[HN Gopher] Astral to Join OpenAI
___________________________________________________________________
Astral to Join OpenAI
https://openai.com/index/openai-to-acquire-astral/
Author : ibraheemdev
Score : 1136 points
Date : 2026-03-19 13:05 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (astral.sh)
(TXT) w3m dump (astral.sh)
| lucrbvi wrote:
| This is a weird pattern accross OpenAI/Anthropic to buy startups
| building better toolings.
|
| I don't really see the value for OAI/Anthropic, but it's nice to
| know that uv (+ ty and many others) and Bun will stay maintained!
| 0x3f wrote:
| > it's nice to know that uv (+ ty and many others) and Bun will
| stay maintained!
|
| Depends if you think the bubble is going to pop, I suppose. In
| some sense, independence was insulation.
| synthc wrote:
| `uv agent` and `bun agent` in 3....2.....1....
| rgilliotte wrote:
| Totally agree
|
| The value for Anthropic / OAI is that they have a strong
| interest in becoming the "default" agent.
|
| The one that you don't need to install, because it's already
| provided by your package manager.
| everforward wrote:
| I don't think this holds because we're talking about
| developers who know how to use a package manager, on a
| piece of software you have to install anyways. The friction
| of "uv add $other_llm_software" is too low for it to have a
| real impact.
|
| I think they're more into the extra context they can build
| for the LLM with ruff/ty.
| siva7 wrote:
| You fool think they are targeting developers with this
| purchase?
| everforward wrote:
| I don't think they're targeting the C suite with it,
| because they don't use uv and Microsoft already has
| Copilot for the "it's bad but bundled with stuff you're
| already paying for" market.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| until "uv add $openai_competitor" mysteriously breaks in
| odd, difficult to troubleshoot ways.
| LoganDark wrote:
| I'm not so sure. I sort of wish they hadn't been acquired
| because these sort of acquihires usually result in stifling the
| competition while the incumbent stagnates. It definitely is an
| acquihire given OpenAI explicitly states they'll be joining the
| Codex team and only that their existing open-source projects
| will remain "maintained".
| jpalomaki wrote:
| Somebody took a deeper look at Claude Code and claims to find
| evidence of Anthropic's PaaS offering [1]. There's certainly
| money to be made by offering a nice platform where "citizen
| developers" can push their code.
|
| From Astral the (fast) linter and type checker are pretty
| useful companions for agentic development.
|
| [1] https://x.com/AprilNEA/status/2034209430158619084
| lucrbvi wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if Vercel were bought by
| Anthropic/OAI (but maybe it would be too expensive?)
| jimmydoe wrote:
| Nothing is too expensive. It will be a bidding war.
| bikelang wrote:
| No no - SpaceX/xAi must now buy Vercel so that we can
| deploy our bloated Next apps to space.
| GCUMstlyHarmls wrote:
| Next now renamed to Xext.
| dirkc wrote:
| At least in space there is lots of space and no heat /s -
| I'd love for Next to exist in a vacuum
| DoctorDabadedoo wrote:
| Good that they got some money and a longer runaway, but I have
| my doubts the product will improve rather than be smothered to
| death.
|
| Embrace, extend, extinguish. Time will tell.
| itissid wrote:
| Isn't this something to do with their paid pyx(as opposed to
| ty/ruff etc) thingy?
| christina97 wrote:
| I mean they are "startups" on the way to mega-companies. They
| need internal tooling to match.
| butlike wrote:
| They probably prompted for what they should do next and got
| this as a half-hallucinated response lol
| OutOfHere wrote:
| Why do you think that uv, etc. will stay maintained? They will
| for now, but as soon as cash is tight at OpenAI, they'll get
| culled so fast that you won't see it coming. This is the risk.
| TheCondor wrote:
| Does OpenAI use a lot of python?
|
| There is the literal benefit of "we use the hell out of this
| tool, we need to make sure it stays usable for us" and then
| there is what they can learn from or coerce the community in to
| doing.
| jbonatakis wrote:
| I don't know about OpenAI using a lot of Python, but Astral
| builds all their tools in Rust and just exposes Python
| bindings. Codex is all Rust. It feels like a reasonable
| acquisition from that perspective. They're banking on at
| least in part on the Astral team being able to integrate with
| and supercharge Codex.
| FaceValuable wrote:
| Yeah, it's all mostly heaps of Python internally aside from
| Codex.
| luxcem wrote:
| The value is to control the tool chain from idea to production
| so it can be automated by agents. It's no secret that the final
| goal is to fully replace developers, the flow "idea to
| production". It's easier to control that flow if you control
| each tool and every step.
|
| I won't be surprised if the next step is to acquire CI/CD
| tools.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| I'm expecting Anthropic to buy Zed
| fnands wrote:
| Woah, first Anthropic buys Bun, now OpenAI Astral?
|
| Seems like the big AI players love buying up the good dev tooling
| companies.
|
| I hope this means the Astral folks can keep doing what they are
| doing, because I absolutely love uv (ruff is pretty nice too).
| dcreager wrote:
| > I hope this means the Astral folks can keep doing what they
| are doing, because I absolutely love uv (ruff is pretty nice
| too).
|
| That is definitely the plan!
| piva00 wrote:
| Being in this industry for over 20 years probably jaded me a
| lot, I understand that's the plan but it's almost always the
| plan (or publicly stated as).
|
| Only time will tell if it will not affect the ecosystem
| negatively, best of luck though, I really hope this time is
| different(tm).
| dcreager wrote:
| I've been in the industry for similarly long, and I
| understand and sympathize with this view. All I can say is
| that _right now_, we're committed to maintaining our open-
| source tools with the same level of effort, care, and
| attention to detail as before. That does not change with
| this acquisition. No one can guarantee how motives,
| incentives, and decisions might change years down the line.
| But that's why we bake optionality into it with the tools
| being permissively licensed. That makes the worst-case
| scenarios have the shape of "fork and move on", and not
| "software disappears forever".
| bbkane wrote:
| I personally get a lot of confidence in the permissive
| licensing (both in the current code quality, and the
| "backup plan" that I can keep using it in the event of an
| Astralnomical emergency); thank you for being open
| source!
| gib444 wrote:
| Literally there is no public comment you are allowed to
| make that we haven't heard 100 times before.
|
| Congratulations though!
| wiseowise wrote:
| > No one can guarantee how motives, incentives, and
| decisions might change years down the line. But that's
| why we bake optionality into it with the tools being
| permissively licensed. That makes the worst-case
| scenarios have the shape of "fork and move on", and not
| "software disappears forever".
|
| Okay, so better prepare already, folks!
| Rapzid wrote:
| > All I can say is that _right now_
|
| I've also been in the industry for similarly long and I
| believe you 100% that's "all you can say" ;)
| a-french-anon wrote:
| >Seems like the big AI players love buying up the good dev
| tooling companies.
|
| Would be a good mustache-twirling cartoon villain tactics, you
| know, try to prevent advances in developer experience to make
| vibecoding more attractive =)
| delfinom wrote:
| You know it's absolutely going that way. That's the lifecycle
| of corporate strategy.
| bonesss wrote:
| It also hints even The Big Guys can't LLM their tooling
| fully, and that current bleeding edge "AI" companies are
| doing that IT thing of making IT for IT (ie dev components,
| tooling, etc), instead of conquering some entire market on
| one continent or the other...
| Ekaros wrote:
| Makes you really think about the true productivity. If
| these companies have the beyond cutting-edge unreleased
| models so best possible tools shouldn't they be able to
| poach just a few most important people for cheaper? And
| then those people could use AI to build new superior
| product in very fast time. There is also buying an
| userbase. But I wonder how the key talent purchase strategy
| would work in comparison...
| a3w wrote:
| JS vs Python wars, redux?
| Mxbonn wrote:
| uv and ruff are one of the best things that happened in the
| python ecosystem the last years. I hope this acquisition does not
| put them on a path to doom.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| If they just give Astral money to keep going, great, but I have
| difficulty believing they would be so altruistic. This is quite
| an upsetting acquisition.
| backwardation_b wrote:
| I like uv, but not sure this is a good path forward for the
| python ecosystem.
| pas wrote:
| why? lot's of good work came to Python by people who were
| sponsored by big tech companies. make Python better for them,
| and for a lot of other people too.
|
| (sure, it's a bit different than contributing to CPython, but
| I'd argue not that different)
| rkangel wrote:
| It is VERY different. One company now has complete control of
| the activities of the team developing these tools.
| Contributing to Python (money or time) gets you some
| influence, but doesn't allow you to dictate anything -
| there's still a team making the decisions.
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| Your heuristic is terrible. It's not about it being a "big
| tech company". I'm sure that you can be more intelligent and
| nuanced than that. It's about fit, aligned goals, aligned
| vision, aligned incentives.
|
| I do not see any alignment between the Astral that I want
| Astral to be, and OpenAI.
| incognito124 wrote:
| Possibly the worst possible news for the Python ecosystem.
| Absolutely devastating. Congrats to the team
| vdfs wrote:
| On the other hand, we get to see what other thing will try to
| replace pip
| politelemon wrote:
| wx
| blitzar wrote:
| I hope they got paid, I will be very sad if they didn't at
| least get G5 money.
| fortuitous-frog wrote:
| Curious how well upstream contributors or projects get
| contributed for these sort of headline-gathering acquisitions
| (probably not at all, unfortunately).
|
| OpenClaw notably was built around Mario Zechner's pi[0]; uv I
| believe was highly adapted from Armin Ronacher's rye[1], and
| uses indygreg's python-build-standalone[2] for distributing
| Python builds (both of which were eventually transferred to
| Astral).
|
| [0]: https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono
|
| [1]: https://github.com/astral-sh/rye
|
| [2]: https://github.com/astral-sh/python-build-standalone
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| Yeah, no. there are many worse news than this.
|
| In the worst case, Astral will stop developing their tools,
| someone else will pick them up and will continue polishing
| them. In the best case, they will just continue as they did
| until now, and nothing will really change on that front.
|
| Astral is doing good work, but their greatest benefit for the
| ecosystem so far was showing what's possible and how it's down.
| Now everyone can take up the quest from here and continue. So
| any possible harm from here out will be not that deep, at worst
| we will be missing out on many more cool things they could have
| built.
| dcre wrote:
| Can't blame you for not trusting OpenAI, but it seems to me
| they would gain very little from fucking up uv (or more
| precisely doing things that have a side effect of fucking up
| uv), and they have tons of incentive to cultivate developer
| good will. Better to think of buying and supporting a project
| like this as a _very_ cheap way to make developers think they
| 're not so bad.
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| No they don't have incentive to cultivate developer goodwill.
| They are monetizing replacing developers everywhere. That is
| the trillion-dollar valuation. They have the opposite
| incentive.
| dcre wrote:
| They are not. A very large proportion of their revenue
| comes from developers. A large proportion of their
| marketing and product work is aimed at developers. You have
| to work really hard to not see this. Just look at what
| Altman and Brockman tweet about.
|
| https://xcancel.com/gdb
|
| https://xcancel.com/sama/
| throwaway5752 wrote:
| All the various APM companies are implementing "Assign to
| agent" flows. The various foundation model providers will
| be satisfied getting a subscription for 10% of total comp
| of a developer, instead of pocketing 60% of the total
| comp completely replacing them?
|
| The only thing that could prevent this is lack of ability
| to execute, like how Uber wanted to replace drivers with
| FSD vehicles.
| dcre wrote:
| It's not about what they wish would happen, it's about
| what they think will happen. In my view they are acting
| precisely like they believe they will be making a
| proportion of developer pay by making them more
| productive rather than replacing developers. I think they
| understand that the alternative doesn't really work out
| for them or anyone.
|
| Even if they believe that their systems will eventually
| tank employment and replace developers rather than
| augment meant, the fate of Astral doesn't matter at all
| in that scenario because a) nobody has a job, and b) you
| can build your own uv replacement for $20.
| dgb23 wrote:
| Could it be that they want developers to use their stuff
| so they get telemetry and mind share out of it? As a
| stepping stone for the ultimate goals so to speak?
| antod wrote:
| One thing to keep in mind is that uv was the product of a whole
| lot of packaging PEPs finally landing and standards being set.
| That combined with not having to support all the old baggage
| meant they could have an effect modernizing community packaging
| standards.
|
| I hope those two factors mean that if things go really wrong,
| then the clean(ish) break with all the non standard complex
| legacy means an easier future for community packaging efforts.
| stephbook wrote:
| This. Their current approach is open sourced. There's no
| going back any more.
| nsbk wrote:
| Let the forks roll!
| fnands wrote:
| Related (OpenAI announcement):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47438716
| hijodelsol wrote:
| This is a serious risk for the open source ecosystem and
| particularly the scientific ecosystem that over the last years
| has adopted many of these technologies. Having their future
| depend on a cap-ex heavy company that is currently (based on
| reporting) spending approx. 2.5 dollars to make a dollar of
| revenue and must have hypergrowth in the next years or perish is
| less than ideal. This should discourage anybody doing serious
| work to adopt more of the upcoming Astral technologies like ty
| and pyx. Hopefully, ruff and uv are large enough to be forked
| should (when) the time comes.
| rst wrote:
| On the flip side, I'm not sure I ever saw a revenue plan or
| exit strategy for Astral _other_ than acquihire. And most
| plausible bidders are unfortunate in one way or another.
| hijodelsol wrote:
| They could have joined projects like the Linux Foundation
| which try to not depend on any single donor, even though
| complete independence from big tech is not possible. I don't
| know the motivation behind Astral's approach, but this
| acquisition does leave a weird taste behind about how serious
| they were about truly open source software. Time will tell, I
| guess. (Edit: typo)
| colesantiago wrote:
| > I don't know the motivation behind Astral's approach, but
| this acquisition does leave a weird taste behind about how
| serious they were about truly open source software.
|
| It was because Astral was VC funded.
|
| https://astral.sh/blog/announcing-astral-the-company-
| behind-...
| japhyr wrote:
| Astral was building a private package hosting system for
| enterprise customers. That was their stated approach to
| becoming profitable, while continuing to fund their open
| source work.
| organsnyder wrote:
| Private package hosting sounds like a commodity that would
| be hard to differentiate.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah you'd think so but somehow JFrog (makers of
| Artifactory) made half a billion dollars last year. I
| don't really understand that. Conda also makes an
| implausible amount of money.
| japhyr wrote:
| From my understanding there are a lot of companies that
| need their own package repositories, for a variety of
| reasons. I listened to a couple podcasts where Charlie
| Marsh outlined their plans for pyx, and why they felt
| their entry into that market would be profitable. My
| guess is that OpenAI just dangled way more money in their
| faces than what they were likely to get from pyx.
|
| Having a private package index gives you a central place
| where all employees can install from, without having to
| screen what each person is installing. Also, if I
| remember right, there are some large AI and ML focused
| packages that benefit from an index that's tuned to your
| specific hardware and workflows.
| kickopotomus wrote:
| Private artifact repositories also help to mitigate
| supply chain risk since you can host all of your screened
| packages and don't have to worry about something getting
| removed from mvn-central, PyPI, NPM, etc.
|
| Plus the obvious need for a place to host proprietary
| internal libraries.
| y1n0 wrote:
| We have some kind of simple pip repo that is private
| where I work. What would astral bring to the table?
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| How many people use that simple pip repo daily? If the
| number is not in the high hundreds, or a few thousands;
| maybe nothing. But once you get up there, any kind of
| better coordination layer is useful enough to pay money
| to a third party for, unless maintaining a layer over pip
| is your core competency.
| tempest_ wrote:
| I mean that was a thing at one point but I feel like it
| is baked into github/gitlab etc now
| nunez wrote:
| Makes sense to me.
|
| Most of the companies that spend $$$$ with them can't use
| public registries for production/production-adjacent
| workloads due to regulations and, secondarily a desire to
| mitigate supply chain risk.
|
| Artifactory is a drop-in replacement for every kind of
| repository they'll need to work with, and it has a nice
| UI. They also support "pass-through" repositories that
| mirror the public repositories with the customization
| options these customers like to have. It also has
| image/artifact scanning, which cybersecurity teams love
| to use in their remediation reporting.
|
| It's also relatively easy to spin up and scale. I don't
| work there, but I had to use Artifactory for a demo I
| built, and getting it up and running took very little
| time, even without AI assistance.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah I mean I understand the demand. My previous company
| used Artifactory. I just don't understand why nobody has
| made a free option. It's so simple it seems like it would
| be a no brainer open source project.
|
| Like, nobody really pays for web servers - there are too
| many good free options. They're far more complex than
| Artifactory.
|
| I guess it's just that it's a product that only really
| appeals to private companies?
| atomicnumber3 wrote:
| A commodity yes, but could be wrapped in to work very
| nicely with the latest and greatest in python tooling.
| Remember, the only 2 ways to make money are by bundling
| and unbundling. This seems like a pretty easy bundling
| story.
| nunez wrote:
| It's also a crowded and super mature space space between
| JFrog (Artifactory) and Sonatype (Nexus). They already
| support private PyPI repositories and are super locked in
| at pretty much every enterprise-level company out there.
| ttul wrote:
| There's always room for improvement...
| r_lee wrote:
| that was never going to work, let's be honest
| pjmlp wrote:
| What would be the added value against JFrog or Nexus, for
| example?
| justcool393 wrote:
| i mean ofc but like you can self-host pypi and the "Docker
| Hub" model isn't like VC-expected level returns especially
| as ECR and GHCR and the other repos exist
| llll_lllllll_l wrote:
| I don't know how to search for that report, can you share it?
| tmaly wrote:
| Would single maintainers of critical open source projects be a
| better situation?
| mcdonje wrote:
| Are you not aware of foundations?
| kjksf wrote:
| The issue is lack of money not lack of legal structure.
|
| Consider ffmpeg. You can donate via
| https://www.ffmpeg.org/spi.html
|
| How much money do they make from donations? I don't know
| but "In practice we frequently payed for travel and
| hardware."
|
| Translation: nothing at all.
|
| If such a fundamental project that is a revenue driver for
| so many companies, including midas-level rich companies
| like Google, can't even pay decent salaries for core devs
| from donations, then open source model doesn't work in
| terms of funding the work even at the smallest possible
| levels of "pay a reasonable market rate for devs".
|
| You either get people who just work for free or businesses
| built around free work by providing something in addition
| to free software (which is hard to pull off, as we've seen
| with Bun and Astral and Deno and Node).
