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How Is Python Supported?
As a popular open source system, Python enjoys a large and active development community that responds to issues and develops enhancements with a speed that many commercial software developers would find remarkable (if not downright shocking). Python developers coordinate work online with a source-control system. Changes follow a formal PEP (Python Enhancement Proposal) protocol and must be accompanied by extensions to Python’s extensive regression testing system. In fact, modifying Python today is roughly as involved as changing commercial software—a far cry from Python’s early days, when an email to its creator would suffice, but a good thing given its current large user base.
The PSF (Python Software Foundation), a formal nonprofit group, organizes conferences and deals with intellectual property issues. Numerous Python conferences are held around the world; O’Reilly’s OSCON and the PSF’s PyCon are the largest. The former of these addresses multiple open source projects, and the latter is a Python-only event that has experienced strong growth in recent years. Attendance at PyCon 2008 nearly doubled from the prior year, growing from 586 attendees in 2007 to over 1,000 in 2008. This was on the heels of a 40% attendance increase in 2007, from 410 in 2006. PyCon 2009 had 943 attendees, a slight decrease from 2008, but a still very strong showing during a global recession.
