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We're sponsoring PyCon

Investing in the Python community responsible for Buttondown's success

We're sponsoring PyCon

Not only would Buttondown not exist without Python, but I — your humble founder — would likely not even be a programmer, having washed out of the industry after one too many invocations of public static void main.

In that vein, we are delighted and honored to be a Participating Sponsor of PyCon US 2024, the largest and longest-running US-based Python conference — sponsored by the Python Software Foundation. This will be the first of many such commitments this year, in a way to pay back some of our own recent growth into the technologies that made it possible (all under the auspices of marketing!)

Buttondown is committed to open source. We donate 10% of our profits to the open source technologies we use — a number that, while small, in absolute terms is still larger than most companies one hundred times our size — and aim to open source parts of our codebase that we think could be broadly useful to the community.

If there's one message I'd like to proselytize, it's that you don't need to be a behemoth to pledge financial support to great open source causes (though perhaps a close second might be "the behemoths should certainly do so too.")

Some great writing I recommend on the subject:

  1. We Just Gave $500,000 to Open Source Maintainers
  2. What Would Open Source Look Like If It Were Healthy?
  3. The burden of an Open Source maintainer

Published on

April 15, 2024

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Written by

Justin Duke

Justin Duke is a software engineer, lover of words, and the creator of Buttondown.

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