| mcdonje wrote:
| Google contributed tons of developer hours for things
| like bug fixes, without which the project might not be
| where it is today.
|
| There are examples of foundations or other similar
| entities paying developers, like Linux, SQLite, even Zig.
|
| Maybe the difference is some projects rely on core
| contributors more because external contributions are more
| restricted in some way.
|
| But sure, the entire open source model doesn't work, lol
| Maxion wrote:
| These tools are open source, if they lock them down the
| community will just fork them.
| hijodelsol wrote:
| This might be true for uv and ruff, and hopefully that will
| happen. But pyx is a platform with associated hosting and if
| successful would lock people into the Astral ecosystem, even
| if the code itself was open source.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Nice idea in theory, in practice is how many folks down in
| Nebraska are going to show up.
| zem wrote:
| as someone who works in the python tooling space I think
| you underestimate the number of people who would be willing
| to do this. i would personally help maintain a community
| fork of ruff if it got to the point where one was needed,
| though I draw the line at moving to nebraska first.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It is proven by the amount of projects that eventually
| falled by the wayside after the first wave of volunteers
| run out of steam to keep it going post-fork.
| zem wrote:
| that is a fair point, but I also believe that that
| happens when the project gets superseded by something
| better. I do not think ruff or uv will die because people
| went back to earlier solutions, if openai does kill them
| _and_ the community fork runs out of steam it will be
| because someone made an even better tool, possibly
| incorporating the lessons learnt from astral 's efforts.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| isn't that's the point of open source software? like when
| Oracle bought Sun. someone forked mysql and created
| mariadb.
| pjmlp wrote:
| I never adopted them, keep using mostly Python written stuff.
|
| Either pay for the product, or use stuff that isn't dependent
| on VC money, this is always how it ends.
| hijodelsol wrote:
| There are ways to independently fund open source projects,
| though. I have previously contributed to the Python Software
| Foundation and to individual open source maintainers through
| GitHub donations (which are not dependent on GitHub, as there
| are many alternatives). Projects like the Linux Foundation
| exist, too. And government funding, especially for scientific
| endeavors or where software is used to fulfill critical state
| tasks, is an option, too. I refuse to subject to the
| hypercommercialization of software and still believe in the
| principles behind open source.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Which is why I mentioned _"....use stuff that isn 't
| dependent on VC money..."_.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| > I never adopted them, keep using mostly Python written
| stuff.
|
| Maybe you use non-transitive pure Python dependencies, but
| it's likely that your tools and dependencies still rely on
| stuff in Rust or C (e.g.: py-cryptography and Python itself
| respectively).
| pjmlp wrote:
| I use mostly the batteries, given that the only purpose I
| have for Python, since version 1.6, is UNIX scripting
| tasks, beyond shell.
|
| As mentioned multiple times, since my experience with Tcl
| and continuously rewriting stuff in C, I tend to avoid
| languages that don't come with JIT, or AOT, in the
| reference tooling.
|
| I tend to work with Java, .NET, node, C++, for application
| code.
|
| Naturally AI now changes that, still I tend to focus on
| approaches that are more classical Python with pip, venv,
| stuff written in C or C++ that is around for years.
| chis wrote:
| My hope would be that this eventually pushes pip to adopt a
| similar feature-set and performance improvements. It's always a
| better story when the built-in tool is adequate instead of
| having to pick something. And yes UV is rust but it's pretty
| clear that Python could provide something within 2-5x the
| speed.
| materielle wrote:
| The problem is funding.
|
| There seems to be a pervasive believe that the Python tooling
| and interpreter suck and are slow because the maintainers
| don't care, or aren't capable.
|
| The actual problem is that there isn't enough money to
| develop all of these systems properly.
|
| Google says that Astral had 15 team members. Or course, it's
| so hard to make these projections. But it wouldn't shock me
| if uv and ruff are each individually multi-million dollar
| pieces of software.
|
| If you'd like to invest a million dollars to improve pip, or
| work for free for 3 years to do it yourself, I'm not sure if
| anyone would object.
| thayne wrote:
| pip isn't exactly a "built-in" tool. Beyond the python
| distribution having a stub module that downloads pip for you.
| zahlman wrote:
| `ensurepip` does not "download pip for you". It bootstraps
| pip from a wheel included in a standard library sub-folder,
| (running pip's own code from within that wheel, using
| Python's built-in `zipimport` functionality).
|
| That bootstrapping process just installs the wheel's
| contents, no Internet connection required. (Pip does, of
| course, download pip for you when you run its self-upgrade
| -- since the standard library wheel will usually be out of
| date).
| adolph wrote:
| > This is a serious risk for the open source ecosystem and
| particularly the scientific ecosystem that over the last years
| has adopted many of these technologies.
|
| At worst, it's just Anaconda II AI Boogaloo. The ecosystems
| will evolve and overcome, or will die and different ecosystems
| rise to meet the need going forward.
|
| I anticipate OpenAI will get bored and ignore Astral's tools.
| Software entropy will do its thing and we will remember an
| actively developed uv as the good old days until something
| similar to cargo gets adopted as part of Python's standard
| distribution.
| dadrian wrote:
| As opposed to Pip, which is obviously free and sustainable
| forever.
| geophph wrote:
| Welp. Guess we just wait for the next package management tool to
| come around. Really thought uv was gonna be the one.
|
| Good for Astral though I guess, they do great work. Just not
| optimistic this is gonna be good for python devs long term.
| tom1337 wrote:
| As a non python dev I really thought UV and TY are great tools
| and liked their approaches but I don't know how good it is that
| they are privately held... no a fan
| incognito124 wrote:
| Technically the tools are not privately held, they're OSS with
| a permissive licence. It's just that the bulk of work was done
| by them. The acquisition (ostensibly) changes none of that
| phlakaton wrote:
| I hope OpenAI realizes they cannot buy developer goodwill.
| this_user wrote:
| They are not trying to buy developer goodwill, they are trying
| to catch up with Antrophic in terms of getting those B2B
| contracts, which is currently the most realistic path towards
| not running out of money.
| phlakaton wrote:
| 1. The Register reports OpenAI is well ahead of Anthropic in
| B2B contracts. It's Anthropic playing catch-up, not OpenAI.
|
| 2. In any case, the announcement strongly suggests that
| customer acquisition had little to do with this. The stated
| purpose of the acquisition, as I read it, is an acquisition
| (plus acquihire?) to bolster their Codex product.
|
| 3. But if they were hoping for some developer goodwill as a
| secondary effect... well, see my note above.
| colesantiago wrote:
| If you don't pay for your tools and support OSS financially, this
| is what happens.
|
| Although Astral being VC funded was already headed this way
| anyway.
|
| Deno, Pydantic (Both Sequoia) will go the same way as with many
| other VC backed "open source" dev tools.
|
| It will go towards AI companies buying up the very same tools,
| putting it in their next model update and used against you.
|
| Rented back to you for $20/mo.
| smahs wrote:
| There is nothing wrong with big money backing, often is
| necessary for long term bets, but rug pulling is a serious
| threat. VC funded open source has become a pattern/playbook.
| colesantiago wrote:
| It would have been fine if the Astral team was acqui-hired
| and uv, ruff, etc were donated to the PSF or Linux Foundation
| for further sponsorship and support.
|
| But the pressure _because_ they raised VC funding, I would
| imagine Astral needed an actual exit and OpenAI saw Astral 's
| tools as an asset.
| weakfish wrote:
| What happens when OpenAI's burn dries up their cash?
| sourcegrift wrote:
| RAM prices go down. My hope though is that the period RAM
| prices stay up will put electron apps out of market.
| genthree wrote:
| All the vibe-coded webshitware these companies are putting
| out seems too be doing the opposite: it's all even more
| memory- and cycle-hungry than the webshit we were lovingly
| pooping out by hand for the last decade.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| They get more money from investors, go public, or get bought.
| throwa356262 wrote:
| They mysteriously gain a lot of government contracts.
|
| In a completely unrelated event, Donald sues Sam for 10M$ for
| calling him old, Sam grudingly agrees to pay him 16M$ and a
| beer.
| prodigycorp wrote:
| $110B will surely last for at least a year.
| morphology wrote:
| That money is going directly to Jensen as quickly as possible
| to secure OpenAI's place in the delivery queue
| prodigycorp wrote:
| The investment version of "can you climb up a falling
| ladder fast enough to not fall"
| ZenoArrow wrote:
| Was that $110B in cash? I wouldn't be surprised if it's based
| on something else (paid for using deals for stock).
| gedy wrote:
| "We must be regulated to contain the nuclear bomb like power of
| our products. Oh look it escaped again!", etc
| Fervicus wrote:
| Taxpayers bail them out.
| gmerc wrote:
| That's where taxpayers come in a the ultimate bagholder.
| brikym wrote:
| `uv` will get PIP'd
| dinosor wrote:
| I'm confused as to what will happen to their platform product
| which was in closed beta - pyx. Since they no longer need to
| worry about money (I assume) they no longer need to chase after
| enterprise customers?
| T-A wrote:
| "OpenAI is focusing employee and investor attention on its
| enterprise business as the artificial intelligence startup
| gears up to go public, potentially by the end of the year, CNBC
| has learned."
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/17/openai-preps-for-ipo-in-2026...
| applfanboysbgon wrote:
| Company that repeatedly tells you software developers are
| obsoleted by their product buys more software developers instead
| of using said product to create software. Hmm.
| avaer wrote:
| As good as the team is, that's not what they're buying in this
| case.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| What are they buying?
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| mindshare and a central piece of the python package
| management ecosystem.
| bootsmann wrote:
| Most popular product on the planet acquires a random
| python packaging org for mindshare? What am I not seeing
| here?
| __float wrote:
| "uv" is a very widely used tool in the Python ecosystem,
| and Python is important to AI. Calling it "a random
| Python packaging org" seems a bit unfair.
| nilkn wrote:
| I feel like it's pretty easy to predict what OpenAI is
| trying to do. They want their codex agent integrated
| directly into the most popular, foundational tooling for
| one of the world's most used and most influential
| programming languages. And, vice versa, they probably
| want to be able to ensure that tooling remains well-
| maintained so it stays on top and continues to integrate
| well with their agent. They want codex to become the
| "default" coding agent by making it the one integrated
| into popular open source software.
| MoreQARespect wrote:
| This makes much more sense as an zoom-buys-keybase style
| acquihire. I bet within a month the astral devs will be
| on new projects.
|
| Bundling codex with uv isnt going to meaningfully affect
| the number of people using it. It doesnt increase the
| switching costs or anything.
| aldanor wrote:
| One of the popular products on the planet acquires the
| most popular python packaging org
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| The dev market? Anthropic's services are arguably more
| popular among a certain developer demographic.
|
| I guess this move might end up in a situation where the
| uv team comes up with some new agent-first tooling, which
| works best or only with OAI services.
| mcmcmc wrote:
| This just seems like panic M&A. They know they aren't on
| track to ever meet their obligations to investors but
| they can't actually find a way to move towards
| profitability. Hence going back to the VC well of
| gambling obscene amounts of money hoping for a 10x
| return... somehow
| OJFord wrote:
| What you're not seeing, edited inline, is:
|
| _Not-most_ popular _LLM software development_ product on
| the planet acquires _most popular /rapidly rising_ python
| packaging org for mindshare.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| I didn't know Claude bought Astral! /S
| everforward wrote:
| I think this is more about `ruff` than `uv`. Linting is
| all about parsing the code into something machines can
| analyze, which to me feels like something that could
| potentially be useful for AI in a similar way to
| JetBrains writing their own language parsers to make
| "find and replace" work sanely and what not.
|
| I'm sort of wondering if they're going to try to make a
| coding LLM that operates on an AST rather than text, and
| need software/expertise to manage the text->AST->text
| pipeline in a way that preserves the structure of your
| files/text.
| skydhash wrote:
| Writing a parser is not that much of work to buy a
| company in order to do it. Piggybacking on LSP servers
| and treesitter would be more efficient.
| everforward wrote:
| Writing a literal parser isn't too hard (and there's
| presumably an existing one in the source code for the
| language).
|
| Writing something that understands all the methods that
| come in a Django model goes way beyond parsing the code,
| and is a genuine struggle in language where you can't
| execute the code without worrying about side effects like
| Python.
|
| Ty should give them a base for that where the model is
| able to see things that aren't literally in the code and
| aren't in the training data (eg an internal version of
| something like SQLAlchemy).
| skydhash wrote:
| If you're talking about magic methods/properties enabled
| by reflection and macros, then you're no longer
| statically analyzing the code.
| dcreager wrote:
| The parser is not the hard part. The hard part is doing
| something useful with the parse trees. They even chose
| "oh is that all?" and a picture of a piece of cake as the
| teaser image for my Strange Loop talk on this subject!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2R1PTGcwrE
| contagiousflow wrote:
| Why can't they just vibe code a uv replacement?
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| They can, everyone can.
|
| Good luck vibe coding marketshare for your new tool.
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| Why would that marketshare be valuable?
| drgiggles wrote:
| This. It's valuable b/c if you have many thousands of
| python devs using astral tooling all day, and it tightly
| integrates with subscription based openai
| products...likelihood of openai product usage increases.
| Same idea with the anthropic bun deal. Remains to be seen
| what those integrations are and if it translates to more
| subs, but that's the current thesis. Buy user base ->
| cram our ai tool into the workflow of that user base.
| freetonik wrote:
| OpenAI could vibe-code marketshare by introducing bias
| into ChatGPT's responses and recommendations. "- how to
| do x in Python? - Start by installing OpenAI-UV first..."
| cesarvarela wrote:
| But new tools (like uv) start with no market share.
| noodletheworld wrote:
| uv
| rvnx wrote:
| > Second, to our investors, especially Casey Aylward from
| Accel, who led our Seed and Series A, and Jennifer Li from
| Andreessen Horowitz, who led our Series B
|
| They are buying out investors, it's like musical chairs.
|
| The liquidity is going to be better on OpenAI, so it
| pleases everyone (less pressure from investors, more
| liquidity for investors).
|
| The acquisition is just a collateral effect.
| tgtweak wrote:
| Are you implying that the revenue multiple on this
| acquisition is lower than openAIs and that they'd be
| making money by acquiring and folding into their
| valuation multiple? I think that's not the case and I
| would wager non existent.
|
| This was an acquihire (the author of ripgrep, rg, which
| codex uses nearly exclusively for file operations, is
| part of the team at Astral).
|
| So, 99% acquihire , 1% other financial trickery. I don't
| even know if Astral has any revenue or sells anything,
| candidly.
| rvnx wrote:
| They raised 4M USD, they have 26 full-time employees
| (they pay 120<->200K / yr, cf
| https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/523411-93 ).
|
| It means the company almost reached their runway, so all
| these employees would have to find a job.
|
| It's a very very good product, but it is open-source and
| Apache / MIT, so difficult to defend from anyone just
| clicking on fork. Especially a large company like OpenAI
| who has massive distribution.
|
| Now that they hired the employees, they have no more
| guarantees than if they made a direct offer to them.
| zanie wrote:
| A brief note, your numbers are way off here -- Astral
| subsequently raised a Series A and B (as mentioned in the
| blog post) but did not announce them. We were doing great
| financially.
|
| (I work at Astral)
| rvnx wrote:
| It seems you are one of the most active contributors
| there.
|
| I would sincerely have understood better (and even
| wished) if OpenAI made you a very generous offer to you
| personally as an individual contributor than choose a
| strategy where the main winners are the VCs of the
| purchased company.
|
| Here, outside, we perceive zero to almost no revenues (no
| pricing ? no contact us ? maybe some consulting ?) and
| millions burned.
|
| Whether it is 4 or 8 or 15M burned, no idea.
|
| Who's going to fill that hole, and when ? (especially
| since PE funds have 5 years timeline, and company is from
| 2021).
|
| The end product is nice, but as an investor, being nice
| is not enough, so they must have deeper motives.
| tgtweak wrote:
| I mean you pirouetted onto the AI hype train before
| running out of working capital - I guess that's doing
| great financially by some definitions.
| tgtweak wrote:
| So I don't see how the acquisition is collateral - it's
| an acquihire plain and simple, if anything else it would
| be supply chain insurance as they clearly use a lot of
| these tools downstream. As you noted the licensing is
| extremely permissive on the tools so there appears to be
| very little EV there for an acquirer outside of the human
| capital building the tools or building out monetized
| features.
|
| I'm not too plugged into venture cap on opensource/free
| tooling space but raising 3 rounds and growing your burn
| rate to $3M/yr in 24 months without revenue feels like a
| decently risky bag for those investors and staff without
| a revenue path or exit. I'd be curious to see if OpenAI
| went hunting for this or if it was placed in their lap by
| one of the investors.
|
| OpenAI has infamously been offering huge compensation
| packages to acquire talent, this would be a relative deal
| if they got it at even a modest valuation. As noted,
| codex uses a lot of the tooling that this team built here
| and previously, OpenAI's realization that competitors
| that do one thing better than them (like claude with
| coding before codex) can open the door to getting
| disrupted if they lapse - lots of people I know are
| moving to claude for non-coding workflows because of it's
| reputation and relatively mature/advanced client tools.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| > They raised 4M USD
|
| What was their pitch?
| tgtweak wrote:
| To raise $4m seed from AAA partners usually requires
| connections + track record/credability of the founders -
| looks like they have that here since they raised 3 rounds
| with zero revenue.
| jon-wood wrote:
| I can see why the former investors and Astral founders
| would like that, what I don't see is what OpenAI get out
| of the deal.
| rvnx wrote:
| Maybe OpenAI literally considers themselves as the
| ultimate non-profit company. Hmm...
| huqedato wrote:
| IMO, they are buying business just to put them down later
| to avoid potential competition. The recipe is not new, it
| has been practiced by Google/Microsoft for many years.
| ainch wrote:
| What competition was OpenAI likely to face from a team
| working on fast Python tooling?
| huqedato wrote:
| I have no idea but for sure they did their homework
| before making this step. I suppose they're grabbing these
| business just to stay ahead, in order to prevent the
| competitors to buy those instead.
| butlike wrote:
| Sitting on cash as a company also looks bad to investors
| cozzyd wrote:
| $ uv install claude-agent-sdk I'm sorry Dave, I
| can't do that
| waynesonfire wrote:
| And, they buy a company writing tooling for Python in not
| Python.
| LollipopYakuza wrote:
| A tool might not be the best tool to build itself, doesn't
| mean it is not good. You don't use a screwdriver to craft
| screwdrivers. Doesn't mean screwdrivers are inherently bad
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| Next you'll complain about CPython being written in C.
| lm28469 wrote:
| They said it'll be good enough in two weeks, give them some
| time!
| XCSme wrote:
| Which year was that?
| wilkystyle wrote:
| All of them
| lm28469 wrote:
| Between when they said VR would be as common as TVs in two
| years, and before Musk said we'd be on mars in 5 years
| largbae wrote:
| They're writing the software to end all softwares!
| siva7 wrote:
| They're not buying developers, they are buying the whole
| ecosystem to produce software. Still aligned with their
| original message.
| applfanboysbgon wrote:
| If the product did what it was advertised to do, they could
| simply build their own ecosystem for producing software and
| train the model to use it.
| siva7 wrote:
| Or, they could use a battle-proven existing solution
| because they can.
| applfanboysbgon wrote:
| "Because they can", after spending a bunch of money to
| acquire an existing solution. I suppose when it's other
| people's money, there's no problem with burning it by the
| fistful. Apparently, "because they can" does not extend
| to building solutions with their own product.
