Maintainer Week is finally here and we’re excited to make this an annual thing! If Maintainer Week is new to you, check out episode #442 with Josh Simmons and Kara Sowles.

Today we’re talking Brett Cannon. Brett is Dev Manager of the Python Extension for VS Code, Python Steering Council Member, and core team member for Python. He recently shared a blog post The social contract of open source, so we invited Brett to join us for Maintainer Week to discuss this topic in detail.

Thank a maintainer on us! We’re printing a limited run t-shirt that’s free for maintainers, and all you gotta do is thank them, today!

Brett Cannon, who is a Python core developer (and a tall, snarky Canadian):

I felt it was time to do another blog post to directly address the issue of entitlement by some open source users which is hurting open source, both for themselves and for others. I want to get the point across that open source maintainers owe you quite literally nothing when it comes to their open source code, and treating them poorly is unethical. And to me, this is the underlying social contract of open source. (emphasis added)

You should read the entire post, especially if you want to learn which programming language (having nothing to do with snakes) that has Brett’s attention. But I’d be remiss not to pull quote this gift of a pull quote from the end:

Every commit of open source code should be viewed as an independent gift from the maintainer that they happened to leave on their front yard for others to enjoy if they so desire; treating them as a means to and for their open source code is unethical.

Brett Cannon, writing for his personal blog:

It’s no secret that I want a Python implementation for WebAssembly. It would not only get Python into the browser, but with the fact that both iOS and Android support running JavaScript as part of an app it would also get Python on to mobile. That all excites me.

But when thinking about the daunting task of creating a new implementation of Python, my brain also began asking the question of what exactly is Python?

What follows from this point in Brett’s post is a stream of consciousness writing style of question and answer, back and forth, iteration over all the points of what makes Python be Python in an attempt to consider what it might take to “compile Python down to WebAssembly.”

In a world where an ex-hit-man named John Wick comes out of retirement to track down the gangsters that killed his dog and stole his car — three die-hard fans (Adam, Jerod, and Brett) spend nearly 2 hours discussing the John Wick trilogy and then some.

We’re talking with Brett Cannon for a behind the scenes look at Guido stepping down as Python’s BDFL (Benevolent dictator for life) and the process they had to go through to establish a new governance model, the various proposed PEPs to establish this new direction, the winning PEP, and what the future holds for Python.

We’ve been following along as the Python community figures out how to live that post-BDFL life. We’ll do a show on the subject once the dust to settles. In the meantime, here’s Brett Cannon on what they’ve figured out so far:

In the end PEP 8016, the steering council proposal, won. The details of the vote are available, but the key thing is that the PEP clearly won no matter what way you calculated the winner and it was a decisive win against second place.

Read Brett’s entire piece to really wrap your head around things. Nominations for the steering council start on January 7th with voting to follow on the 21st.

Adam and Jerod talk to Brett Cannon, core contributor to Python and a fantastic representative of the Python community. They talked through various details surrounding a talk and blog post he wrote titled “Setting expectations for open source participation” and covered questions like: What is the the purpose of open source? How do you sustain open source? And what’s the goal?

They even talked through typical scenarios in open source and how kindness and recognizing that there’s a human on the other end of every action can really go a long way.