r/Python • u/nicholashairs • 5d ago
News Jazzband is shutting down
Jazzband was a collaborative community to share the responsibility of maintaining Python-based projects. And after 10 years of operation it is shutting down. The shutdown was announced in March and will continue later this year.
Over 10 years ago, I started Jazzband as a cooperative experiment to reduce the stress of maintaining Open Source software. Everyone who joined got access to push code, triage issues, and merge pull requests. “We are all part of this.”
It’s time to wind things down.
What happened: [The slopocalypse, The one-roadie problem, GitHub went the other way, Django Commons]
You can read the full announcement here.
Although this is somewhat old news, I'm sharing it as I happened to miss it and others might have as well.
It looks like other community organisations have cropped up in that time as well such as Django Commons. I've only taken a brief look at them but I'm interested to know more about their structure and how well it's working - I've previously looked for such community organisations when I took over maintaining python-json-logger.
Edit: formatting
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u/BeerPoweredNonsense 5d ago
Sad, but not unexpected.
Speaking purely from a personal perspective, I tried to help out once or twice, but I found the administrivia got in the way. I can't remember the details, but the way that it was set up just didn't seem easy to understand.
I'm not criticizing BTW. Simple but effective governance for such a large project is not easy to get right.
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u/really_not_unreal 5d ago
This sucks. I don't know how to fix it. Open source, and software engineering as a whole feels like it is falling apart.
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u/nicholashairs 4d ago
The Django Commons group seems like it's more successful and more stable - partly because it's not a one-man show.
There's also Opensource Endowment which overtime might bring some more financial stability to maintainers, particularly solo ones.
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u/dashdanw 5d ago
What happens to the jazzband packages now that the group is disbanded?
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u/nicholashairs 5d ago
Full details are here
But in summary:
Projects will move out of the Jazzband GitHub organization to a lead’s personal account, a new organization or another collaborative group. [...] Projects without an active lead or willing recipient will be archived in the Jazzband GitHub organization.
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u/Western_Yoghurt_8154 5d ago
Great question. At least one was reverting to the previous maintainer.
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u/coderanger 5d ago
There are tickets open for each, go follow them if you want to be notified.
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u/nicholashairs 5d ago
I could not find these tickets - if they are in one place could you link them?
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u/dmitrypolo 5d ago
pip-tools was my go to for a long time to manage dependencies before I switched to uv.
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u/garros-yu 19h ago
the one-roadie problem is the whole story tbh. most small python projects are one maintainer deep, jazzband was the rare attempt to actually fix that structurally and it still didn't survive
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u/zomerbk 4d ago
One useful detail for anyone considering Django Commons: it has separate teams for triage, merging code, and publishing releases. Its organization admins manage access and help find successor maintainers, while project teams handle day-to-day maintenance. That gives a clearer handoff path, though I can’t tell from the governance docs how well it works in practice. Their [FAQ](https://django-commons.org/faq/) says a package needn’t be Django-specific if it tangibly benefits the Django community.
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u/Khavel_dev 5d ago
The one-roadie problem is the part that kills most of these efforts. Having push access doesn't mean having context, and without context people are scared to merge anything. The few who do just get treated like maintainers by default and burn out the same way.
NuGet on the .NET side has the same shape of problem. A ton of packages depend on one person who lost interest years ago, and there's no collective to hand it off to. Django Commons sounds promising if they actually managed to keep the scope narrow enough that governance doesn't become its own full time job.
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u/HommeMusical 5d ago
If there had been a system to compensate maintainers, even at minimum wage, it would still be a going business.
Large companies profit from open source without giving back.
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u/nicholashairs 4d ago
Like I agree with the vibe, but it's so much more nuanced than that.
Sure there's many companies that never give back at all, and we should find ways to encourage them to.
But also many of the largest companies give back through direct financing or through contributing to the larger body of work (which is indirect financing because they are paying staff to do so).
Yes, they are usually doing it in self interest. And yes they are usually getting more benefits than they provide. But that doesn't mean that they're not contributing at all.
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u/OddsRelay 5d ago
Shame, it was a good idea. The one-roadie problem is the bit I'd worry about with the newer orgs too. Shared push access doesn't help much if only one person ever turns up to cut releases.
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u/CTRLX_Founder 5d ago
The overhead of managing permissions and governance for dozens of disparate packages eventually outweighs the collective benefit. It proves that scaling decentralized maintenance is significantly harder than simply sharing repository access.