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| They should just halt development immediately and build
| their own operating system from scratch!
|
| You realise that there's certainly at least one Astral
| dev that uses Copilot or Claude Code or whatever, right?
|
| You're so anti-AI that you're making nonsensical
| arguments. The existence of AI doesn't mean that human
| effort and skill and care is worth nothing. OpenAI has
| never argued that. Nothing is incongruent here except for
| the completely fictionalised worldview you've conjured up
| and attributed to...a company?
| wiseowise wrote:
| And then what? History is laden with technically superior
| software that lost to popular one. They can create uw
| tomorrow, but who will use it when everyone uses uv and its
| good enough for them?
| applfanboysbgon wrote:
| The "then what" is that their model uses it. Technically
| superior software loses to popular software on marketing.
| But LLM owners have the ultimate marketing tool, because
| they can make their model use the tool. Anyone who asks
| how to do X in Python gets recommended "OpenAI-Python-
| Tool-For-X". Anyone who asks Codex to do X, Codex
| automatically installs "OpenAI-Tool-For-X". It would be
| _very easy_ for them to launch even technically inferior
| software into a prime position. On top of that, if
| software developers are being replaced altogether as we
| are bashed in the head with such tales again and again,
| the marketing of dev tools wouldn 't even matter, only
| what models are trained to use.
| wiseowise wrote:
| This comment section is the evidence that your strategy
| won't work. Why fight against community if you can buy
| it? Or you seriously think this is some ideological war
| where they need to prove that their offering is so good
| by reinventing all of software? Why won't you stretch it
| further? They should've written their browser, their OS
| and their mobile phones instead of offering ChaGPT on
| existing ones.
| applfanboysbgon wrote:
| > where they need to prove that their offering is so good
| by reinventing all of software?
|
| They could start by inventing _any_ software with their
| agents. They probably should prove their offering is good
| enough to do that considering they 're hundreds of
| billions of dollars in debt, owing truckloads of money
| they currently have no hope of repaying to investors who
| are being promised a literal revolution.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Why would they diffuse their attention when competition
| is not sleeping?
| applfanboysbgon wrote:
| Their attention apears to already be quite diffuse if
| buying a python package manager is an item anywhere on
| their agenda. Also, once again, if the tool did what it
| was promised -- it wouldn't even be a diffusion of
| attention. The entire schtick is that software engineers
| are being replaced and that you can just run a model to
| create the product for you. Unless, of course, the thing
| does not do what is promised.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > Their attention apears to already be quite diffuse if
| buying a python package manager is an item anywhere on
| their agenda.
|
| According to the blog [0], their whole monorepo is in
| Python, their models are obviously trained using Python,
| their experiments are written using Python and core and
| CLI of their Codex is written using Rust. Uv brings both
| Python and Rust expertise. You're talking nonsense
| because of your blind hate of LLMs. Even though I agree
| that they're capitalizing on the fear of SWE being
| redundant.
|
| 0 - https://calv.info/openai-reflections
| applfanboysbgon wrote:
| Blind hate of LLMs? I don't hate LLMs, in fact I do
| contract work off-and-on for a bootstrapped startup in
| the field (which is profitable on its own merits, imagine
| that!). What I hate is blind sycophancy, that Sam Altman
| is a huckster who is in the process of defrauding
| investors of what will probably be over a trillion
| dollars when all is said and done, and the corresponding
| completely batshit environment he's created with this
| bubble of his. I can't even get through reading the
| vomit-inducing blog you linked. "It's entirely possible
| that the quality of the work will draw me back. It's hard
| to imagine building anything as impactful as AGI, and
| LLMs are easily the technological innovation of the
| decade". Ugh.
|
| Obviously, buying skilled Rust devs makes sense for any
| normal software company that develops in Rust. I wouldn't
| be making a point out of it if the headline were "Amazon
| buys Rust developers". Or if OpenAI were honest about
| what their product is.
| tripledry wrote:
| When someone at work talks about all software devs being
| replaced I link them to the Anthropic career pages.
| tedsanders wrote:
| I work at OpenAI. Software developers are not obsoleted by
| Codex or Claude Code, nor will they be soon.
|
| For our teams, Codex is a massive productivity booster that
| actually increases the value of each dev. If you check our
| hiring page, you'll see we are still hiring aggressively. Our
| ambitions are bigger than our current workforce, and we
| continue to pay top dollar for talented devs who want to join
| us in transforming how silicon chips provide value to humans.
|
| Akin to how compilers reduced the demand for assembly but
| increased the demand for software engineering, I see Codex
| reducing the demand for hand-typed code but increasing the
| demand for software engineering. Codex can read and write code
| faster than you or me, but it still lacks a lot of intelligence
| and wisdom and context to do whole jobs autonomously.
| applfanboysbgon wrote:
| This seems like a reasonable take. Maybe you could inform
| your CEO, the media and influencer sycophants, the tech
| companies that are laying off tens of thousands of developers
| while mandating the use of your company's tool, and everyone
| else responsible for us being inundated with outlandish
| claims that software engineering is dead on a literally daily
| basis. Hey, while I'm asking for wishes that won't be
| granted, maybe get people in your company to stop thinking
| they're so important that it's okay to buy 40% of the world's
| RAM supply with borrowed money, making it cost 4.5x as much
| for the rest of us?
| KolmogorovComp wrote:
| It's a good news to me considering their open-source nature.
| If/when they go downhill there will be still the option to fork,
| and the previous work will still have been funded.
|
| Now for those wondering who would fork and maintain it for free,
| that is more of a critic of FOSS in general.
| huksley wrote:
| UV_DISABLE_AGENT=1 UV_DISABLE_AI_HINTS=1 uv add
| emmettm wrote:
| lol, underrated comment
| rafaelgoncalves wrote:
| :D, and i think they would add some optout telemetry flags too
| to make this even funnier
| photon_collider wrote:
| Reading this news only leaves me worried about long-term future
| of these open source tools.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I have long since found the VC model for open source
| questionable. If you are not selling popular enough direct
| enterprise support what is the model to actually make money.
|
| Take ruff, I have used it, but I had no idea it even had a
| company behind it... And I must not be only one and it must not
| be only tool like it...
| readitalready wrote:
| I'd expect OpenAi to make some type of Github clone next, perhaps
| with Astral, or maybe with jujutsu.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| Why? Github is already owned by Microsoft, who are deep in with
| OpenAI. And what worth would a Github-clone even have for the
| world? It's not like there is any important innovation left in
| that space at the moment, or are there any?
| 0x500x79 wrote:
| Better uptime? https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-is-
| developing-altern...
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| Ok, seems reasonable, but still a bit strange. If uptime is
| their problem, then a dedicated personal instance for their
| own projects seems good enough? But might be they have some
| other problems too.
|
| On the other side, thinking about, if all the AI-Slope is
| moving to their own platform, it would be a big benefit for
| Github. And maybe this is their real goal? To let Github
| continue being a source of good high quality human-
| maintained training-material?
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| Greed knows no limit
|
| OpenAI is Microslop, so it's the classic EEE, nothing new to see
|
| It's like with systemd now planning to enforce gov. age
| verification
|
| People will censor you if you dare say something negative on this
| website
|
| So i guess, _wears a clown hat_ "congrats!"
| jedahan wrote:
| great for astral, sucks for uv. was nice to have sane tooling at
| least for a few years, thanks for the gift.
| ziml77 wrote:
| I really hope they don't kill off uv or turn it into some way
| to sell OpenAI services. But I suspect that's exactly what's
| going to happen :(
| butlike wrote:
| I don't know. yarn never really turned into a vehicle to sell
| Facebook, though you always kind of transiently knew it was
| FB that offered it. I imagine that sort of transient
| advertising is it's own value, too.
| pennomi wrote:
| Time for the PSF to consider something inspired by uv as a
| native solution.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| The core-adjacent people have completely failed to produce
| reasonable packaging tools for decades, why would you want
| another new tool from them?
| zahlman wrote:
| Who said anything about it coming from core-adjacent
| people?
|
| Was Kenneth Reitz "core-adjacent" when Requests was brought
| under the PSF umbrella?
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| Hn's favorite company meets hn's most hated company.
|
| Hilarity in the comments will ensue
| incognito124 wrote:
| Thank you n-gate
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Genuinely. UV is so awesome and OpenAI is so meh.
|
| I am not even sure how to feel about this news but feel a bit
| disappointed as a user even if I might be happy for the devs
| that they got money for such project but man, I would've hoped
| any decent company could've bought them out rather than OpenAI
| of all things.
|
| Maybe OpenAI wants to buy these loved companies to lessen some
| of the hate but what its doing is lessening the love that we
| gave to corporations like astral/uv sadly, which is really sad
| because uv is/(was?) so cool but now we don't know where this
| tool might be headed next given its in the hands of literally
| OpenAI :(
| sakesun wrote:
| Pyright and ty are under the same roof now.
| codethief wrote:
| How so? Pyright is being developed by Microsoft.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Congrats!
|
| This of course means more VC funding for FOSS tools since a
| successful exit is a positive signal.
| baq wrote:
| Funding is as good as gone until the Iran mess is over.
| bogwog wrote:
| > a successful exit is a positive signal
|
| This is peak finance brainrot. In no scenario is abandoning
| ship a positive signal, even if you managed to pocket some
| valuables on the way out.
|
| Let's stop celebrating dysfunctional business models and
| consolidation of the industry around finance bros who give zero
| fucks about said industry.
| afavour wrote:
| And so, more core functionality developers depend on becomes
| dependent on a continuing stream of billions in VC funding. What
| could go wrong?
| Hackbraten wrote:
| Don't you dare enshittify my uv.
| odie5533 wrote:
| Can we rename it to Codex?
| hollow-moe wrote:
| rip uv
| holografix wrote:
| Solid move by Altman - good signal they're serious about
| capturing the Claude Code market from Anthropic.
|
| What I don't understand is why hasn't anyone bought Jetbrains
| yet.
|
| Atlassian? AWS? Google?
| hirako2000 wrote:
| Because Jetbrain strategy wasn't to burn money with free tools
| to eventually exit with the jackpot. They have been profitable
| for over a decade, simply asking users to pay a fair price for
| great product.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Judging by all their mistakes in the last years, Russian war
| and AI, it's only a matter of time until someone buys them
| out.
| rkomorn wrote:
| With the way they're going, I'm less and less convinced
| there will be much left to buy, unless it's for pennies.
|
| I've only been a JetBrains user for five years but it's
| felt like it's only getting worse the whole time.
| user34283 wrote:
| Atlassian? Bitbucket as a platform for agentic development..
| shudder
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Most likely because Jetbrains is not for sale. Google almost
| certainly offered to buy at some point.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Never did. I remember someone replied to my comment here that
| Google isn't paying a penny to JetBrains. They're quite happy
| with the relationship primarily because they don't have to
| pay anything. If anything, JetBrains is the one who needs
| Google more than the other way around.
| amterp wrote:
| Happy for the devs, they deserve the presumably massive payout
| for the amount of value they've brought to the Python community.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Great that I keep using traditional Python tools.
| throwa356262 wrote:
| "Sir, you now have twice as many private jets as Dario"
|
| "But he owns a tooling company. WHY can't I have that? :( :("
| sublime_happen wrote:
| these (uv and bun) are not acquihires, they're acqui-rootaccess
| OutOfHere wrote:
| We need to explore this angle. With OpenAI already strongly
| being intelligence gathering apparatus for the US, now with
| this acquisition, it will potentially have access to the code
| and environment variables of a good chunk of private projects
| even when Codex doesn't.
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| What about those of us that don't wear tinfoil hats? What
| will we discuss?
|
| This is such a delusional and complex supposed means to an
| end. You're just fantasising.
| edelbitter wrote:
| Have you looked at the .github/ folder of any actively
| developed python packages lately? It has become difficult to
| find one where there _isn 't_ a few interesting people with
| code-execution-capable push/publish/cache-write access
| somewhere along the blown up transitive dependency/include
| chains.
| AnishLaddha wrote:
| F*CK. take everything from me why dontcha?
| noodletheworld wrote:
| I really love uv.
|
| Its always hard to really trust these corporate funded open
| source products, but they've honestly been great.
|
| ...but I find it difficult to believe openai owning the corner
| stone of the python tooling ecosystem is good thing for the
| python ecosystem.
|
| There is no question openai will start selling/bundling codex
| (and codex subscriptions) with uv.
|
| I dont think I want my package manger doing that.
| bethekidyouwant wrote:
| "There is no question openai will start selling/bundling codex
| (and codex subscriptions) with uv." What does that even mean?
| NiloCK wrote:
| A concern:
|
| More and more plainly, OpenAI and Anthropic are making plays to
| own (and lease) the "means of production" in software. OK - I'm a
| pretty happy renter right now.
|
| As they gobble up previously open software stacks, how viable is
| it that these stacks remain open? It seems perfectly sensible to
| me that these providers and their users alike have an interest in
| further centralizing the dev lifecycle - eg, if Claude-Code or
| Codex are interfaces to cloud devenvs, then the models can get
| faster feedback cycles against build / test / etc tooling.
|
| But when the tooling authors are employees of one provider or
| another, you can bet that those providers will be at least a few
| versions ahead of the public releases of those build tools, and
| will enjoy local economies of scale in their pipelines that may
| not be public at all.
| rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote:
| If it ever goes bad, well I hope that that's an impetus for new
| open source projects to be started -- and with improvements
| over and lessons learned from incumbent technologies, right at
| the v1 of said projects.
| Maxion wrote:
| If LLMs turn out to be such a force multiplier, the way to
| fight it is to ensure that there are open source LLMs.
| runarberg wrote:
| That would be accepting the framing of your class enemy,
| there is no reason to do that.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| unless they are also pirate LLMs, I don't see how any open
| source project could have pockets deep enough for the
| datacenters needed to seriously contend
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| The problem is even if an OSS had the resources (massive
| data centers the size of NYC packed with top end custom GPU
| kits) to produce the weights, you need enormous VRAM laden
| farms of GPUs to do inference on a model like Opus 4.6.
| Unless the very math of frontier LLMs changes, don't expect
| frontier OSS on par to be practical.
| palmotea wrote:
| > you need enormous VRAM laden farms of GPUs to do
| inference on a model like Opus 4.6.
|
| It's probably a trade secret, but what's the actual per-
| user resource requirement to run the model?
| supern0va wrote:
| There's already an ecosystem of essentially
| undifferentiated infrastructure providers that sell cheap
| inference of open weights models that have pretty tight
| margins.
|
| If the open weights models are good, there are people
| looking to sell commodity access to it, much like a cloud
| provider selling you compute.
| lukeschlather wrote:
| I feel like you're overstating the resources required by
| a couple orders of magnitude. You do need a GPU farm to
| do training, but probably only $100M, maybe $1B of GPUs.
| And yes, that's a lot of GPUs, but they will fit in a
| single datacenter, and even in dollar terms, there are
| many individual buildings in NYC that are cheaper.
| captainbland wrote:
| I think the issue is that LLMs are a cash problem as much
| as they are a technical problem. Consumer hardware
| architectures are still pretty unfriendly to running models
| which are actually competitive to useful models so if you
| want to even do inference on a model that's going to
| reliably give you decent results you're basically in
| enterprise territory. Unless you want to do it really
| slowly.
|
| The issue that I see is that Nvidia etc. are incentivised
| to perpetuate that so the open source community gets the
| table scraps of distills, fine-tunes etc.
| butlike wrote:
| You got me thinking that what's going to happen is some
| GPU maker is going to offer a subsidized GPU (or RAM
| stick, or ...whatever) if the GPU can do calculations
| while your computer is idle, not unlike Folding@home.
| This way, the company can use the distributed fleet of
| customer computers to do large computations, while the
| customer gets a reasonably priced GPU again.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| The kinds of GPUs that are in use in enterprise are
| 30-40k and require a ~10KW system. The challenge with
| lower power cards is that 30 1k cards are not as
| powerful, especially since usually you have a few of the
| enterprise cards in a single unit that can be joined
| efficiently via high bandwidth link. But even if someone
| else is paying the utility bill, what happens when the
| person you gave the card to just doesn't run the
| software? Good luck getting your GPU back.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Consumer hardware is there. grab a mac or AMD395+ and
| Qwen coder and Cline or Open code and you're getting 80%
| of the real efficiency.
| nunez wrote:
| Open-source models will never be _truly_ competitive as
| long as obtaining quality datasets and training on them
| remains prohibitively expensive.
|
| Plus, most users don't want to host their own models. Most
| users don't care that OpenAI, Anthropic and Google have a
| monopoly on LLMs. ChatGPT is a household name, and most of
| the big businesses are forcing Copilot and/or Claude onto
| their employees for "real work."
|
| This is "everyone will have an email server/web
| server/Diaspora node/lemmy instance/Mastodon server" all
| over again.
| hot_iron_dust wrote:
| What would the new open source projects do differently from
| the "old" ones? I don't think you can forbid model training
| on your code if your project is open source.
| bix6 wrote:
| If it goes bad? It's too late by that point. And how is open
| source going to compete with billions of investment dollars?
