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NiloCK 14 hours ago [-]
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.
throwaway63467 14 hours ago [-]
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 14 hours ago [-]
Small tool shop, burning VC money, true. "Tiny part of the Python ecosystem" is an understatement given how much impact uv has made alone.
rob 13 hours ago [-]
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.
Sure, but if tomorrow uv and ruff ceased to exist, we could all go back to any number of other solutions.
arw0n 10 hours ago [-]
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.
bodge5000 7 hours ago [-]
> 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 6 hours ago [-]
Python is the blub language now.
mapontosevenths 2 hours ago [-]
Keep in mind that when Graham coined that term Java and C++ were considered blub languages.
Speaking as a grey beard myself, I think its safe to say that the grey beards among us will always deride those who didn't have to work as hard as they did.
hilbertseries 2 hours ago [-]
And Python is four years older than Java.
tasuki 7 hours ago [-]
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!
larodi 5 hours ago [-]
relax, soon u be rewriting the essence of all these libs into something new. python has its days numbered also perhaps for many engineering decisions that are now cheap via llms.
stuaxo 2 hours ago [-]
The LLMs write bad python as easily as any other language.
To make it good, you need to review and interate.
aprdm 8 hours ago [-]
Python existed for years before uv with a huge ecosystem, and will continue to do so after/if it dies
* disclosure: We are a commercial client of astral.sh
notpushkin 3 minutes ago [-]
It’ll probably be a game changer for scripts, yes. Writing “portable” Python scripts was a nice exercise, though (and will be, for a while).
theptip 9 hours ago [-]
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 8 hours ago [-]
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.
fud101 40 seconds ago [-]
> 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)
I always looked down on the Java ecosystem but if it turns out Maven had a better story all along and we all overlooked it, that's wild.
Affric 6 hours ago [-]
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 8 hours ago [-]
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.
bmitc 4 hours ago [-]
How is uv awesome and Poetry so bad? They do basically the same things except Astral re-invents the wheel but only part way instead of just relying on the existing tools. uv is fast. As far as I can tell, there's hardly any difference in functionality except for it also replacing PyEnv, which I never use anyway.
rtpg 3 hours ago [-]
uv assuming your local Python is busted to hell and back helps a lot with isolation.
Poetry's CLI would often, for me, just fall over and crash. Crashing a lot is not a fundamental problem in the sense you can fix the bugs, but hey I'm not hitting uv crashes.
pipenv was even worse in terms of just hanging during package resolution. Tools that hang are not tools you want in a CI pipeline!
The end result: `uv run` I expect to work. `pipenv` or `poetry` calls I have to assume don't work, have to put retries into CI pipelines and things like that.
neves 3 hours ago [-]
uv has a lot of sensible defaults that prevent clueless developers to shoot their own feet. Uv sync, for example, would uninstall packages not in pyproject.toml
Terretta 5 hours ago [-]
let's get carried away.
`uv run` a .py with inline script metadata has all the deps installed and your script running in a venv while poetry is still deciding to resolve...
notpushkin 11 minutes ago [-]
uv is nice, but not irreplaceable. An open source, maintenance mode fork would work just as fine. And even if all of uv disappeared today, I’d go just back to Poetry. Slower? Sure, a bit.
...and then I’ve read the rest of your comment. Please do go read the HN guidelines.
KaiserPro 7 hours ago [-]
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 6 hours ago [-]
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”.
ghshephard 5 hours ago [-]
I've used python for roughly 15 years, and 10 of those years I was paid to primarily write and maintain projects written in Python.
Things got bearable with virtualenv/virtualenv wrappers, but it was never what I would call great. Pip was always painful, and slow. I never looked forward to using them - and every time I worked on a new system - the amount of finaggling I had to do to avoid problems, and the amount of time I spent supporting other people who had problems was significant.
The day I first used uv (about is as memorable to me as the the day I first started using python (roughly 2004) - everything changed.
