a smooth and accessible election process for everyone in our community.

Finally, it might feel a little early to mention this, but we will have at least 3 seats open again next year. If you're interested in running or learning more, we encourage you to contact a current PSF Board member or two this year and ask them about their experience serving on the board.

Sprints are the best part of a conference

When I first started attending Python conferences, my focus was entirely on the talks on the schedule. That's not surprising, there's no conference without talks! Over the years, though, I came to appreciate the so-called hallway track and the usual post-conference sprints that many events include. These days, I mostly come for those. Let's talk about why.

Raw numbers

Before we get into subjective and soft reasons why sprints are great, just consider how productive they are for Python. To give you an idea, let's focus on three Python conferences of different sizes on three continents.

At PyCon US 2025, 370 new PRs were open to the Python organization during, 286 to the cpython repository alone. Close to 300 PRs were merged into the Python GitHub organization during that time. That's for four days of sprints. This is over 2X the number of PRs handled during the same period when there's no sprint happening.

There's been two days of sprints at EuroPython in Prague this year, but they didn't disappoint either: 122 new PRs open to the Python organization, including 99 to the cpython repository. 79 PRs were merged into the Python GitHub organization during this time. This is 1.75X the number of PRs handled during a typical weekend.

Even single-day sprint days at conferences are pretty productive. At PyCon Korea earlier this August the attendees managed to open 59 new PRs to the Python organization, including 35 PRs to the cpython repository. Over 40 PRs were merged into the Python organization that day. Still 1.7X the typical velocity.

Hopefully, you're seeing what I'm seeing: sprints can provide a measurable boost to an open-source project. The longer the sprints are, the bigger this boost is. This is because many contributions need more than a day to bake, some bugs can be pretty stubborn, and many features uncover surprising depth once you start implementing them.

Momentum

There's something magical about a large group of people banding together to attack problems. While this is what open source is in general, adding together physical presence in the same physical space at the same time is the secret sauce. Real-time coordination really is more efficient. We can guess at reasons for this, but we can safely assume a big part is simply that humans are social animals. It's easier to empathize with a person when they're in the same room with you. In my experience, pointing at a screen still beats Internet communication.

Part of what makes sprints so productive is that it is a time-boxed period of uninterrupted time away from your usual work environment. And that's true for everyone, so people have the ability to focus on a specific project or problem for an extended period of time. But since there's a time limit to how long the sprints are, there's also some productive pressure to ship something concrete by the end of your stay. So, it's rare to see people playing games or doomscrolling during sprints. Instead, they want to ship something, even if it's a humble small first contribution.

Better yet, after you spend some time with a person in real life, even online interactions with them afterwards change. My brain does this thing where it reads GitHub comments of people I know in their voice. This little thing additionally humanizes the pixels on screen and makes the interaction smoother. When you come to sprints, you build more lasting connections, because you don't only talk about stuff in the hallway, you're solving problems together.

You're getting for free what you wouldn't be able to buy if you tried

You're solving problems together alongside developers from different companies, backgrounds and specialties. Some of them are maintainers of the projects you're contributing to, with a wealth of expertise they're sharing freely. You get immediate feedback, you can learn at a rate that is impossible to match online. You learn not only by doing and asking questions, but even just by watching others work. You discover better tools or ways to use them you didn't know existed.

To put it bluntly, the experts you work with during sprints would be impossible to hire as tutors, and here you get to work with them free of charge. Think about it, that alone makes it worth staying for sprints. And don't get cold feet, either, because...

You belong

I've heard some newcomers are worried that maybe the expected experience level is too high. I say you will definitely find something productive to do. I even blogged about this specifically for PyCon US this year, so you can read "What to Expect at PyCon US Sprints" to get an idea about how to make your experience great. The PyCon Korea sprint organizer and Steering Council member Donghee Na says: "I notice that the participants who had a good experience at last year's sprint tend to rejoin the sprint this year. I hope that many of them come back next year too." I'm seeing the same thing, and want to see even more of it. We do care about your experience.

Specifically at PyCon US, this year we tried something new. We split the CPython sprint room into two rooms: one dedicated to first-time contributors, and one to seasoned developers that needed to focus on some feature or bugfix they really wanted to ship before leaving Pittsburgh. It turned out great. Talking to attendees on both ends, I think both rooms enjoyed this setup and we will be repeating that for next year. While I was coordinating the first-time contributor room, I was heartened to see that quite a few veteran core developers joined me in the room. It was fun all four days!

At EuroPython, the setup this year was such that Petr Viktorin and I were coordinating the CPython sprint... or so we thought! In parallel, Adam Turner was leading the CPython documentation sprint, but attendees responded so well to him that he quickly organically became the de facto leader of the entire CPython sprint. Kudos, Adam, you did great!

Dedicated sprint events

It's not all roses with sprints that are attached to conferences. After an intense few days of the larger event, people tend to get tired. Introverts run out of steam. Key people that you could use talking to don't stay or are only available on the first day. If only there could be an event where core developers gather for a week just to sprint. No distracting talks and hallway tracks!

CPython actually does this annually since 2016 with the obvious online-only hiccup of 2020 and 2021. We do love those sprints as they are both productive and fun. Last year we returned to Meta while this year we will be sprinting at Arm Ltd in Cambridge UK. Unlike the conference sprints, this is an invite-only event for core developers where we can focus on making the next version of Python shinier than it would otherwise be.

But maybe organizing sprint-first events makes sense in general? It seems to me like that could be pretty helpful. Or maybe this is already a thing? Let us know if you know of sprint-first events in your area.

And in the meantime, consider staying for sprints at the next conference you're attending. It's well worth it!