| darth_avocado wrote:
| If AI tools are as good as the CEOs claim, we should have
| no friction towards building multiple open source
| alternatives very quickly. Unless of course, they aren't as
| good as they are being sold as, in which case, we have
| nothing to worry about.
| cube2222 wrote:
| Honestly, for now they seem to be buying companies built around
| Open Source projects which otherwise didn't really have a good
| story to pay for their development long-term anyway. And it
| seems like the primary reason is just expertise and tooling for
| building their CLI tools.
|
| As long as they keep the original projects maintained and those
| aren't just acqui-hires, I think this is almost as good as we
| can hope for.
|
| (thinking mainly about Bun here as the other one)
| bix6 wrote:
| And how likely is that?
|
| Once you're acquired you have to do what the boss says. That
| means prioritizing your work to benefit the company. That is
| often not compatible with true open source.
|
| How frequently do acquired projects seriously maintain their
| independence? That is rare. They may have more resources but
| they also have obligations.
|
| And this doesn't even touch on the whole commodification and
| box out strategy that so many tech giants have employed.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > Once you're acquired you have to do what the boss says.
|
| Or quit, and take the (Open Source) project and community
| with you. Companies sometimes discover this the hard way;
| see, for instance, the story of how Hudson became Jenkins.
| volkercraig wrote:
| It's not any different from the launch of the FSF. There's a
| simple solution. If you don't want your lunch eaten by a
| private equity firm, make sure whatever tool you use is GPL
| licensed.
| palmotea wrote:
| > If you don't want your lunch eaten by a private equity
| firm, make sure whatever tool you use is GPL licensed.
|
| 1. For the record: the GPL is entirely dependent on
| copyright.
|
| 2. If AI "clean-room" re-implementations are allow to bypass
| copyright/licenses, the GPL won't protect you.
| islandfox100 wrote:
| Maybe I'm reading wrong here, but what's the implication of
| the clean room re-implementations? Someone else is cloning
| with a changed license, but if I'm still on the GPL
| licensed tool, how am I "not protected"?
| eru wrote:
| There's basically no different between GPL and BSD in
| that case.
| darkwater wrote:
| 1. Company A develops Project One as GPLv3
|
| 2. BigCo bus Company A
|
| 3a. usually here BigCo should continue to develop Project
| One as GPLv3, or stop working on it and the community
| would fork and it and continue working on it as GPLv3
|
| 3b. BigCo does a "clean-room" reimplementation of Project
| One and releases it under proprietary licence. Community
| can still fork the older version and work on it, but
| BigCo can continue to develop and sell their "original"
| version.
| makapuf wrote:
| 2. BigCo owns ProjectOne now 3a. Bigco is now free to
| release version N+1 as closed source only. 3b. Community
| can still fork the older version and work on it, but
| BigCo can continue to develop and sell their original
| version.
| bloppe wrote:
| As a real world example, Redis was both Company A and
| BigCo. Project One is now ValKey.
| goku12 wrote:
| > If AI "clean-room" re-implementations are allow to bypass
| copyright/licenses, the GPL won't protect you.
|
| Isn't that the same for the obligations under
| BSD/MIT/Apache? The problem they're trying to address is a
| different one from the problem of AI copyright washing.
| It's fair to avoid introducing additional problems while
| debunking another point.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| If clean-room re-implementations are allowed to bypass
| copyright/licenses (software) copyright is dead in general?
| justcool393 wrote:
| well no, (clean room )reimplementations of APIs have done
| since time immemorial. copyright applies to the work
| itself. if you implement the functionality of X, software
| copyright protects both!
|
| patents protect ideas, copyright protects artistic
| expressions of ideas
| shimman wrote:
| "Clean room" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Having the
| entire corpus of knowledge for humanity and how LLMs work,
| how can you honestly argue in court that this is purely
| clean room implementation?
|
| This is right up there with Meta lawyers claiming that when
| they torrent it's totally legal but when a single person
| torrents it's copyright infringement.
| 20k wrote:
| Far too many people treat AI as a way to launder
| copyright, it seems likely that a lot of the current
| state of outright plagiarism won't stand up in court
| bredren wrote:
| No IP will stand up to AI, from Star Wars to Linear.
| Things are about to change.
| petcat wrote:
| The biggest scam the mega-clouds and the Githubs ever pulled
| was convincing open source developers that the GPL was
| somehow out of vogue and BSD/MIT/Apache was better.
|
| All so they could just vacuum it all up and resell it with
| impunity.
| leetrout wrote:
| I remember a somewhat prominent dev in the DC area putting
| on Twitter around 2012 or so something like "I do plenty of
| open source coding and I don't put a fucking license on it"
| and it stuck with me for all these years that it was a
| weird stance to take.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| John Carmack said that about a week ago.
| roryirvine wrote:
| Dan Bernstein took that attitude back in the 90s - I
| think his personal theory of copyright went something
| like "if it doesn't have a license, then it's obviously
| public domain", which ran counter to the mainstream
| position of "if it doesn't have a license, then you have
| to treat it as proprietary".
|
| And, sure, djb wasn't actually likely to sue you if you
| went ahead and distributed modified versions of his
| software... but no-one else was willing to take that
| risk, and it ended up killing qmail, djbdns, etc stone
| dead. His work ended up going to waste as a result.
| chuckadams wrote:
| I doubt the lack of license was the reason DJB's projects
| didn't take over the world. Most of them required heavy
| forking to break away from hardwired assumptions about
| the filesystem and play nice with the OS distribution,
| and DJB is himself notoriously difficult to work with.
| Still, qmail managed to establish maildir as the standard
| format and kill off mbox, and for that alone I'm
| eternally grateful.
| roryirvine wrote:
| Well, there were always plenty of patches available -
| it's just that lots of them conflicted with each other,
| and that _was_ a product of the licensing.
|
| Agreed with the rest, though. I relied heavily on qmail
| for about a decade, and learned a lot from the
| experience, even if it was a little terrifying on
| occasion!
| chuckadams wrote:
| These days one would just most likely create a fork on
| github. Vim was also maintained through separate patches
| for a long time, but Bram was a lot more accepting about
| integrating and distributing those patches himself.
| 12_throw_away wrote:
| > his personal theory of copyright went something like
| "if it doesn't have a license, then it's obviously public
| domain"
|
| I mean philosophically and morally, sure, one can take
| that position ... but copyright law does not work like
| that, at least not for anything published in the US after
| 1989 [1].
|
| [1] https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ03.pdf
| kjksf wrote:
| I don't remember GitHub or Amazon advocating MIT over GPL.
|
| Feel free to prove me wrong by pointing out this massive
| amount of advocacy from "mega-clouds" that changed people's
| minds.
|
| The ads, the mailing list posts, social media comments.
| Anything at all you can trace to "mega-clouds" execs.
| colesantiago wrote:
| https://choosealicense.com/
|
| https://choosealicense.com/about/
|
| > "GitHub wants to help developers choose an open source
| license for their source code."
|
| This was built by GitHub Inc a very very long time ago.
| supern0va wrote:
| >This was built by GitHub Inc a very very long time ago.
|
| So long ago, in fact, that it was five years before their
| acquisition by Microsoft.
| thayne wrote:
| I don't see anything on there saying that non-copyleft
| licenses are better, unless you are in an ecosystem that
| prefers a different license.
| Master_Odin wrote:
| The site puts the MIT and GPLv3 front and center with a
| nice quick informative blurb on them. How are they
| pushing MIT over GPL?
| eru wrote:
| Huh? When you deploy something in the cloud, you don't have
| to share your GPL'ed stuff either. Google doesn't.
| benterix wrote:
| You probably mean AGPL. Companies hated GPL from the start
| and nothing has changed to this day. But the cloud is
| specifically against AGPL.
| xorcist wrote:
| The big cloud providers are perfectly happy to use GPL'd
| stuff (see: Elastic, MySQL). They don't need to use
| embrace-and-extend, they're content with hosting.
|
| The ones pushing for permissive licenses are rather
| companies like Apple, Android (and to some extent other
| parts of Google), Microsoft, Oracle. They want to push
| their proprietary stuff and one way to do that in the face
| of open source competition is by proprietary extensions.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| > ones pushing for permissive licenses are rather
| companies like Apple, Android
|
| The FOSS community at large embraced permissive licenses
| and it had nothing to do with the interests of big
| corporations.
| dirkc wrote:
| While the license is important, it's the community that plays
| the key role for me. VC funder open source is not the same as
| community developed open source. The first can very quickly
| disappear because of something like a aquihire, the second
| has more resilience and tends to either survive and evolve,
| or peter out as the context changes.
|
| I'm careful to not rely too heavily on VC funded open source
| whenever I can avoid it.
| munk-a wrote:
| A GPL license helps but if support for a dependency is pulled
| you'll likely end up needing to divert more resources to
| maintain it anyways. There really isn't any guarantee against
| this cost - you either pay someone else to maintain it and
| hope they do a good job, build it in house and become an
| "also that thing" company, or follow a popular project
| without financially supporting it and just hope other people
| pick up your slack.
|
| Preferring GPL licensed software means that you're immune to
| a sudden cut off of access so it's always advisable - but
| it's really important to stay on top of dependencies and be
| willing to pay the cost if support is withdrawn. So GPL helps
| but it isn't a full salve.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| Since when has GPL stopped any company from doing so? I'd
| genuinely be happy to hear of a single time someone was
| actually pressed about their GPL compliance after FSF v.
| Cisco, it's like some immaterial sword of Damocles, the
| entire weight of which is the shame of losing face, which is
| fleeting in a society post-appeal-to-authority.
| throwaway63467 wrote:
| It's a small tool shop building a tiny part of the Python
| ecosystem, let's not overstate their importance. They burned
| through their VC money and needed an exit and CLI tool chains
| are hyped now for LLMs, but this mostly sounds like an
| acquihire to me. Dev tools are among the hardest things to
| monetize with very few real winners, so good for them to get a
| good exit.
| druml wrote:
| Small tool shop, burning VC money, true. "Tiny part of the
| Python ecosystem" is an understatement given how much impact
| uv has made alone.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Do you have any statistics for that?
| pm90 wrote:
| anecdotally every place ive worked at has switched over
| and never looked back.
| shawnwall wrote:
| been in the python game a long time and i've seen so many
| tools in this space come and go over the years. i still
| rely on good ol pip and have had no issues. that said, we
| utilize mypy and ruff, and have moved to pyproject etc to
| remotely keep up with the times.
| jitl wrote:
| uv solved it, it will be the only tool people use in 2
| more years. if you're a python shop / expert then you can
| do pip etc but uv turned incidental python + deps from a
| huge PITA for the rest of us, to It Just Works simplicity
| on the same level or better than Golang.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| I don't want software on my computer, that just downloads
| and installs random stuff. This is the job of the OS in
| particular the package manager.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Then don't use it?
| QuantumNomad_ wrote:
| What's the point of constraining oneself to what is in
| the OS package manager? I like to keep my dependencies up
| to date. The versions in the OS package manager are much
| older.
|
| And let's say you constrain yourself to your OS package
| manager. What about the people on different distros?
| Their package managers are unlikely to have the exact
| same versions of your deps that your OS has.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| > What's the point of constraining oneself to what is in
| the OS package manager? I like to keep my dependencies up
| to date. The versions in the OS package manager are much
| older.
|
| I favor stability and the stripping of unwanted features
| (e.g. telemetry) by my OS vendor over cutting edge
| software. If I really need that I install it into
| /usr/local, that it what this is for after all.
|
| > And let's say you constrain yourself to your OS package
| manager. What about the people on different distros?
| Their package managers are unlikely to have the exact
| same versions of your deps that your OS has.
|
| This is a reason to select the OS. Software shouldn't
| require exact versions, but should stick to stable
| interfaces.
| zbentley wrote:
| Do you not use non-OS package managers?
|
| If not, do you develop software with source dependencies
| (go, java, node, rust, python)? If so, how do you handle
| acquiring those dependencies--by hand or using a tool?
| 1718627440 wrote:
| > Do you not use non-OS package managers?
|
| Mostly no, sometimes I give up and still use pip as a
| separate user.
|
| > If not, do you develop software with source
| dependencies (go, java, node, rust, python)? If so, how
| do you handle acquiring those dependencies--by hand or
| using a tool
|
| I haven't felt the need to use Go, the only Java software
| I use is in the OS repo. I don't want to use JS software
| for other reasons. This is one of the reasons why I don't
| like Rust rewrites. Python dependencies are very often in
| the OS repo. If there is anything else, I compile it from
| source and I curse when software doesn't use or adheres
| to the standard of the GNU build system.
| maleldil wrote:
| I hope you understand you are part of a very, very small
| minority.
| LtWorf wrote:
| Personally I run "apt install whateverineed"
| maccard wrote:
| Do you use pip?
| wiseowise wrote:
| Don't worry, gramps, pip won't trigger your tinfoil hat.
| dotancohen wrote:
| In general I agree with you. But not for software dev
| packages.
|
| The package manager I use, apt on Debian, does not
| package many Python development repos. They've got the
| big ones, e.g. requests, but not e.g. uuid6. And I
| wouldn't want it to - I like the limited Debian dev
| effort to be put towards the user experience and let the
| Python dev devs worry about packaging Python dev
| dependencies.
| jitl wrote:
| You're welcome to live in the 90s dark ages, I feel this
| attitude and the shape of the old linux distros like
| Debian that laboriously re-package years-old software
| have been one of the biggest failures of open source and
| squandered untold hours of human effort. It's a model
| that works okay for generic infrastructure but requires
| far too much labor and moves far too slowly with quite a
| poor experience for end users and developers. Why else
| would all modern software development (going back to
| perl's cpan package manager in 1995) route around it?
| pdntspa wrote:
| Then can they please figure out some way of invoking it
| that doesnt require prefixing everything with 'uv'
| tomrod wrote:
| alias in ~/.zshrc?
| cjp wrote:
| direnv, .envrc, "layout uv"
|
| https://github.com/direnv/direnv/wiki/Python#uv
| malcolmgreaves wrote:
| uv run bash/zsh/your shell of choice
| maleldil wrote:
| You can source the virtualenv like normal.
| arw0n wrote:
| For any command, you can create an 'alias' in your shell
| config. That way you can get rid of the prefix.
| tomrod wrote:
| Geospatial tends to be the Achilles heel for python
| projects for me. Fiona is a wiley beast of a package, and
| GDAL too. Conda helped some but was always so slow. Pip
| almost uniformly fails in this area for me.
| crimsoneer wrote:
| Yup, the fact UV just installed geopandas out of the box
| with no issues blew my mind.
| _moof wrote:
| Same. It's game-changing - leaps and bounds above every
| previous attempt to make Python's packaging, dependency
| management, and dev workflow easy. I don't know anyone
| who has tried uv and not immediately thrown every other
| tool out the window.
| macNchz wrote:
| I use uv here and there but have a bunch of projects
| using regular pip with pip-tools to do a requirements.in
| -> requirements.txt as a lockfile workflow that I've
| never seen enough value in converting over. uv is clearly
| much faster but that's a pretty minor consideration
| unless I were for some reason changing project
| dependencies all day long.
|
| Perhaps it never grabbed me as much because I've been
| running basically everything in Docker for years now,
| which takes care of Python versioning issues and caches
| the dependency install steps, so they only take a long
| time if they've changed. I also like containers for all
| of the other project setup and environment scaffolding
| stuff they roll up, e.g. having a consistently working
| GDAL environment available instantly for a project I
| haven't worked on in a long time.
| imp0cat wrote:
| 2 things: First, you can (and should) replace your `pip
| install` with `uv pip install` for instant speed boost.
| This matters even for Docker builds.
|
| Second, you can use uv to build and install to a separate
| venv in a Docker container and then, thanks to the
| wonders of multistage Docker builds, copy that venv to a
| new container and have a fully working minimal image in
| no time, with almost no effort.
| jengland wrote:
| uv has almost 2x the number of monthly downloads Poetry
| has.
|
| - https://pypistats.org/packages/poetry -
| https://pypistats.org/packages/uv
|
| In the 2024 Python developer survey, 18% of the ecosystem
| used Poetry. When I opened this manifold question[0], I'm
| pretty sure uv was about half of Poetry downloads.
|
| Estimating from these numbers, probably about 30% of the
| ecosystem is using `uv` now. We'll get better numbers
| when the 2025 Python developer survey is published.
|
| Also see this: https://biggo.com/news/202510140723_uv-
| overtakes-pip-in-ci-u...
|
| [0]: https://manifold.markets/JeremiahEngland/will-uv-
| surpass-poe...
| rob wrote:
| Just a tiny project with over 100 million downloads every
| month, over 4 million every day. No big deal. Just a small
| shop, don't overstate its importance.
|
| https://pypistats.org/packages/uv
| throwaway63467 wrote:
| The "requests" package gets downloaded one billion times
| every month, should that be a multi billion dollar VC
| company as well? It's a package manager and other neat
| tooling, it's great but it's hardly the essence of what
| makes Python awesome, it's one of the many things that
| makes this ecosystem flourish. If OpenAI would enshittify
| it people would just fork or move on, that's all I'm
| saying, it's not in any way a single point of failure for
| the Python ecosystem.
| druml wrote:
| > the essence of what makes Python awesome
|
| This is not the point of uv or any good package manager.
| The point is what prevents Python to suck. For a long
| time package management had been horrible in Python
| compared what you could see in other languages.
| FuckButtons wrote:
| Sure, but if tomorrow uv and ruff ceased to exist, we
| could all go back to any number of other solutions.
| tomrod wrote:
| Maybe you could. I would stare longingly into the void,
| wondering if I can ever work another python project after
| having experienced uv, ruff, and ty.
|
| Such an outcome would make me wonder regarding the wisdom
| of "It is better to have love and lost than to have never
| loved at all."
