Wednesday, August 12, 2020

A new chapter for PyPy

PyPy winds down its membership in the Software Freedom Conservancy

Conservancy and PyPy's great work together

PyPy joined Conservancy in the second half of 2010, shortly after the release of PyPy 1.2, the first version to contain a fully functional JIT. In 2013, PyPy started supporting ARM, bringing its just-in-time speediness to many more devices and began working toward supporting NumPy to help scientists crunch their numbers faster. Together, PyPy and Conservancy ran successful fundraising drives and facilitated payment and oversight for contractors and code sprints.

Conservancy supported PyPy's impressive growth as it expanded support for different hardware platforms, greatly improved the performance of C extensions, and added support for Python 3 as the language itself evolved.

The road ahead

Conservancy provides a fiscal and organizational home for projects that find the freedoms and guardrails that come along with a charitable home advantageous for their community goals. While this framework was a great fit for the early PyPy community, times change and all good things must come to an end.

PyPy will remain a free and open source project, but the community's structure and organizational underpinnings will be changing and the PyPy community will be exploring options outside of the charitable realm for its next phase of growth ("charitable" in the legal sense -- PyPy will remain a community project).

During the last year PyPy and Conservancy have worked together to properly utilise the generous donations made by stalwart PyPy enthusiats over the years and to wrap up PyPy's remaining charitable obligations. PyPy is grateful for the Conservancy's help in shepherding the project toward its next chapter.

Thank yous

From Conservancy:

"We are happy that Conservancy was able to help PyPy bring important software for the public good during a critical time in its history. We wish the community well and look forward to seeing it develop and succeed in new ways."
— Karen Sandler, Conservancy's Executive Director

From PyPy:

"PyPy would like to thank Conservancy for their decade long support in building the community and wishes Conservancy continued success in their journey promoting, improving, developing and defending free and open source sofware."

— Simon Cross & Carl Friedrich Bolz-Tereick, on behalf of PyPy.

About

PyPy is a multi-layer python interpreter with a built-in JIT compiler that runs Python quickly across different computing environments. Software Freedom Conservancy (Conservancy) is a charity that provides a home to over forty free and open source software projects.

5 comments:

intgr said...

This post has lots of words but unfortunately contains almost no information. What impact does this change have on PyPy? What is the new chapter?

Rick Sanchez said...

What does PyPy do? Why should I use it over other Python compilers?

Anonymous said...

@intgr the wind-down with the SFC hasn't been smooth and this is the politically-neutral, agreed-by-both-parties post. PyPy remains the same free and open-source project. Essentially we just switched to a different money-handler. We're announcing it in the next blog post.

Florian said...

As https://bitbucket.org/pypy/pypy/downloads/pypy2.7-v7.3.1-linux32.tar.bz2 is down (due to heptapod move ?)

Where can we download pypy binaries ?

Armin Rigo said...

The page https://pypy.org/download.html contains the updated links.