What are “third-party modules”?

Question

In researching the tool distutils I stumbled on the term "third-party module" . What does that mean?

Answer 1

A third party module is any code that has been written by a third party (neither you nor the python writers (PSF)).

You can use them to add functionality to your code without having to write it yourself.

Examples include things like requests that simplifies http requests and nose that helps with unit/integration testing.