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| It is an MIT licensed project, someone will absolutely
| fork it.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| You seem to be underestestimating the laziness of the
| people, and overestimating their resolve. Angry forks
| usually don't last, angst doesn't prevent maintenance
| burnouts.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| You underestimate the value that something like uv and
| company bring to the ecosystem. Given enough time I could
| have seen it replacing some core utilities, now that its
| owned by OpenAI I don't see that happening, unless OpenAI
| "donates" the project but keeps the devs on a payroll.
| jitl wrote:
| clicking "fork" in github is pretty easy
| signal11 wrote:
| I was using poetry pretty happily before uv came along.
| I'd probably go back.
|
| Note that uv is fast because -- yes, Rust, but also
| because it doesn't have to handle a lot of legacy that
| pip does[1], and some smart language independent design
| choices.
|
| If uv became unavailable, it'd suck but the world would
| move on.
|
| [1] https://nesbitt.io/2025/12/26/how-uv-got-so-fast.html
| theLiminator wrote:
| Maybe I could give up uv, but giving up ruff would suck.
| crdrost wrote:
| This is just the weirdest thread.
|
| Like, the whole point of open source is that this thread
| is not a thing. The whole point is "if this software is
| taken on by a malevolent dictator for life, we'll just
| fork it and keep going with our own thing." Or like if
| I'm evaluating whether to open-source stuff at a startup,
| the question is "if this startup fails to get funding and
| we have to close up shop, do I want the team to still
| have access to these tools at my next gig?" -- there are
| other reasons it might be in the _company 's_ interests,
| like getting free feature development or hiring better
| devs, but that's the main reason it'd be in the
| _employees '_ best interests to want to contribute to an
| open-source legacy rather than keep everything
| proprietary.
| asa400 wrote:
| The leadership and product direction work are at least as
| hard as the code work. Astral/uv has absolutely proven
| this, otherwise Python wouldn't be a boneyard for build
| tools.
|
| Projects - including forks - fail all the time because
| the leadership/product direction on a project goes
| missing despite the tech still being viable, which is why
| people are concerned about these people being locked up
| inside OpenAI. Successfully forking is much easier said
| than done.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I had a lot of trouble convincing people that a correct
| Python package manager was even possible. _uv_ proved it
| was possible and won people over with speed.
|
| I had a sketched out design for a correct package manager
| in 2018 but when I talked to people about it I couldn't
| get any interest in it. I think the brilliant idea that
| _uv_ had that I missed was that it can 't be written in
| Python because if is written in Python developers are
| going to corrupt its environment sooner or later and you
| lose your correctness.
|
| I think that now that people are used to _uv_ it won 't
| be that hard to develop a competitor and get people to
| switch.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Maybe consider something other than python.
| scuff3d wrote:
| Good luck with that. I haven't been successful at
| convincing anyone to move away from it. I'm so fucking
| sick of writing Python at work lol
| tomrod wrote:
| Always choose the best tool for the job.
|
| Then import that tool and and check if __name__ ==
| "__main__"
| FreakLegion wrote:
| Ruff is performant but finds about half the issues Pylint
| does (see https://github.com/astral-sh/ruff/issues/970).
| Ty is quantitatively the worst of the well-known type
| checkers (see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47398023). Uv is
| Astral's only winner.
| crimsoneer wrote:
| Eurgh, I do not want to ever touch Poetry or pyenv again,
| thank you very much.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| While I hope it never comes to that, all the code is MIT
| licensed, I would assume everyone would make the sensible
| decision for fork it.
| alsetmusic wrote:
| I see Apache and MIT license files in their GitHub.
| What's to prevent the community from forking and
| continuing development if the licenses change?
| eviks wrote:
| The same things that prevented "community" from building
| the tool in the first place
| johnisgood wrote:
| Cannot we at one point consider the tool to be "done"? I
| mean, what is there to constantly change and improve?
| Genuinely curious. It sounds like a tool that can be
| finished. Can it not be?
| influx wrote:
| You'd be surprised how many features the Python runtime
| adds each release. It's not trivial for tooling to keep
| up with language changes.
| zem wrote:
| that makes zero sense to me. developing something like
| ruff from scratch takes a lot of things happening -
| someone having the idea, the time to develop it from
| scratch in their free time, or the money to do it as a
| job, and perhaps the need to find collaborators if it's
| too large a project for one person. but now ruff is
| there, there's no need to build it from scratch. if I
| wanted to build a python linter or formatter I would
| simply fork ruff and build on top of it. as others have
| said in this subthread, that's the whole point of open
| source!
| PaulHoule wrote:
| i think the main problem was that people didn't believe
| that pip was broken, or didn't think there was any value
| in a 100% correct package manager over a 97% correct
| package manager (e.g. misread "worse is better")
|
| I had the problem basically understood in 2018 and I am
| still pissed that everybody wanted to keep taking their
| chances with pip just like they like to gamble with agent
| coders today.
|
| Now that people know a decent package manager is possible
| in Python I think there is going to be no problem getting
| people to maintain one.
| pxc wrote:
| Idk how anyone could sustain the impression that pip was
| not broken unless they had basically never used anything
| else (including Linux package managers) long enough to
| have even a basic understanding of it.
|
| And that's a big part of what's so frustrating about
| Python generally: it seems to be a language used by lots
| of people who've never used anything else and have an
| attitude like "why would I ever try anything else"?
|
| Python has a culture where nominal values of user-
| friendliness, pragmatism, and simplicity often turn into
| plain old philistinism.
| skywhopper wrote:
| I mean, if you believe the hype on this website, Claude
| Code could build a perfect clone of uv in a few hours
| using only the documentation.
| arw0n wrote:
| Ruff is nice, but not important, uv is one of the few
| things making the python ecosystem bearable. Python is a
| language for monkeys, and if you don't give monkeys good
| tools, they will forever entangle themselves and _you_.
| It is all garbage wrapped in garbage. At least let me
| deploy it without having to manually detangle all that
| garbage by version.
|
| I'm done pretending this is a "right tools for the right
| job" kind of thing, there's wrong people in the right
| job, and they only know python. If no one self-writes
| code anymore anyway, at least use a language that isn't a
| clusterfuck of bad design decisions, and has 1 trillion
| lines of code in the collective memory of people who
| don't know what a stack is.
| theptip wrote:
| I agree uv is great but let's not get carried away here.
| Poetry is good, pip was fine for many use-cases after
| they added native lock files.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| if you are working on one tiny project on your machine
| that pips in four packages you probably think pip was OK.
|
| Circa 2017 I was working on systems that were complex
| enough that pip couldn't build them and after I got to
| the bottom of it I knew it not my fault but it was the
| fault of pip.
|
| I built a system which could build usable environments
| out of pre-built wheels and sketched out the design of a
| system that was roughly 'uv but written in Python' but
| saw two problems: (1) a Python dependent system can be
| destroyed by people messing with Python environments,
| like my experience is that my poetry gets trashed every
| six months or so and (2) there was just no awareness by
| the 'one tiny project on your machine that pips in four
| packages' people that there was a correctness problem at
| all and everybody else was blaming themselves for a
| problem and didn't have a clear understanding of what was
| wrong with pip or what a correct model for managing
| python dependencies is (short answer: see maven) or that
| a 100% correct model was even possible and that we'd have
| to always settle for a 97% model. The politics looked
| intractable so I gave up.
|
| Now written in rust, uv evaded the bootstrap problem and
| it dealt with the adoption problem by targeting 'speed'
| as people would see the value in that even if they didn't
| see the value in 'correctness'. My system would have been
| faster than pip because it would have kept a cache, but
| uv is faster still.
| Affric wrote:
| Well said.
|
| I have used them all and UV is the only one that actually
| solves the problem.
|
| It's insane that people would suggest that Python can go
| back.
| rtpg wrote:
| Poetry and friends are so bad that many people continued
| just using pip -r requirements.txt despite knowing about
| this other stuff
|
| Poetry having users isn't the metric for success. pip
| having way less users is.
| aprdm wrote:
| Python existed for years before uv with a huge ecosystem,
| and will continue to do so after/if it dies
| bodge5000 wrote:
| > If no one self-writes code anymore anyway, at least use
| a language that isn't a clusterfuck of bad design
| decisions
|
| I can get behind the idea that LLM's probably don't need
| a language designed for humans if humans arent writing
| it, but the rest of this is just daft. Pythons popularity
| isn't just pure luck, in fact its only been in recent
| years that the tooling has caught up to the point where
| its as easy to setup as it is to write, which should
| really tell you something if people persevered with it
| anyway.
|
| I'm sorry your favourite language doesnt have the
| recognition it so rightfully deserves, but reducing
| python to just "stupid language for stupid people" is,
| well, stupid
| sitkack wrote:
| Python is the blub language now.
| tasuki wrote:
| Ahaha, I feel this comment.
|
| I used to do backend development in superior languages,
| and sometimes do hobby frontend in superior languages,
| but my work is Python now. And it kind of has to be
| Python: we do machine learning, and I work with GDAL and
| PDAL and all these other weird libraries and everything
| has Python bindings! I search for "coherent point drift"
| and of course there's a Python library.
|
| The superior languages I mentioned... perhaps they have
| like a library for JSON encoding and decoding. You need
| anything else? Great, now you're a library author and
| maintainer!
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Ok, what am I missing, I've used python for many many
| years. What does UV give us over pip + venv + pyenv?
|
| (I'm not doing this to be a dick, I genuinely want to
| know what the use case is)
| andyferris wrote:
| Everything "just works" and is fast - and that's
| basically it.
|
| You can run a script with a one liner and it will
| automatically get you the same python and venv and
| everything as whoever distributed the python code, in
| milliseconds if the packages are already cached on your
| local computer.
|
| Very easy to get going without even knowing what a venv
| or pypi or anything is.
|
| If you are already an expert you get "faster simpler
| tooling" and if you are a complete beginner it's "easy
| peasy lemon squeezy".
| Eridrus wrote:
| It's not horrifically slow.
| antonvs wrote:
| > making the python ecosystem bearable
|
| You should really qualify that statement, it implies that
| the Python ecosystem is bearable.
| wiseowise wrote:
| I would just ditch Python, like I did 8 years ago.
| MidnightRider39 wrote:
| Personally I would stop using Python again. uv is the one
| thing that made it bearable.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| I wish that were also true for the case of
| Claude/Codex/etc
| crypto137 wrote:
| UV is so much nicer than the other options.
| linsomniac wrote:
| >Sure, but if tomorrow uv and ruff ceased to exist, we
| could all go back to any number of other solutions.
|
| Or, more relevant to this conversion: If they closed
| source tomorrow, the community could fork the current
| version.
| joelthelion wrote:
| That says more about the sad state of modern CI pipelines
| than anything about uv's popularity.
|
| Not disputing that it's a great and widely used tool,
| BTW.
| skywhopper wrote:
| I mean, these sorts of numbers speak to the mind-
| bogglingly inefficient CI workflows we as an industry
| have built. I'd be surprised if there were 4 million
| people in the world who actually know what 'uv' is.
| johnisgood wrote:
| I do feel like it is overstated, and the number of
| downloads is not a good metric at all. There are npm
| packages with many millions of downloads, too.
| wombatpm wrote:
| You can take my padleft function from my cold dead hands,
| but it will live forever in example code!
| LtWorf wrote:
| It's not difficult to download something yourself 4
| million times every day to look popular :)
| swexbe wrote:
| VC money bailing out other VCs. A tale as old as time.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| They have some nice ideas. But if they turn to shit you can
| just fork their tools and use that instead.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| Maybe there needs to be some nonprofit watchdog which
| helps identify those cases in their early stages and
| helps bootstrap open forks. I'd fund to a sort of open
| capture protection savings account if I believed it would
| help ensure continuity of support from the things I rely
| on.
| throwaw12 wrote:
| uv and ruff is not tiny part anymore, its growing fast
| Syntaf wrote:
| Not to mention their language server + type checker `ty` is
| incredible. We moved our extremely large python codebase
| over from MyPy and it's an absolute game changer.
|
| It's so fast in fact that we just added `ty check` to our
| pre-commit hooks where MyPy previously had runtimes of 150+
| seconds _and_ a mess of bugs around their caching.
| woodruffw wrote:
| As a point of information: Astral did not, in fact, burn
| through its VC money. I agree that dev tools are difficult to
| monetize, though.
|
| (Source: I'm an Astral employee.)
| benterix wrote:
| Finally someone competent to answer the crucial question.
| Taken into account the enormous amount of excellent work
| you did, and the fact that dev tools are hard to monetize,
| what was your strategy?
| woodruffw wrote:
| You can find some resources on our strategy in previous
| blog posts, like this one on pyx[1].
|
| [1]: https://astral.sh/blog/introducing-pyx
| ontouchstart wrote:
| Are you going to join codex team as well? I am curious
| about how the codex code base will evolve after you guys
| joined. It is going to affect Python/Rust toolchains
| tremendously.
| cj wrote:
| Check this HN thread from 8 months ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44358216
| nullhole wrote:
| > As a point of order: Astral did not, in fact, burn
| through its VC money.
|
| That's a point of information, not a point of order.
| woodruffw wrote:
| You're right, I've edited it.
| jdgoesmarching wrote:
| Is pointing out the incorrect use of a point of order
| itself a point of order, or also a point of information?
| jitl wrote:
| what does that mean
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| uv is the best thing to happen to package management in
| Python.
|
| It's not perfect, but it is light-years better than what
| preceded it.
|
| I jumped ship to it and have not looked back. (So have many
| of my clients).
| gigatexal wrote:
| Uv is the defacto way to do projects. Ty is really really
| good. Ruff is the defacto linter. I mean they've earned a lot
| of clout.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| > Dev tools are among the hardest things to monetize with
| very few real winners, so good for them to get a good exit.
|
| I'm on the fence about cancelling my JetBrains subscription
| I've had for nearly 10 years now. I just don't use it much.
| Zed and Claude Code cover all my needs, the only thing I need
| is a serious DataGrip alternative, but I might just sit down
| with Claude and build one for myself.
| paddy_m wrote:
| What do you want in your datagrip alternative. I'm working
| on some stuff, and interested to hear how people approach
| data with LLMs
| mikenikles wrote:
| I'm curious what you think of https://seaquel.app as a
| DataGrip alternative.
|
| It's a project I'm working on to build a database
| management product I've always wanted.
|
| I spend way too much time obsessing over UX but hope people
| appreciate it :).
| raincole wrote:
| > tiny part of the Python ecosystem
|
| https://xkcd.com/2347/
| scuff3d wrote:
| That's kind of like saying Cargo is a small part of the Rust
| ecosystem.
|
| It's not there yet, but it's getting there.
| anentropic wrote:
| That was my feeling - more than 'owning' uv etc I could see
| this as being about getting people onboard who had a proven
| track record delivering developer tooling that was loved
| enough to get wide adoption
| 19205817 wrote:
| They were hyped here without any pushback. Maybe OpenAI
| thinks the Astral folks will now evangelize and foist Codex
| and ChatGPT onto the open source "community".
|
| People need to be very careful about resisting. OpenAI wants
| to make everyone unemployed, works with the Pentagon, steals
| IP, and copyright whistleblowers end up getting killed under
| mysterious circumstances.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| given that they delivered the goods I would not say they
| were "hyped"
| jitl wrote:
| Every uv-related post here had a few people going "i don't
| want to use VC funded stuff!! what about rug pull!!",
| although perhaps they were drowned out eventually all the
| people (like me) going "uv is fantastic and solves 15 years
| of python packaging hell"
| screye wrote:
| UV is arguably this decade's most important addition to the
| python ecosystem. They are a small, but they are important.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Explain to me how this is any different than Microsoft,
| Blackrock, Google, Oracle, Berkshire or any other giant company
| acquiring their way to market share?
| TrackerFF wrote:
| But how does this work out in the long run, in the case of AGI?
|
| If AGI becomes available, especially at the local and open-
| source level, shouldn't all these be democratized - meaning
| that the AGI can simply roll out the tooling you need.
|
| After all, AGI is what all these companies are chasing.
| butlike wrote:
| Let us assume AGI never comes. I don't plan scenarios for
| when aliens land, why should I for AGI? It's not particularly
| close.
| butlike wrote:
| If it becomes too antagonistic, people will change. The desire
| to build things is larger than any given iron fist du jour.
| Just ask Oracle or IBM.
| goku12 wrote:
| Could you say the same about the Chrome browser? Google is
| using it to EEE the web (Embrace, Extend and Extend it till
| it's a monstrosity that nobody else can manage). That's
| pretty antagonistic. But did people change?
| butlike wrote:
| Sample size: 1 but I use Arc browser. It's still webkit
| under the hood (and in maintenance mode now), though it's
| actually pretty good and last I checked had most of the
| baked in google stuff toggled-off by default
| pixelsort wrote:
| In the many darker timelines that one can extrapolate,
| capturing essential tech stacks is just a pre-cursor to
| capturing hiring.
|
| Once we start seeing Open AI and Anthropic getting into the
| certifications and testing they'll quickly become the gold
| standard. They won't even need to actually test anyone. People
| will simply consent to having their chat interactions analyzed.
|
| The models collect more information about us than we could ever
| imagine because definitionally, those features are unknown
| unknowns for humans. For ML, the gaps in our thinking carry far
| richer information about is than our actual vocabularies,
| topics of interest, or stylometric idiosyncrasies.
| echelon wrote:
| As if there will be hiring in the fullness of time.
|
| There will come a day when you can will an entire business
| into existence at the press of a button. Maybe it has one or
| two people overseeing the business logic to make sure it
| doesn't go off the rails, but the point is that this is a
| 100x reduction in labor and a 100,000x speed up in terms of
| delivery.
|
| They'll price this as a $1M button press.
|
| Suddenly, labor capital cannot participate in the market
| anymore. Only financial capital can.
|
| Suddenly, software startups are no longer viable.
|
| This is coming.
|
| The means of production are becoming privatized capital
| outlays, just like the railroads. And we will never own
| again.
|
| There is nothing that says our careers must remain viable.
| There is nothing that says our output can remain competitive,
| attractive, or in demand. These are not laws.
|
| Knowledge work may be a thing of the past in ten years' time.
| And the capital owners and hyperscalers will be the entirety
| of the market.
|
| If we do not own these systems (and at this point is it even
| possible for open source to catch up?), we are fundamentally
| screwed.
|
| I strongly believe that people not seeing this - downplaying
| this - are looking the other way while the asteroid
| approaches.
|
| This. Is. The. End.
| pixelsort wrote:
| There could be opportunities we haven't anticipated.
|
| What if labor organizes around human work and consumers are
| willing to pay the premium?
|
| At that point, it's an arms race against the SotA models in
| order to deepen the resolution and harden the security
| mechanisms for capturing the human-affirming signals
| produced during work. Also, lowering the friction around
| verification.