I've used uv pretty much every single day since then and the joy has never left. Every operation is twitch fast. There has never once been any issues. Combined with direnv - I can create projects/venvs on the fly so quickly I don't even bother using it's various affordances to run projects without a venv.
To put it succinctly - uv gives me two things.
One - zero messing around with virtualenvwrappers and friends. For whatever reason, I've never once run into an error like "virtualenvwrapper.sh: There was a problem running the initialization hooks."
Two - fast. It may be the fastest software I've ever used. Everything is instant - so you never experience any type of cognitive distraction when creating a python project and diving into anything - you think it - and it's done. I genuinely look forward to uv pip install - even when it's not already in cache - the parallel download is epically fast - always a joy.
kortex 2 hours ago [-]
for one, it's one tool, that does the job of all three.
it just works. i'm not sure how else to describe it other than less faffing about. it just does the right thing, every time. there's a tiny learning curve (mostly unlearning bad or redundant habits), but once you know how to wield it, it's a one stop shop.
and as mentioned, it's crazy fast.
Eridrus 6 hours ago [-]
It's not horrifically slow.
antonvs 6 hours ago [-]
> making the python ecosystem bearable
You should really qualify that statement, it implies that the Python ecosystem is bearable.
pojzon 5 hours ago [-]
Yes please, lets start with scraping to bin whole internet using javascript and its family.
See the point ?
tomrod 12 hours ago [-]
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."
signal11 11 hours ago [-]
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.
Maybe I could give up uv, but giving up ruff would suck.
crdrost 10 hours ago [-]
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 10 hours ago [-]
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 8 hours ago [-]
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.
giancarlostoro 11 hours ago [-]
It is an MIT licensed project, someone will absolutely fork it.
WesolyKubeczek 11 hours ago [-]
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 11 hours ago [-]
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.
You are aware that ty has only recently entered beta status?
Ruff isn’t stable yet either and has evolved into the de facto standard for new projects. It has more than double the amount of rules than Pylint does. Also downloaded more than 3 times as often as Pylint in the past month.
Pylint has some advantages, sure, but Ruffs adoption speaks for itself. Pylint is 25 years old. You’d hope they do some things better.
Saying that uv is their only winner is a hilarious take.
deadbabe 11 hours ago [-]
Maybe consider something other than python.
tomrod 8 hours ago [-]
Always choose the best tool for the job.
Then import that tool and and check if __name__ == "__main__"
scuff3d 10 hours ago [-]
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
giancarlostoro 11 hours ago [-]
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 10 hours ago [-]
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 10 hours ago [-]
The same things that prevented "community" from building the tool in the first place
PaulHoule 8 hours ago [-]
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 6 hours ago [-]
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.
zem 9 hours ago [-]
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!
johnisgood 10 hours ago [-]
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 9 hours ago [-]
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.
eviks 1 hours ago [-]
So why isn't pip done?
MidnightRider39 8 hours ago [-]
Personally I would stop using Python again.
uv is the one thing that made it bearable.
wiseowise 9 hours ago [-]
I would just ditch Python, like I did 8 years ago.
linsomniac 6 hours ago [-]
>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.
crimsoneer 12 hours ago [-]
Eurgh, I do not want to ever touch Poetry or pyenv again, thank you very much.
sdevonoes 8 hours ago [-]
I wish that were also true for the case of Claude/Codex/etc
bbor 4 hours ago [-]
…if tomorrow python ceased to exist, we could all go back to any number of other solutions.
crypto137 7 hours ago [-]
UV is so much nicer than the other options.
skywhopper 10 hours ago [-]
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.
neves 3 hours ago [-]
Don't understate its importance. I've been using Python for more than 30 years. They solved a problem that a lot of smart people didn't solve (). Python developer experience improved an order of magnitude.
() Sure, they were on the shoulders of giants
johnisgood 10 hours ago [-]
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 8 hours ago [-]
You can take my padleft function from my cold dead hands, but it will live forever in example code!
throwaway63467 12 hours ago [-]
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 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
joelthelion 11 hours ago [-]
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.
