Hey there.
My name is Sumana Harihareswara
and I am the project manager for the Python Package Index.
From the time that I was a child, I've been very interested in
community organizing, empowering other people,
making sure that there's nothing about us without us.
So when I found out about free and open source software,
I thought, 'yeah! This is the way forward.'
Essentially, the Python Package Index is core infrastructure
for a huge chunk of the computing industry.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We needed funding in order to get
this piece of core infrastructure deployed.
Nobody was just giving us money for that.
We heard about MOSS and realized that we were potentially a good candidate
to apply for a MOSS award. It's interesting how MOSS is
kind of a hidden gem, that not nearly enough people have
heard of who would benefit from it.
The Mozilla Open Source Support program is a fantastic way to get funding
from an organization that understands why what you do is important.
Without the MOSS award, Python would be immeasurably worse off right now.
The MOSS Award is what enabled the Python Package Index
to launch and move into production.
(soft music)