|
| In that timeline, workers would have to wear devices to
| monitor their GSR and record themselves on video to track
| their PPG. Inconvenient, and ultimately probably doomed,
| but it could extend or renew the horizon for certain kinds
| of knowledge work.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > What if labor organizes around human work and consumers
| are willing to pay the premium?
|
| We could start today, but sweat shops and factories
| dominate the items on our shelves.
|
| But I'm sure people will draw the line at human made
| software.../s
| nunez wrote:
| And never forget that we collectively cheered it on as the
| asteroid's crater got deeper and wider.
| dabbz wrote:
| Oh are compilers going away? Or personal computers for that
| matter?
|
| If the barrier to button-pressed companies goes that high
| up, the cost to run/consume the product also goes up.
| Making hand-rolled products cheaper.
|
| Slower paced to roll out things? Sure.
|
| That's the precarious balance these LLMs providers have to
| make. They can't just move on without the people feeding it
| data and value. The machine is not perpetual.
| dismalaf wrote:
| Of course they're trying to capture existing tech stacks. The
| models themselves are plateauing (most advancement is coming
| from the non-LLM parts of the software), they took too much VC
| money so they need to make some of it back. So gobbling up
| wafers, software, etc... is the new plan for spending the money
| and trying to prevent catastrophic losses.
| bargainbin wrote:
| This is a logical conclusion of most open source tools in a
| capitalist economy, it's been this way for decades.
|
| Equivalent or better tools will pop up eventually, heck if AI
| is so fantastic then you could just make one of your own, be
| the change you want to see in the world, right?
| justinhj wrote:
| These are MIT/Apache 2. Sure they can buy and influence the
| direction but they can't prevent forks if they stray from what
| users want.
| gigatexal wrote:
| If our corporate overlords are gonna buy up all that is good
| I'd rather it have been Anthropic and not that wierdo humans-
| need-food-and-care-for-inference-so-LLMs aren't-that-power-
| hungry Sam Altman. Man that guy is weird.
|
| Oh well. They'll hopefully get options and make millions when
| the IPO happens. Everyone eventually sells out. Not everyone
| can be funded by MIT to live the GNU maximalist lifestyle.
| andrepd wrote:
| "Bearded German philosopher" once again being uncannily
| applicable to 21st century happenings...
| nazgulnarsil wrote:
| it never made sense to have devs all over the world doing the
| same task with tiny variation. Centralization was inevitable.
| LLMs might have been a step change but the trajectory was
| already set.
| Zopieux wrote:
| The exact opposite has started: every single developer with
| an LLM subscription now has 45 variations of any foundational
| tool and library, to cater to their weird use-case, because
| it was easier for the LLM to just modify it rather than
| adapting to it. Almost nobody upstreams such improvements (or
| they are too niche anyway).
|
| The ecosystem will be this way for a while, if not the new
| normal.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| I see it as:LLMs will solve the problems they create.
| They'll 10x your eccentric layout, modularity, monolith;
| they'll multiply your anti-DRY or try to make everything
| DRY. It's largescale copy/paste/find/replace in a glorious
| crescendo of idiosyncratic programming. `
| getpokedagain wrote:
| Stop using MIT licensed software being run by small vc backed
| operations if you value stability. They are risky and often
| costly Trojan horses.
| brabel wrote:
| What do you mean? MIT is essentially as open as you can get.
| The worst that can happen is that they will relicense,
| eventually, to force big users to pay, but when that happens
| everybody knows how it goes: some consortium of other big
| companies forks it and continues development as if nothing
| happened.
| jhasse wrote:
| Well if it's GPL without CLA and they accept outside
| contributions, they can't relicense / make it propriatary.
| Unlike with MIT.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| somebody looked at Claude Code's binaries and Anthropic is
| testing out their own app platform called antspace. Not sure
| why people are shocked, they've been cloning features of their
| API customers and adding them to their core products since day
| 1. Makes sense they will take user data and do it for Claude
| Code by copying features or buying up what developers are using
| so they can lock people into a stack. These are the same people
| that trained on every scrap of data they could get their hands
| on and now complain about distilling models from their output
|
| https://x.com/AprilNEA/status/2034209430158619084
|
| Ironically this type of stuff really makes me doubt their AGI
| claims, why would they bother with this stuff if they were
| confident of having AGI within the next few years? They would
| be focused on replacing entire industries and not even make
| their models available at any price. Why bother with a PaaS if
| you think you are going to replace the entire software industry
| with AGI?
| Frieren wrote:
| > they've been cloning features of their API customers and
| adding them to their core products since day 1
|
| Is this not just the strategy of all platforms. Spy on all
| customers, see what works for them and copy the most valuable
| business models. Amazon does that with all kinds of products.
|
| Platforms will just grow to own all the market and hike
| prices and lower quality, and pay close to nothing to
| employees. This is why we used to have monopoly regulations
| before being greedy became a virtue.
| munk-a wrote:
| I think the good news here is that since OpenAI is a zombie
| company at this point this particular acquisition shouldn't be
| too concerning - and from what I've seen Anthropic has been
| building out in a direction of increased specialization. That
| said vertical integration is as much of a problem as it always
| was and it'd be excellent to see some sane merger oversight
| from the government.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| Hmm, from my perspective, an essential step to legitimize
| "vibecoding" in an enterprise setting is to to have a clearly
| communicated best practice - and have the LLM be hyper
| optimized for that setting.
|
| Like having a system prompt which takes care of the project
| structure, languages, libraries etc
|
| It's pretty much the first step to replacing devs, which is
| their current "North Star" (to be changed to the next
| profession after)
|
| Once they've nailed that, the devs become even more of a tool
| then they're already are (from the perspective of the
| enterprise).
| charcircuit wrote:
| As the cost of building software trends towards $0 I don't see
| how one can realistic own "the" means of production rather than
| "a" means. Any competitor can generate a similar product
| cheaply.
| thegrim33 wrote:
| >> "means of production" in software
|
| Ah yes, it was impossible to write software before these
| companies existed, and the only way to write software is via
| the products from these companies. They sure do control the
| "means of production".
| PaulHoule wrote:
| You know until today I dismissed all those concerns about _uv_
| being a commercial product but now I am very concerned.
|
| Microsoft has been a reasonable steward of github and npm
| considering everything but I don't feel so good about OpenAI
| this makes me reconsider my use of _uv_ and Python as a whole
| because _uv_ did a lot to stop the insanity. Not least
| Microsoft has been around since 1975 whereas I could picture
| OpenAI vanishing instantly in a fit of FOMO.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Not a concern: LLMs can fork all these products while they're
| still open licensed.
| Rapzid wrote:
| Vercel did this as well. I called it "ecosystem capture" but I
| like "means of production" too.
| stingrae wrote:
| The risk is one of them buys it and pulls an Oracle / Java
| (Sun) stunt.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| It's open source. Forking it is an option. And with AI, one-
| shotting a replacement is an option as well. Or having it make
| changes to your fork. Just because you can, doesn't mean you
| should do that of course.
|
| The point is that the value of accumulated know how and skill
| that lead to things like uv isn't lost even if the worst would
| happen to the company or people behind it. I don't think there
| are many signs of that. I don't think they had much of a
| revenue model around providing OSS tools. It's problematic for
| a lot of VC funded companies. An exit like this is as good as
| it gets. OpenAI now pays them to do their thing. Investors are
| probably pretty happy. And we maybe get to skip the
| enshittification that seems inevitable with the whole IPO/hedge
| funds circus that many vc funded OSS companies end up being
| subjected to. Problem solved. Congratulations to the team. They
| can continue doing what they love doing in a company that
| clearly loves all things python. And who knows what they can do
| next when freed from having to worry about making investors
| happy?
|
| Big companies and OSS have always had symbiotic relationships.
| Some of the largest contributors to open source are people
| working in big companies. OpenAI fits this tradition
| beautifully. Most big software companies actively contribute to
| OSS projects that are relevant or important to them. Even very
| secretive companies like Apple or profit focused sharks like
| Oracle. Google, Meta, IBM. There are very few large software
| companies that aren't doing that. OSS without this very large
| scale corporate sponsor ships would just be a niche thing. Yes
| there are a lot of small projects. I have a few of my own even.
| But most of the big ones have some for profit businesses behind
| them.
|
| The real meta question is of course if we still need a lot of
| the people centered development tooling when AIs are starting
| to do essentially all of the heavy lifting in terms of coding.
| I think we might need very different tools soon.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Great someone cashed out, time for the next startup idea.
| overflowy wrote:
| Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47438716
| world2vec wrote:
| Just when I moved from poetry to uv.
| kkirsche wrote:
| Happy for the team, sad for users. I just don't believe their
| work will continue under new ownership
| time0ut wrote:
| I love uv and the other tooling Astral has built. It really
| helped reinvigorate my love for Python over the last year.
|
| Something like this was always inevitable. I just hope it doesn't
| ruin a good thing.
| nusl wrote:
| I am actually quite saddened by this. It's very unlikely that'
| I'll keep using uv, now. I don't trust this kind of shit.
| prodigycorp wrote:
| Codex team now has the legends who created Pyright and
| UV/Ruff/Ty.
| hmokiguess wrote:
| Mixed feelings, happy for the guy, he deserves it. Unhappy about
| whom he went with, though not sure if he had other buyers /
| offers in the mix?
| Hamuko wrote:
| So, any good alternatives to uv?
| ragebol wrote:
| pixi? https://pixi.prefix.dev/latest/
|
| Have not tried it too much yet because I was pretty content
| with `uv`, but I've heard lots of good things about it
| Zizizizz wrote:
| Pretty sure that uses UV to do it's magic
| notatallshaw wrote:
| pixi offloads PyPI ecosystem stuff to uv, but pixi is conda
| first. The team were actually the first to build a Rust
| based Python package resolver (rip), but after uv was
| released they migrated to uv's resolver (Python package
| resolvers are hard and a lot of work to build and must be
| tested against the whole ecosystem).
| __siru__ wrote:
| It literally says on the homepage/the page you linked, that
| pixi is just a frontend for uv in the background to interface
| with PyPI and the project TOML files.
| jawknee4000 wrote:
| that isn't quite true, it defaults to conda packages (and
| so supports non-pypi things, its main advantage), I believe
| only when you are mixing these with pypi packages does it
| then also use the same resolution library backend as uv
| (and indeed directly at the rust level)
| https://pixi.prefix.dev/latest/concepts/conda_pypi/
| jjice wrote:
| Not who I would've liked to acquire Astral. As long as OpenAI
| doesn't force bad decisions on to Astral too hard, I'm very happy
| for the Astral team. They've been making some of the best Python
| tooling that has made the ecosystem so much better IME.
| smallpipe wrote:
| If Codex's core quality is anything to go by, it's time to
| create a community fork of UV
| pronik wrote:
| Maybe they are being acquired to improve the quality of
| Codex.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| That's the thing. To me that says that as soon as cash
| becomes tight at OpenAI, the Astral staff will no longer
| get to work on Python tooling anymore, namely uv, etc.
| shimman wrote:
| Tale as old as time in SV, why we keep trusting venture
| capital to be the community's stewards I have no idea.
|
| We need public investment in open source, in the form of
| grants, not more private partnerships that somehow always
| seem to hurt the community.
| hun3 wrote:
| > why we keep trusting venture capital to be the
| community's stewards I have no idea.
|
| They bought the trust.
| piskov wrote:
| At least it's in rust.
|
| Unlike those react-game-engine guys over at Claude
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| The priorities of the tooling will change to help agents
| instead of human users directly. That's all that's happening.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| Eh, if it turns out to be too bad I guess I'll just end up
| switching back to pipenv, which is the closest thing to uv
| (especially due to the automatic Python version management, but
| not as fast).
| zbentley wrote:
| Does pipenv download and install prebuilt interpreters when
| managing Python versions? Last I used it it relied on pyenv
| to do a local build, which is incredibly finicky on
| heterogenous fleets of computers.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I would much rather use pipenv, if it only had the speed of
| uv.
|
| Every interface kenneth reitz originally designed was
| fantastic to learn and use. I wish the influx of all these
| non-pythonistas changing the language over the last 10 years
| or so would go back and learn from his stuff.
| Rapzid wrote:
| People would just make pipenv fast? There are some new tools
| that can help with that..
| Tyrubias wrote:
| I think it's impossible to predict what will happen with this new
| trend of "large AI company acquires company making popular open
| source project". The pessimist in me says that these products
| will either be enshittified over time, killed when the bubble
| bursts, or both. The pragmatist in me hopes that no matter what
| happens, uv and ruff will survive just like how many OSS projects
| have been forked or spun out of big companies. The optimist in me
| hopes that the extra money will push them to even greater
| heights, but the pessimist and the pragmatist beat the optimist
| to death a long time ago.
| renewiltord wrote:
| It's open source. If you want it to go in a different direction
| fork it and take it in that direction. Instead of the optimist,
| the pessimist, and the pragmatist the guy you need is the chap
| who does some work.
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| And which one are you again? The least useful of them all.
| acedTrex wrote:
| damn it, another one bites the dust sadly
| bobajeff wrote:
| This might not be bad as long as Astral is allowed to continue to
| work on improving ty, uv and ruff. I do worry about they'll get
| distracted by their Codex job duties though.
| cess11 wrote:
| If I were to engage in Python development, what's the alternative
| to uv?
| umren wrote:
| no real alternative
| bikelang wrote:
| Poetry was the best alt-package manager before uv came along.
| That said - uv completely outclassed it.
| cess11 wrote:
| Looks like I can wrap my head around it, thanks.
| duskdozer wrote:
| What are you having an issue with? Environments? pyenv.
| Dependency management? pip+requirements.
| cess11 wrote:
| I'll make a note of this, thanks.
| japhyr wrote:
| This has me thinking about VS Code and VS Codium. I've used VS
| Code for a while now, but recently grew annoyed at the
| increasingly prevalent prompts to subscribe to various Microsoft
| AI tools. I know you can make them go away, but if you bounce
| between different systems, and particularly deal with installing
| VS Code on a regular basis, it becomes annoying.
|
| I started using VS Codium, and it feels like using VS Code before
| the AI hype era. I wonder if we're going to see a commercial
| version of uv bloated with the things OpenAI wants us all to use,
| and a community version that's more like the uv we're using right
| now.
| sschueller wrote:
| MS is actively making your life using VS Codium a pain. They
| removed the download button the extension marketrplace making
| it very difficult to download extensions and installing them in
| VS Codium since VS Codium does not have access to the official
| MS extension marketplace. Many don't publish outside the
| marketplace for example Platformio. [1]
|
| [1] https://github.com/platformio/platformio-vscode-
| ide/issues/1...
| matkoniecz wrote:
| Luckily I avoided extensions before switching to VS Codium.
|
| Glad to hear that I am avoiding Microsoft's spam.
| barnabee wrote:
| I've not struggled to find the things I need at https://open-
| vsx.org (usually by searching directly within VSCodium), but
| then I only use it for editing things like markdown docs and
| presentations, LaTeX/Typst, rather than coding, which I
| prefer to do in a terminal and with a modal editor.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| Also, Microsoft does not allow use of their LSP for python.
| You have to use the barebones Jedi LSP.
| satya71 wrote:
| Fortunately, there are competing LSPs of reasonable quality
| now. I'm using pyrefly. Not sure if ty/ruff have one too.
| stephbook wrote:
| 1. You can add a bookmark that executes enough JavaScript to
| download the VSIX as usual. 2. I think you can patch the
| product.json from VSCodium to use VSCode. Gets overwritten on
| every update probably.
|
| Honestly though, it's easier to disable ~three settings in
| VSCode and call it a day.
| kayson wrote:
| I really wanted to use vscodium but had to go back to vscode
| proper because the remote ssh extension is just nowhere near as
| good. The open source one uses a JS library to implement the
| SSH protocol rather than using a system binary which means many
| features (GSSAPI) aren't supported. Also just seems like a bad
| idea to use an SSH implementation that's not nearly as battle
| tested as openssh...
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I really loved uv, I am happy for the developers at astral but I
| am sad as a user seeing this :(
|
| Any good alternatives to uv/plans for community fork of uv?
| ragebol wrote:
| Not often that I audibly groan at a HN headline :-(
| alex_suzuki wrote:
| Same here. I've adopted uv across all of my Python projects and
| couldn't be happier. ty looks very promising as well.
|
| Probably inevitable, and I don't blame the team, I just wish it
| were someone else.
| ragebol wrote:
| Ty, Ruff, UV, all great tools I recently started really using
| and I couldn't be happier with them.
|
| Sigh
| pprotas wrote:
| Monkey paw curls tight
|
| Microsoft acquires Astral
|
| Wish comes with a cost
| saalweachter wrote:
| I kind of feel like the nature of the Python ecosystem is a
| dozen or so extremely useful frameworks/tools that everyone
| uses heavily for 3 years and then abandons and never speaks
| of again.
|
| I'm not very deep in Python anymore, but every time I dip my
| toes back in it's a completely different set of tools, with
| some noticably rare exceptions (eg, numpy).
| fastasucan wrote:
| I cant see how the ecosystem evolves being a bad thing?
| krick wrote:
| I think, it may be the first time I am actually upset by
| acquire announcement. I am usually like "well, it is what it
| is", but this time it just feels like betrayal.
| Fervicus wrote:
| > it just feels like betrayal
|
| It was a VC backed tool. What did you expect?
| krick wrote:
| Nothing. I was very much aware of their prospects. Well,
| best-case scenario I could imagine them being acquired by
| Google or Microsoft, that would have looked like a prettier
| death, to be honest. Anyway, knowing that people eventually
| die doesn't mean you are immune to being sad when somebody
| dear actually dies. Especially when they die so young and
| full of potential.
| articsputnik wrote:
| to be expected at some point, but for the independence and best
| interest of the Python ecosystem, I don't think it's a plus.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Welp. I used to respect Astral. I hope someone responsible forks
| their Python tooling and maintains it. Ideally a foundation
| rather than a company.
| krick wrote:
| Yeah, well, the fact is that every person who ever touches
| Python needed uv, but only Astral folks created it. So, nope,
| there's no one capable of filling the void, just accept that
| it's fucked now. The best die first.
| MoonZ wrote:
| 25 years of Python behind me, please let me tell you that
| hopefully you're wrong : we don't "need" uv :)
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| If that were true, Astral wouldn't have been able to build it
| in the first place. It's an Open Source tool. Perhaps folks
| excited about working on it can move to the Python Foundation
| and maintain it there. Perhaps companies who saw today's
| acquisition and became deeply worried about the future of
| this tooling could help support and fund such an effort.
| aseipp wrote:
| Part of the reason Astral as a team is so well liked is
| precisely _because_ they are not part of the main fold or
| related to "Core Python"; they are an independent vendor,
| one that delivered high quality code and listened directly
| to users and their own (extensive) experience to do so, and
| they succeeded at that repeatedly. Python packaging has
| {been seen as, actually been} miserable _for years_ , and
| so by the same token the capacity to believe in/buy into
| solutions from the "core project" has dwindled. "If it took
| Astral to fix it, why would it be any different going
| forward?"
|
| So that's all it really comes down to; uv isn't loved just
| because it's great but because it is _in good hands_. This
| real /perceived change of hands pretty much explains all
| the downstream responses to the news that you see in this
| thread. Regardless of who bought them, any fork is going to
| have very, very big shoes to fill, and filling those shoes
| appropriately is the big worry.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Fair enough. But that does seem like something that'd
| depend more on the people than the organization. Whoever
| forks it will need to be trusted to continue to be "good
| hands", whatever organization they operate under the
| auspices of.
| dcreager wrote:
| Does that not also suggest (cautious, make sure we back
| it up with our actions) optimism about this acquisition?
| We're not breaking up the band. These tools will be in
| the same hands as before. And it would be extremely
| value-destructive to bring in a team like ours and then
| undermine what made us valued and successful.
| ex-aws-dude wrote:
| I write python all the time and I've never used it
| fortuitous-frog wrote:
| I don't think it's a coincidence that a lot of the (stale)
| tooling that Astral replaced were managed by foundations
| instead of companies...
| petercooper wrote:
| I feel some _" commoditize your complements"_ (Spolsky) vibes
| hearing about these acquisitions. Or, potentially, " _control_
| your complements "?
|
| If you find your popular, expensive tool leans heavily upon third
| party tools, it doesn't seem a crazy idea to purchase them for
| peanuts (compared to your overall worth) to both optimize your
| tool to use them better and, maybe, reduce the efficacy of how
| your competitors use them (like changing the API over time,
| controlling the feature roadmap, etc.) Or maybe I'm being
| paranoid :-)
| zoobab wrote:
| Undisclosed amount?
| ddxv wrote:
| This is why I still like to setup projects and environments with
| my own `make` `venv` and `pip`.
