Sunsetting Jazzband
Source: Hacker News
TL;DR
Jazzband is sunsetting. New sign‑ups are disabled. Project leads will be contacted before PyCon US 2026 to coordinate transfers. The wind‑down plan has the timeline, and the retrospective tells the full story.
Background
Over 10 years ago, Jazzband began as a cooperative experiment to reduce the stress of maintaining open‑source projects. The idea was simple – everyone who joins gets access to push code, triage issues, and merge pull requests. “We are all part of this.”
It had a good run – more than a decade, actually. But it’s time to wind things down.
What happened
The “slopocalypse”
GitHub’s slopocalypse – the flood of AI‑generated spam PRs and issues – made Jazzband’s open‑membership model untenable. Jazzband was built for a world where the worst case was an accidental merge. Today:
- Only 1 in 10 AI‑generated PRs meets project standards (source).
curlhad to shut down its bug bounty because confirmation rates fell below 5% (blog).- GitHub responded with a kill switch that disables pull requests entirely (The Register).
An organization that gives push access to everyone simply can’t operate safely any more.
The one‑roadie problem
Jazzband was always a one‑roadie operation. Over the years people:
I tried several times to make it work, but the effort never stuck. When volunteers stepped up they eventually stepped back. The result was that every project transfer, lead assignment, PyPI permission change, and infrastructure decision went through me.
The warnings
The sustainability question was raised as early as 2017. I gave a keynote at DjangoCon Europe 2021 – five years in – stating that the “social coding” experiment had failed to create an equitable community and that a sustainable solution required serious financial support.
The roadmap I presented (revamp infrastructure, grow the management team, formalise guidelines, seek funding) never materialised. The only thing that did is the PSF fiscal sponsorship (announcement).
Since then I’ve served on the PSF board (now as PSF chair). That work matters, but it meant Jazzband got even less of my time.
GitHub went the other way
- Copilot launched in 2022, trained on open‑source code that maintainers were already burning out maintaining for free.
- 60 % of maintainers are still unpaid (The Register, 2024).
- The XZ Utils backdoor (2024) showed what can happen when a lone maintainer burns out and a malicious actor fills the gap.
- Jazzband’s own infrastructure began getting in the way of the projects it was supposed to help – the release pipeline couldn’t support trusted publishing, and projects that needed admin access were stuck (issue 393).
Consequently, projects started leaving – and that was always expected.
Django Commons
A special thanks to Django Commons and Tim Schilling for picking up where Jazzband fell short. They now have:
- 5 admins
- 15 active projects (including
django-debug-toolbar,django-simple-history, anddjango-cookie-consentfrom Jazzband)
django-polymorphic is currently transferring (issue 445).
If you’re a Jazzband project lead looking for a new home for a Django project, start there. For non‑Django projects (e.g., pip-tools, contextlib2, geojson, tablib) I’m not aware of an equivalent; if anyone wants to build one for the broader Python tooling ecosystem, I’d love to see it.
By the numbers
- 3 135 members from every continent except Antarctica
- 84 projects maintained, ~93 000 GitHub stars
- 1 312 releases shipped to PyPI
- Projects that passed through Jazzband are downloaded >150 million times per month (e.g.,
pip-tools23 M,prettytable42 M) django-debug-toolbarspent 8 years under Jazzband and ended up in the official Django tutorialdjango-avatar(started 2008) was still getting releases in 2026django-axesshipped 129 versions – a release every 13 days at its peak
The full 10‑year retrospective contains all the numbers, stories, and what actually happened.
What happens next
I’m not pulling the plug overnight. A detailed wind‑down plan (link) outlines the timeline. The short version:
Timeline
| Date | Action |
|---|---|
| Today | New sign‑ups are disabled |
| Before PyCon US 2026 | Project leads will be contacted to coordinate transfers |
| Q2 2026 | Archive inactive repositories, revoke unused credentials |
| Q3 2026 | Transfer remaining active projects to new homes (e.g., Django Commons, community‑run orgs) |
| End 2026 | Dissolve the Jazzband GitHub organization and close the fiscal sponsorship |
If you have any questions or need assistance with the transfer process, please open an issue in the Jazzband help repo or reach out directly to the current maintainers.
Thank you to everyone who contributed, used, or supported Jazzband over the past decade. The work we did together will continue to live on in the projects that remain.
Before PyCon US 2026 we will coordinate transferring projects to new homes.
The GitHub organization and website will remain available during the transition period through the end of 2026.
If you’re a project lead, expect an email soon.
Thank you
None of this would have been possible without the people who showed up—strangers on the internet who decided to maintain something together. Thanks to the 81 project leads who kept things going despite the bottlenecks I created, and to everyone who joined, contributed, filed issues, and shipped releases over the years.
I started Jazzband because maintaining open source alone was exhausting. The irony of then becoming a single point of failure for 71 projects is not lost on me. But the experiment worked in the ways that mattered—projects got maintained, releases got shipped, people collaborated.
Anyways, the projects will move on to new homes, and that’s fine. That was always the point.
We are all part of this.
Written by Jannis Leidel on Mar 14 2026, 12:00 PM