We've donated qtconsole to the spyder team 👋

[choldgraf]

Hey all - I am pleased to share that the Jupyter Executive Council recently voted to approve moving the qtconsole project into the spyder GitHub organization, and it has now been transferred!

qtconsole was one of the early projects created by the IPython Notebook / Jupyter project. It was a key part of the infrastructure stack in the early days, as a more interactive and rich console to access via the browser. Over the past several years, Jupyter has focused its limited resources on other aspects of its technical stack and qtconsole wasn’t getting a lot of maintenance. At the same time, the Spyder team has been providing helpful maintenance and development of the project. @carreau recently asked them if they’d be willing to take over maintenance of the project, and they’ve agree to do it!

I think this is an excellent outcome for a few reasons:

• Open source projects have very limited resources, and doing too many things at once makes it hard to do any one thing particularly well. Shrinking the number of things you have to maintain, so that you can focus on the tools that are strategically important, is healthy and necessary for an open source project.
• The Spyder project and team has been around for a long time, with an excellent track record of developing technology in the open. They’ve been doing most of the maintenance in the project lately, and we trust their vision for it. I’m happy that a team like this is willing to take over stewardship of the project.

I think we should celebrate it any time that an open source project decides that it’s strategically important to let go of something. It doesn’t happen enough! We should also celebrate when projects find a good home that is potentially able to give them more attention. We wish you the best, qtconsole!

See this issue for more discussion and context:

Transfer qtconsole to the spyder team/org

Acknowledgements: Many thanks to @carreau for doing most of the work engaging with the Spyder team, and helping the JEC decide on this transition. And thanks to the Spyder team for being willing to take over stewardship and for all of the leadership and development they’ve done in the project over the last few years.

Edit: added some clarification about the contributions and leadership that spyder have already made per @carreau’s suggestion

[carreau]

Just as clarification, moving the qtconsole is a recognition of the spyder team work, they were the one doing 99% of the work for years now. And this is not a new topic as when the EC and new governance was created (4years ago), the governance document already mentioned doing this migration.

I want to clarify as often, these “we donated X project”, is more a giving up on something and abandoning it.

QtConsole was the project I sent my first pull request to in 2014, and how I started to be heavily involved in IPython. This is the work that gave me a scholarship to attend SciPy in 2015, and met all the fantastic Python community.