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| No it's not. You do it because you didn't see the point in
| changing what you do. Don't pretend that this is your "I told
| you so" moment. The QOL improvement offered by uv over your
| approach is certainly substantial, but it's also easy to get
| off of uv. Nobody here feels legitimately "trapped" in the uv
| "ecosystem". For 99.999% of Python projects, if they need to
| get off of uv, it's going to be a very quick thing to do.
|
| The disappointment and anger is because we've had a nice QOL
| improvement which is now more directly threatened in a way that
| it was before, and it's always hard to go backwards. A QOL
| improvement that you never had in the first place.
| So...congrats?
|
| Unless your point is "this is why I deprive myself of nice
| things, because they can go away"...which is just silly.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| The Bun acquisition made a little sense, Boris wanted Daddy
| Jarred to come clean up his mess, and Jarred is 100% able to
| deliver.
|
| This doesn't make as much sense. OpenAI has a better low level
| engineering team and they don't have a hot mess with traction
| like Anthropic did. This seems more about acquiring people with
| dev ergonomics vision to push product direction, which I don't
| see being a huge win.
| morphology wrote:
| They do have a hot mess with traction amongst developers. Codex
| is far behind Claude Code (in both the GUI and TUI forms), and
| OpenAI's chief of applications recently announced a pivot to
| focus more on "productivity" (i.e. software and enterprise
| verticals) because B2B yields a lot more revenue than B2C.
| cute_boi wrote:
| Honestly, I like codex performance compared to claude code.
| JoshPurtell wrote:
| Codex is not far behind Claude Code
| cozzyd wrote:
| This will solve the problem of when the package you want to
| install doesn't exist yet.
| clickety_clack wrote:
| I don't know who I would've like to see but them, buy OpenAI is
| not it. Sad day for uv, ruff and ty users.
| h1fra wrote:
| what happen when openai goes brankrupt?
| jimmydoe wrote:
| It's meant to be bought so at least no more guessing.
|
| Ant is building their app distribution platform, so no wonder
| OpenAI thinking the same, it will only surprise me if they move
| so slow.
| tgtweak wrote:
| Amusing that the best python tools are written entirely in rust.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| That's what you get with toy languages.
| wiseowise wrote:
| ...amusing how? CPython is written in C, JVM is written in mix
| of cpp and Java, Rust was written using OCaml initially. Don't
| know why you're snickering. Do you also find it amusing that by
| the time cpp/rust team scaffolds and compiles initial
| boilerplate, python team is already making money?
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Associated OpenAI post: https://openai.com/index/openai-to-
| acquire-astral/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47438716)
| petterroea wrote:
| How does this make sense
| wrqvrwvq wrote:
| So instead of finally building an enterprise-grade package
| manager where you could pay for validated, verified and secure
| packages, we're going to vibe project management and let a slop-
| spiggot fill the trough. Brilliant. Incredibly pleased that the
| last sane tools in the entire python ecosystem are getting gutted
| to discourage the last few non-braindead devs from bothering.
| wrqvrwvq wrote:
| Don't get me wrong I love getting 300 dependabot updates per
| day. It's a huge productivity booster and even if you devote
| 1/2 your dev team to keeping this shit up to date, you'd still
| be vulnerable to repo-jacking, because the entire pkg ecosystem
| is broken. The other thing i love about npm and pypi is the way
| a single small team will re-download in ci (regardless of
| caching) a TiB of packages all day long for no reason. Love
| waiting for gh actions to re-import infinite packages for the
| nth time before it times out and you restart it manually. makes
| so much sense. Great work all. glad openai is putting the nails
| in this retard coffin.
| duskdozer wrote:
| Not surprised at all on this. I've been really suspicious about
| how hard `uv` was being pushed in 24/25.
| zemo wrote:
| "was being pushed" ... by whom? I think there's widespread
| grassroots support for it because it's a good tool.
| moregrist wrote:
| I think the push has been entirely organic. Compared to
| existing tooling, uv is fantastically fast.
|
| One of the bigger pain points I've faced in Python is
| dependency resolution. conda could take 30-60 minutes in some
| cases. uv took seconds.
|
| A serious quality of life improvement.
| optionalsquid wrote:
| uv replaces pip (and venv, and pipx, and more), not conda. If
| you want a uv-equivalent that replaces conda, then look at
| pixi: https://pixi.prefix.dev/
| moregrist wrote:
| Sure, it replaces pip, but _we used conda_ for env
| management. And the slow part was still _dependency
| resolution_, much like pip.
|
| Was there a better option? I'm sure. Choices were made.
| Regrets were had. Switching to uv was a huge improvement
| for our purposes.
| optionalsquid wrote:
| If all you are installing using conda is pypi packages
| and different versions of Python, then sure, uv is a fine
| replacement. I use it for that as well. But if you are
| using other conda/conda-forge/bioconda packages, then uv
| isn't a replacement since it cannot install those.
| However, Pixi can replace conda for that use-case and
| it's about as fast as uv since it uses uv's dependency
| resolution code
| edelbitter wrote:
| > dependency resolution. conda could take 30-60 minutes
|
| Quite literally this is what first raised the alarm bells for
| me. Dependency resolution complexity is more of a symptom. If
| that delay ends up being the point where Ops finally agrees
| that things have gone very wrong, then fixing that delay is
| not really helping hire the _maintenance_ folks that can make
| those dependencies.. well, "dependable" again.
| a_t48 wrote:
| Hey now, I was a completely organic shill! I worked for free!
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| uv and ruff are incredible tools for python development, and
| I've loved my time using ty. This acquisition is absolutely
| terrible.
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| Are you legitimately unable to tell the difference between
| something being "pushed" and people just legitimately liking
| and using something?
|
| If you're going to be a grump about everything, sometimes your
| broken clock is going to be right. It's still not worth showing
| off.
| 0xDEFACED wrote:
| will private packages hosted on pyx be available for openai to
| use as training data?
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| Dude, no. That's not how licenses work. That's absurd. You
| really think that whatever little code is in pyx is providing
| any material training edge over the code that OpenAI already
| has access to? Get off it.
| maltelau wrote:
| Wtf!? Is this an early April's fools? I've been recommending
| astral tools left and right, Looks like I'm out a good chunk of
| social capital on that.
|
| Who's organizing a fork, or is python back to having only shitty
| packaging available? :(
| the__alchemist wrote:
| I can get pyflow back to a maintained state and iron out the
| bugs if that would help. It's the same concept as uv, just kind
| of buggy and I haven't touched it in 6 years.
| kseniamorph wrote:
| i feel like moves like this make it even harder for new open-
| source tools to break through. there's already evidence that LLMs
| are biased toward established tools in their training data (you
| can check it here https://amplifying.ai/research/claude-code-
| picks). when a dominant player acquires the most popular
| toolchain in an ecosystem, that bias only deepens. not because of
| any skewing, but because the acquired tools get more usage, more
| documentation, more community content. getting a new project into
| model weights at meaningful scale is already really hard.
| acquisitions like this make it even harder.
| fortuitous-frog wrote:
| I'm also concerned about this, but I feel as though uv and
| ruff's explosive growth happening alongside and despite that of
| LLMs demonstrates that it's not a show-stopper. I vividly
| recall LLM coding agents defaulting to pip/poetry and
| black/flake8, etc. for new projects. It still does that to some
| extent, but I see them using uv and ruff by default -- without
| any steering from me -- with far greater frequency.
|
| Perhaps it's naive optimism, but I generally have hope that new
| and improved tools will continue to gain adoption and shine
| through in the training data, especially as post-training and
| continual learning improve.
| merrvk wrote:
| Who advises on these acquisitions?
|
| Or are they just using a dartboard?
| Fervicus wrote:
| I (along with many others) always thought that Astral being VC
| backed is going to lead to a future disappointment for the
| community.
| duskdozer wrote:
| I don't understand how anyone is surprised at this point. VC
| project trying to build a brand just isn't going to lead to
| some utopic community.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| I at least thought we'd get a few more good years before the
| rug pull.
| Bnjoroge wrote:
| It was pretty obvious that some sort of acquisition was imminent.
| Astral is vc-funded and has to somehow generate returns for
| investors. An IPO is extremely unlikley in this market.
| am17an wrote:
| Welp, back to pip
| Bnjoroge wrote:
| This was pretty obvious to just about anyone tbh. FastAPI is
| probably next
| incognito124 wrote:
| Don't even joke
| Bnjoroge wrote:
| vcs gotta eat somehow, and iirc they were building a "fastapi
| cloud platform"
| incognito124 wrote:
| I thought some more about it, and unfortunately it makes sense.
| IIRC there were several "insider" blogposts from OpenAI that
| said something along the lines of "Yeah almost every service we
| write is FastAPI"
| wiseowise wrote:
| Where can I find some of those?
| incognito124 wrote:
| here's one of them:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44573195
| wiseowise wrote:
| Thanks.
| Bnjoroge wrote:
| yeah and I wouldnt be surprised if some oltp database
| platform is in the horizon as well. iirc they already
| acquired rockset. The eventual goal for these AI platforms is
| to own the entire e2e platform for e2e agents, from literally
| the language ecosystem(anthropic betting on TS/Bun) to local
| dev tooling using their harnesses to production-grade stuff
| that an agent needs.
| vaylian wrote:
| The lead dev seems to think about using AI with FastAPI
| already: https://tiangolo.com/ideas/library-agent-skills/
| Patt_ wrote:
| Whoa, So Sam and Drio are just gonna buy out every popular open
| source projects now?
| isodev wrote:
| And this is why we don't use tools by VC funded corps.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Would there be any interest in me fixing the bugs in Pyflow and
| getting it updated to install newer python versions? It's almost
| identical to uv in concept, but I haven't touched it in 6 years.
|
| Astral has demonstrated that there is desire for this sort of
| "just works" thing, which I struggled with, and led me to
| abandoning it. (I.e.: "pip/venv/conda are fine, why do I want
| this?", despite my personal experience with those as high-
| friction)
| natemcintosh wrote:
| Personally, I'd expect a few good years of stewardship, and then
| a decline in investment. I can only hope there are enough
| community members to keep things going by then.
| drcongo wrote:
| This is the worst possible news. Fantastic team at Astral joining
| a bunch of scumbag scammers at "Open"AI.
| butterlettuce wrote:
| This is where POTUS should step in and stop this sale. Not cool.
| cesarvarela wrote:
| So vite.dev is next.
| godblessamerica wrote:
| How are they acquiring it without "open" in their name?
| chocks wrote:
| Fantastic for the team, huge fan for Ruff and Uv. Hope OpenAI
| continues with the OSS tooling and not introduce restrictive
| licensing.
| skeledrew wrote:
| After investing a bunch in converting my projects to, and
| evangelizing uv, I feel betrayed. I smell stability troubles
| ahead. Should've stuck to Conda.
| JoshPurtell wrote:
| You most certainly should not have stuck with Conda
| opyate wrote:
| This is your friendly PSA that pip-tools still exist.
|
| https://github.com/jazzband/pip-tools
| opyate wrote:
| goddammit
|
| https://jazzband.co/news/2026/03/14/sunsetting-jazzband
| OutOfHere wrote:
| Discussion: https://github.com/jazzband/pip-
| tools/discussions/2353
| Ridius wrote:
| Ah but that's not a shiny new tool I can add to my cv /s
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| Get off it.
|
| * uv is better than pip-tools in every single way, apart from
| it being VC-backed.
|
| * Nobody is placing any value on uv being on someone's CV.
|
| You are essentially incorrectly LLM pattern-matching being a
| jaded, sarcastic "smart person". Learn to tell the difference
| between a "shiny new thing" and a legitimately better tool.
| If you can't do that, you're at best a sub-par developer.
| __mharrison__ wrote:
| Interesting acquihire. I would have assumed MS would have snagged
| them (until their __layoffs__ last year). My gut is that this is
| more for Python expertise, and ruff/ty knowledge of linting code
| than uv...
|
| I'm a heavy user and instructor of uv. I'm teaching a course next
| week that features uv and rough (as does my recent Effective
| Testing book).
|
| Interesting to read the comments about looking for a change.
| Honestly, uv is so much better than anything else in the Python
| community right now. We've used projects sponsored by Meta (and
| other questionable companies) in the past. I'm going to continue
| enjoying uv while I can.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| Oh no! This is actually terrible. Get ready for "premium tooling
| only available in Codex(TM)".
| emddudley wrote:
| Well shit, I feel betrayed. This is exactly the opposite of what
| I thought Charlie's goals were. I thought he was focused on
| making the Python ecosystem better.
| brooke2k wrote:
| nooooooooooooooo god why. I loved uv. just why
| nrvn wrote:
| Should I freeze my plans to migrate from `poetry` to `uv` at
| "${WORK}"?
| butlike wrote:
| Sure, why not
| tyree731 wrote:
| Assuming things start getting weird about 18 months from now,
| poetry and uv have very similar semantics, so 18 months of
| comically faster workflows sounds nice.
| Fiveplus wrote:
| The "commitment to open source" line in these press releases
| usually has a half-life of about 18 months before the telemetry
| starts getting invasive.
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| Telemetry has nothing to do with having a commitment to open-
| source, other than the same sort of neckbeards having strong
| opinions about both.
| keithluu wrote:
| Why do I feel uneasy about this?
| gessha wrote:
| I see people in this thread complain about the acquisition but
| the source code of uv is right there [1]. Fork it and move on. If
| ClosedAI enshittifies uv, gather with a bunch of other people and
| prop up a new version.
|
| [1] https://github.com/astral-sh/uv
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| No, you.
|
| These comments are so silly and condescending. You aren't being
| clever or smart. You think that you need to go to GitHub and
| find the repo for uv and put it in a little footnote? You think
| that you're being a clever boy by doing that? Everyone knows
| how open source works. We are developers.
| testfrequency wrote:
| I've been thinking about purchasing zsh myself
| fortuitous-frog wrote:
| While I -- like most other commenters -- am dubious of both
| OpenAI and this acquisition, I think it's pretty reasonable to
| wait to see how this turns out before rushing to final judgment.
|
| Everything I've seen from Astral and Charlie indicates they're
| brilliant, caring, and overall reasonable folks. I think it's
| unfair to jump to call them sell-outs and cast uv and the rest as
| doomed projects.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| We always "wait and see" and it always turns out terrible. Even
| if the original founders stay on, eventually they will get
| pushed out when their morals conflict with company goals. Wont
| happen overnight, but uv will enshitify eventually.
| walthamstow wrote:
| Charlie's fine. OpenAI are the problem here. Similar situation
| to steipete. Happy for the person, sad for the
| tool/ecosystem/everyone else.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Not similar at all. One has been a miracle for the Python
| ecosystem, another was a small scale Twitter hype-fart.
| fortuitous-frog wrote:
| I suppose my point is: I would expect that Charlie and co.
| carried their negotiations with OpenAI with the same laser-
| focused, careful judgment that catapulted Astral to success
| in the first place. I don't mean to fanboy, but I generally
| trust that they made the best decision for not only them, but
| the Python community as a whole.
