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Hey there.
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My name is Sumana Harihareswara
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and I am the project manager
for the Python Package Index.
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From the time that I was a child,
I've been very interested
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in community organizing,
empowering other people,
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making sure that there's
nothing about us without us.
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So when I found out about
free and open source software,
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I thought, 'yeah! This is the way forward.'
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Essentially, the Python Package Index is
core infrastructure
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for a huge chunk of
the computing industry.
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Most of the time, when people write software, we don't write everything from scratch. We basically borrow and duplicate stuff that other people have done.
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This is part of the magic of free and open-source software, and it's part of how the internet -- and most of the technology you use! -- has been built.
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It's really useful to have a single website, the Python Package Index, that's a one-stop shop for all of the open-source Python code that you might want to reuse.
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The Python Package Index got popular before the code got good. Starting a few years ago, some people thought, 'all right, we need a rewrite.' Volunteers started it. But volunteers, working on unpredictable schedules -- it wasn't working. We knew that we needed help. We needed MONEY! [laugh] Okay.
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We needed funding in order to get this piece of core infrastructure deployed. Nobody was just giving us money for that.
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We heard about MOSS and realized that we were potentially a good candidate to apply for a MOSS award.
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It's interesting how MOSS is kind of a hidden gem, that not nearly enough people have heard of who would benefit from it.
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The Mozilla Open Source Support program is a fantastic way to get funding from an organization that understands why what you do is important.
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Without the MOSS award, Python would be immeasurably worse off right now.
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The MOSS Award is what enabled the Python Package Index to launch and move into production.