&gt; What&#x27;s the backstory here?<p>No backstory, the development of PIL gradually slowed down and ultimately stopped in 2011 (the last official release having been cut in 2009), I&#x27;ve never seen any info as to why that happened, it just did. Possibly the difficulty of implementing P3 compatibility while remaining pre-2.7 compatible.<p>PIL was always an idiosyncratic package with a completely custom setup script, a difficult install (including setuptools-incompatibility) and weird-ass modules (probably owing in part to 1.5~2.7 compatibility), as well as a fairly slow release schedule (bi-yearly at the best of times).<p>And so in 2013 it was forked (not entirely unlike LibreSSL from OpenSSL) and a dedicated group started on maintaining and cleaning the stuff, progressively phasing out pre-2.6 compatibility and adding Python 3 support, etc...