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| You know how investment works, right? You realise that
| there were people sitting around wanting a return? People
| that aren't as laser focused and principled or whatever as
| the guy you're putting on a pedestal.
| krick wrote:
| Sure, I don't think anybody disagrees, I sure don't. You never
| know, and all. It's just that we (the imaginary crowd you are
| arguing with) are not hopeful. And your "but wait, guys, I
| think they are good people!" is some quite pitiful attempt to
| console us. Sure, good, brilliant and caring, that's why we are
| upset in the first place. Always more sad when it's somebody
| you liked that dies.
|
| And framing it as "sell-outs" is cheap rhetoric that means
| nothing. The fact is, they were the company who never really
| had a solid business model, but provide a lot of value for the
| community. Being acquired by some infinite-money company was
| always the best outcome they could hope for. Well, they did.
| Probably got a ton of money. Will it require some sacrifice?
| Well, some people would say that working for a company who
| makes products for the Department of War of the USA on
| conditions that even Anthropic found too ugly to satisfy, is
| enough of a sacrifice on its own. I am pretty sure though that
| most people would be willing to make this sacrifice for the
| right amount of money (with "right amount" being a variable
| part). So calling someone a sell-out is usually just bitterness
| about the fact that it wasn't you who managed to sell out. I
| mean, not judging someone for a sacrifice they make isn't the
| same thing as pretending they didn't make a sacrifice.
| Sometimes we (the world, they were trying to make better) are a
| sacrifice. That's all.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I am very unhappy about this. Astral tools like uv are key to my
| work/experimenting process. I think OpenAI sucks as a company.
|
| That said, I hope the excellent Astral team got a good payday.
| speedgoose wrote:
| I was hoping that uv and ruff were the ones. I guess Python has a
| curse.
| fithisux wrote:
| Astral to Join OpenAI (astral.sh) OpenAI to Acquire
| Astral(https://openai.com/index/openai-to-acquire-astral/)
|
| what can I say?
| pgwalsh wrote:
| UV, Ruff, and Ty are all very good things, hopefully that doesn't
| change and gets better.
| nnevatie wrote:
| > I am so excited to keep building with you.
|
| Fixed: I am so excited to take these millions of dollars.
| seanplusplus wrote:
| I'm into this.
|
| Anthropic acquiring Bun, now OpenAI acquiring Astral. Both show
| the big labs recognize that great AI coding tools require great
| developer tooling, and they are willing to pay for it rather than
| build inferior alternatives. Good outcome for the teams.
|
| Not exactly a great look for the "AGI is right around the corner"
| crowd -- if the labs had it, they would not need to buy software
| from humans.
| gritspants wrote:
| I'm assuming that they were buying great Rust devs (given codex
| is written in it).
| 6thbit wrote:
| This wasn't a software acquisition at all. They were already
| able to use Astral's software just like anyone else. They
| wanted a good dev-tools team so that's what they bought.
|
| > the Astral team will join the Codex team at OpenAI and over
| time, we'll explore deeper integrations that allow Codex to
| interact more directly with the tools developers already use
| saxwick wrote:
| Btw astral repo has Claude as one of its top contributors
| s_ting765 wrote:
| It should have been FastAPI instead.
| jredwards wrote:
| As someone who loves Astral and hates OpenAI, this is making me
| pretty sad.
| jmux wrote:
| nooo
| daredoes wrote:
| It would seem to me that purchasing a piece of software as an AI
| company is just an outright admission that they could not
| generate an equivalent piece of software for a better price?
|
| If it was cheaper to use their internal AI to create these tools,
| they would.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Extremely stupid argument. It doesn't matter how good is your
| car if the driver is lacking.
| QuadrupleA wrote:
| Not sure I follow - is the car the coding agent, and the
| developer the driver?
|
| Agree with OP here, if AI coding tools are as intelligent and
| amazing as AI influencers and CEOs are saying, just prompt
| them to "Remake UV but faster & better".
| wiseowise wrote:
| Car is the coding agent. Developer is the driver.
|
| > Agree with OP here, if AI coding tools are as intelligent
| and amazing as AI influencers and CEOs are saying, just
| prompt them to "Remake UV but faster & better".
|
| If average dev is more intelligent and amazing than any
| coding model, just hire a team of average devs and "remake
| UV but faster & better".
| QuadrupleA wrote:
| Average dev might be more intelligent, but likely neither
| will produce something of UV's quality. Either AI coding
| claims are way overblown and OpenAI can't easily remake
| UV, or OpenAI is buying the ecosystem & mindshare rather
| the code, probably to lock-in, enshittify, and try to
| squeeze a profit out of a so far money-losing business
| (AI not Astral, though true for both I guess).
| EddieLomax wrote:
| Goddamnit
| wiseowise wrote:
| So begins the uv-Bun war.
| seanrrr wrote:
| My initial reaction was being weirdly sad about this and I don't
| fully understand why yet. I read the headline, clicked into the
| link, and just went noooooooo. I really like uv and I hope it
| continues to do well, congrats to the team though and hope
| everyone there gets a good outcome.
| vinhnx wrote:
| What excites me about the OpenAI + Astral acquisition: Codex CLI,
| uv, and ruff are all written in Rust. Fast by design, and fully
| open source.
| wraptile wrote:
| Haha just migrated everything off openai and on ruff/uv/ty last
| week. Sorry guys, it's clearly my fault.
| ontouchstart wrote:
| It is interesting to see this after yesterday's announcement of
| Unsloth Studio:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47414032
|
| Uv did solve a distribution problem for them.
|
| There is still a lot of room to grow in the space of software
| packaging and distribution.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| This acquisition doesn't make too much sense for the longevity of
| Astral's software because Astral's software is orthogonal to
| Codex. It seems more like a acqui-hire. If tomorrow OpenAI were
| to stop funding Astral's software due to a cash crunch, it would
| be game over for uv et al. Codex doesn't need uv.
| fantasizr wrote:
| should I be glad I never got off pip?
| dahlia wrote:
| What strikes me most about this acquisition isn't the AI angle.
| It's the question of why so many open source tools get built by
| startup teams in the first place.
|
| I maintain an open source project funded by the Sovereign Tech
| Fund. Getting there wasn't easy: the application process is long,
| the amounts are modest compared to a VC round, and you have to
| build community trust before any of that becomes possible. But
| the result is a project that isn't on anyone's exit timeline.
|
| I'm not saying the startup path is without its own difficulties.
| But structurally, it offloads the costs onto the community that
| eventually comes to depend on you. By the time those costs come
| due, the founders have either cashed out or the company is
| circling the drain, and the users are left holding the bag.
| What's happening to Astral fits that pattern almost too neatly.
|
| The healthier model, I think, is to build community first and
| then seek public or nonprofit funding: NLnet, STF, or similar.
| It's slower and harder, but it doesn't have a built-in betrayal
| baked into the structure.
|
| Part of what makes this difficult is that public funding for open
| source infrastructure is still very uneven geographically. I'm
| based in Korea, and there's essentially nothing here comparable
| to what European developers can access. I had no choice but to
| turn to European funds, because there was simply no domestic
| equivalent. That's a structural problem worth taking seriously.
| The more countries that leave this entirely to the private
| sector, the more we end up watching exactly this kind of thing
| play out.
| alexchantavy wrote:
| I think this overstates the "betrayal" angle.
|
| A lot of great open source comes out of startups because
| startups are really good at shipping fast and getting
| distribution (open source is part of this strategy). Users can
| try the tool immediately, and VC funding can put a lot of
| talent behind building something great very quickly.
|
| The startup model absolutely creates incentive risk, but that's
| true of any project that becomes important while depending on a
| relatively small set of maintainers or funders.
|
| I'm not sure an acquisition is categorically different from a
| maintainer eventually moving on or burning out. In all of those
| cases, users who depend on the project take on some risk.
| That's not unique to startups; it's true of basically any
| software that becomes important.
|
| There's no perfect structure for open source here - public
| funding, nonprofit support, and startups all suck in their own
| ways.
|
| And on the point you make about public funding being slow:
| yeah, talented people can't work full-time on important things
| unless there's serious funding behind it. uv got as good as it
| is because the funding let exceptional people work on it full-
| time with a level of intensity that public funding usually does
| not.
| dahlia wrote:
| That's fair, and I don't really blame anyone for taking the
| startup route. It's often the only realistic path to working
| full-time on something you care about. My point is more that
| it shouldn't have to be. The more public funding flows into
| open source infrastructure, the less that tradeoff becomes
| necessary in the first place. Korea being almost entirely
| absent from that picture is part of why I feel this so
| keenly.
| theallan wrote:
| > I maintain an open source project funded by the Sovereign
| Tech Fund.
|
| I would absolutely love to know more about this if you are
| willing to share the story?
| dahlia wrote:
| Sure! Here's what I wrote about the story:
| https://writings.hongminhee.org/2025/10/stf-fedify/
| jackbravo wrote:
| Most likely, because it is less money :-p. But also because it
| is less known and harder, as you already mentioned. Personally,
| I'm based in Mexico, and I would never have thought about
| trying to get nonprofit funding for a community project, nor
| would I know where to start to get that.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| open source allows you to build community trust must faster,
| and community trust/adoption is key
|
| I don't see any betrayal here, since the tools are still OSS -
| yeah OpenAI might take it a different direction and add a bunch
| of stuff I don't like/want, but I can still fork
| jitl wrote:
| capitalism / the bazaar is faster than communism / the
| cathedral, news at 11
| rtpg wrote:
| uvs success is downstream of paying like 10 very good rust
| tooling developers to work on uv full time.
|
| Full time effort put into tools gets you a looooot of time to
| make things work well. Even ignoring the OSS stuff, many
| vendors seem to consider their own libs to be at best "some
| engineers spend a bit of time on them" projects!
| saghm wrote:
| Yeah, it's pretty hard to argue that at least for the python
| tooling use case, the typical open source methodologies had
| failed to solve things as well in a couple decades as uv did
| in a few years as a startup. The lesson we should take from
| that is probably more up for debate.
| apitman wrote:
| That didn't take long:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46648627
| croes wrote:
| So no problem in joining OpenAI after the whole DoD/DoW mess?
|
| > I started Astral to make programming more productive.
|
| And now they help make killing more productive
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| > And now they help make killing more productive
|
| As do our taxes.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| Ugh, this isn't good.
|
| I hate relying on anything that is controlled by a single
| company. Considering that Astral is basically brand new in the
| python timeline, it is concerning that they are already being
| acquired.
|
| On the other hand, UV is so fast that it makes up for anything I
| find annoying about it.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Can Astral's stuff be forked?
| ranaaditya wrote:
| congrats team !
| jfb wrote:
| Don't love it. But, I'm glad the Astral folks are getting the
| bag.
| linhns wrote:
| > It is increasingly clear to me that Codex is that frontier.
|
| I'm not really sure about this.
| klysm wrote:
| Damnit I was really rooting for uv :(
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| Another HN darling falls from grace. But hey, the next one will
| not follow the same steps!
| execution wrote:
| I do hope every at Astral got a a nice pay-out for this.
|
| It does look like this is going to be the norm for popular open
| source projects related to AI ecosystem, but I guess open source
| developers need to get paid somehow if that project is their only
| livelihood.
|
| Shame for the end-user though. As you will always be second
| guessing how they will ruin the tool, i.e. via data collection or
| AI-sloppifying it. It is likely OpenAI won't, but it is not a
| great feeling knowing a convenient tool you use is at the whim of
| a heartless mega-corp.
| caidan wrote:
| Booooooooooooooooooo
| amai wrote:
| WAT? uv now belongs to Trump mega-donors? That is not good for
| the Python ecosystem.
| waba99 wrote:
| I wonder who's going to pick up VoidZero
| ajkjk wrote:
| what a shame
| mhd wrote:
| Maybe it's time to get out my Cowlishaw Rexx book again...
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| Time for https://zubanls.com/
| mkrd wrote:
| Ah shit, back to poetry
| imp0cat wrote:
| Ok I laughed, but god, please no.
| 0dayman wrote:
| won't increase your subscriptions, people are dropping out in the
| millions and no one wants jewPT
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| Piss off with that antisemitism. Absolutely cringe.
| looneysquash wrote:
| I don't get it. Why buy Astral? Why not just fund it? Why not
| just hire the company to do whatever work you want to get out of
| the team as part of the merger?
|
| Why buy, when they can rent?
|
| (Not to mention, multiple companies could hire and fund them.)
| sesm wrote:
| To buy the users
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| It's not a merger.
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| Congrats to the Astral team, they've done great work and deserve
| everything.
|
| As a user of uv who was hoping it would be a long term stable
| predictable uninteresting part of my toolchain this sucks, right?
| politelemon wrote:
| As the owner they dictate their priorities, whether around
| features or tighter integration with their ecosystem.
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| Yes I agree. And I think that joining OpenAI will probably
| change their priorities, and that sucks.
| krick wrote:
| Tested the "Kagi LinkedIn Speak" translator[0] from a couple of
| days ago[1] on this. Works pretty great! If you translate it back
| and forth a number of times, it pretty much distills it to the
| essence.
|
| [0] https://translate.kagi.com/?from=linkedin&to=en
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47408703
| Thanemate wrote:
| Any move that strengthens future oligopolies is a net loss for
| all consumers.
|
| I don't care how good/bad a company is, because I lived long
| enough to know that most of them started off like that. Good luck
| to the uv team.
| sota_pop wrote:
| > uvex init my_new_slop_project ---describe "make me the bestest
| saas that will make $1M ARR per day" ---disable_thinking
| ---disable_slop_scaffolded_feature
|
| > uvex add other_slop_project
| ---disable_peddled_package_recommendations
|
| > implicitly phoning home your project, all source code, its
| metadata, and inferring whether your idea/use-case is worth
| steamrolling with their own version.
|
| This is the future of "development". Congrats to the team.
| joshuawright11 wrote:
| Wow - this is potentially the most cynical hacker news thread
| I've ever read. When did this place trade it's curiosity and
| excitement about technology for constant doomerism?
|
| Congrats Astral and co!
| dgb23 wrote:
| I think it was always that way. When an org gets big and its
| leaders become powerful, then there's always a good portion of
| snark and mistrust from this community.
| jdgoesmarching wrote:
| Open source tools are being snapped up by a company famous for
| reneging on its non-profit mission as soon as they sniffed some
| profit. Wow gee, imagine the cynicism.
| barnabee wrote:
| Sorry, but I don't think cheering on OpenAI represents
| curiosity and excitement about technology.
|
| I'm happy for the Astral team but in my opinion, big tech
| especially is incompatible with curiosity and hacker ethos.
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| Blindly celebrating all accusations is not "curiosity and
| excitement about technology". Disappointing that you can't tell
| the difference between tech and the SV startup scene. They are
| different things.
| Lws803 wrote:
| Wonder if they can still use claude code in their repos now
| 19205817 wrote:
| Astral threads here have been surprisingly flag resistant and
| plentiful. This takeover explains a lot.
|
| I suspect some OpenClaw "secure" sandbox is coming (Nvidia
| jealousy) with Astral delivering the packages for Docker within
| Docker within Qemu within Qubes. A self respecting AI stack must
| be convoluted.
|
| I can't wait until all this implodes after the IPOs.
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| ...what? Flag-resistant?
|
| Astral's tools have been a huge QOL improvement for a great
| many developers using what's, what? The second most piously
| programming language ever?
|
| Does the level of attention surprise you? Or do you just flag
| things that you personally aren't into?
| selectnull wrote:
| I see a lot of comments that are "somebody should fork this" or
| "community will fork it" or similar.
|
| I didn't see a single comment of "I will fork it" type.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| You're absolutely correct! Not a single one.
| jt-hill wrote:
| Astral was always going to have to find _some_ way to sustain
| itself financially. They weren't going to just make the best free
| tools in the ecosystem forever. uv is sufficiently entrenched as
| infrastructure that I'm sure it'll take no time for a community
| fork to show up if they do anything stupid with it.
| portly wrote:
| Will this be the beginning of the Great Rust vs Zig battle ?
| ebri wrote:
| I will start migrating from uv, ty and ruff first thing this
| weekend. It will be painful but not being dependent on OpenAI
| will be more than worth it.
| wiseowise wrote:
| So many negative comments but not a single:
|
| - I'm willing to pay for Astral ecosystem so it stays
| independent/open source
|
| - I'm willing to fork the project
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| Here you go: I am willing to pay for Astral ecosystem so it
| stays independent / open-source.
|
| Nobody gave me that opportunity.
|
| Not everybody puts every thought they have into a HN comment.
| Saying " I am willing to pay for Astral ecosystem so it stays
| independent / open-source" just isn't a very useful thing to
| say at the moment.
|
| Get off your high-horse.
| fastasucan wrote:
| This leaves me a bit scared for uv and ruff to be honest.
| elAhmo wrote:
| Terrible news for Python ecosystem. I guess the money was too
| much to reject this ridiculous offer.
| deskamess wrote:
| uv has been very useful but I also looking at pixi. Anyone have
| any experience with that? I hear good things about it.
| bilalel wrote:
| That's unfortunate for the python community. I can understand the
| move by Astral team, but it's still difficult to accept it.
| brikym wrote:
| Does this mean pip is finally getting PIP'd?
| 6thbit wrote:
| py stuff aside for a sec, having this team working on Codex will
| be huge.
|
| I didn't see a way they ever dethroned Claude until now.
|
| Happy as a Codex user, gloomy as a Python one.
| crimecanada wrote:
| good job
| aanet wrote:
| Uff. Reading all the comments made my head hurt.
|
| I love(d) `uv`. I think it's one of the best tools around for
| Python ecosystem... Therefore the pit in my tummy when I read
| this.
|
| Yes, congrats to the team and all that.
|
| I'm more worried about the long term impact on the ecosystem, as
| are almost everybody who dropped a comment here.
|
| My own thoughts echo somewhat what @SimonW wrote here [1]
|
| [1] https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/19/openai-acquiring-
| astra...
|
| However, a forking strategy is may (or may not) be the best for
| `uv`.
|
| Could we count on the Astral team to keep uv in a separate
| foundation?
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| This is like, the worst outcome for Astral. This is severely
| disappointing. I say this as someone that uses Astral and OpenAI
| products practically every day. This is such a terrible fit.
|
| I just hope that Charlie doesn't trot around the dev circuit
| (like he has in years past) trying to sell everyone on this
| "being a good thing, actually". I hope that he isn't given the
| space to sell any story other than "we took the AI money despite
| it being a terrible fit", because that story would just be a lie.
| The fact that this blog post is already trying to preemptively
| justify it--"well in my launch post what I said is..."--is
| extremely, extremely telling.
|
| This is so hugely disappointing. And again, I am at this point
| quite bullish on AI. This isn't a philosophical or anti-AI take
| at all, because those are easier to dismiss.
|
| I'm not going to pretend to "congratulate the team" or whatever.
| As far as I'm concerned, that's HN culture brain rot. Some of
| y'all in 'startup culture' may see getting acquired by OpenAI as
| some sort of big prize or worth celebrating or whatever, but I
| certainly don't.
| atoav wrote:
| Unfortunate, wince I trust Astral, and can't say the same about
| openAI
| talideon wrote:
| Well, that's the first shoe dropping. Thankfully uv and ruff are
| MIT licensed and in a good place, so worst comes to worst...
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