Since urllib3 was created in 2008, we have gained several amazing maintainers and hundreds of contributors. Any time you do anything that touches HTTP in Python, you’re probably using urllib3 behind the scenes. It is the 2nd most downloaded third-party Python package, after pip.

Tens of thousands of engineering hours were donated by people working on their own time, unpaid. The whole world benefited from these important donations.

Generous companies have helped the urllib3 contributors and maintainers financially over the years. In the spirit of transparency, I’m going to take a moment to talk about some of our recent funding and how that money was spent.

Supportive Employers

Above all, I want to applaud employers who are actively encouraging their team to contribute back to open source as part of their job. You’re already part of our README, but once more for the active supporters:

Thank you Google Cloud Patform for supporting Thea, our lead maintainer.

Thank you Abbott for supporting Seth, who has been doing the bulk of the work for a long time now.

And thank you to all of the employers who have contributed your company’s resources to our project in the past: Akamai, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and others. If your work on urllib3 is actively being funded by your employer, please send a pull request to be added to the README.

Grants and Sponsorships

We have received a variety of support in various shapes and sizes over the years. Most recently:

Thank you Computer Emergency Response Team of the Government of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg for funding 8 weeks of Seth’s time towards improving urllib3’s security and robustness.

Thank you Gitcoin for allocating over $6,000.00 in funds over 3 months that will go towards Seth’s time on urllib3.

Additionally, urllib3 joined Tidelift Subscription to provide better support guarantees for their paying customers. Our current revenue from the subscription is $417.00 per month ($10,000 over 2 years). This funding is going to Seth for handling support requests and releases. Previously, I was taking $208.50 per month for work as backup maintainer. Thank you Tidelift!

Does your company benefit from Python?

With over 50 million installs per month, urllib3 is a core part of the world’s infrastructure. There is a never ending stream of improvements and fixes that need to be done, especially as HTTP continues to evolve as a technology.

If you can convince your management to allocate a budget to support the improvement of urllib3, please get in touch with me or Thea. We will find the right urllib3 project and contributor to make good use of the funding, and the whole world will benefit from it.

Thank you.