SergeAx 1 hours ago [-]
Not including direct downloads via the native installers, Homebrew, Winget, or Docker, mind you.
skywhopper 10 hours ago [-]
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.
LtWorf 9 hours ago [-]
It's not difficult to download something yourself 4 million times every day to look popular :)
TeMPOraL 4 hours ago [-]
Right. If anything, this "tiny part" has pretty much taken over Python and turned it from OSS BDFL language into a company-backed one (like Erlang, Scala, C#).
victorbjorklund 9 hours ago [-]
They have some nice ideas. But if they turn to shit you can just fork their tools and use that instead.
__MatrixMan__ 9 hours ago [-]
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.
swexbe 9 hours ago [-]
VC money bailing out other VCs. A tale as old as time.
Hamuko 14 hours ago [-]
Do you have any statistics for that?
jengland 13 hours ago [-]
uv has almost 2x the number of monthly downloads Poetry has.
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.
anecdotally every place ive worked at has switched over and never looked back.
_moof 13 hours ago [-]
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 12 hours ago [-]
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 9 hours ago [-]
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.
shawnwall 13 hours ago [-]
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 13 hours ago [-]
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.
pdntspa 12 hours ago [-]
Then can they please figure out some way of invoking it that doesnt require prefixing everything with 'uv'
arw0n 9 hours ago [-]
For any command, you can create an 'alias' in your shell config. That way you can get rid of the prefix.
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.
jitl 8 hours ago [-]
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?
zbentley 12 hours ago [-]
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 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
zbentley 5 hours ago [-]
Thanks for explaining your workflow. It seems predictable, but like it really locks you into one of the few (albeit popular) programming languages that has many/most of its development libraries repackaged by your OS. There are plenty of very popular languages that don't offer that at all.
Go and Rust, specifically, seem a bit odd to be allergic to. Their "package managers" are largely downloading sources into your code repository, not downloading/installing truly arbitrary stuff. How is that different from your (presumably "wget the file into my repo or include path") workflow for depending on a header-only C library from the internet which your OS doesn't repackage?
I understand if your resistance to those platforms is because of how much source code things download, but that still seems qualitatively different to me from "npm install can do god-knows-what to my workstation" or "pip install can install packages that shadow system-wide trusted ones".
maleldil 11 hours ago [-]
I hope you understand you are part of a very, very small minority.
LtWorf 9 hours ago [-]
Personally I run "apt install whateverineed"
dotancohen 9 hours ago [-]
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.
QuantumNomad_ 13 hours ago [-]
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 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
wiseowise 9 hours ago [-]
Don't worry, gramps, pip won't trigger your tinfoil hat.
mirekrusin 13 hours ago [-]
Then don't use it?
maccard 12 hours ago [-]
Do you use pip?
nimchimpsky 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
tomrod 12 hours ago [-]
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 11 hours ago [-]
Yup, the fact UV just installed geopandas out of the box with no issues blew my mind.
woodruffw 13 hours ago [-]
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.)
nullhole 12 hours ago [-]
> 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 12 hours ago [-]
You're right, I've edited it.
jdgoesmarching 10 hours ago [-]
Is pointing out the incorrect use of a point of order itself a point of order, or also a point of information?
jitl 8 hours ago [-]
what does that mean
benterix 12 hours ago [-]
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 12 hours ago [-]
You can find some resources on our strategy in previous blog posts, like this one on pyx[1].
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.
UV is arguably this decade's most important addition to the python ecosystem. They are a small, but they are important.
__mharrison__ 12 hours ago [-]
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).
giancarlostoro 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
mikenikles 8 hours ago [-]
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 :).
dajt 4 hours ago [-]
I've been using DBeaver CE since I lost my DataGrip license.
paddy_m 8 hours ago [-]
What do you want in your datagrip alternative. I'm working on some stuff, and interested to hear how people approach data with LLMs
19205817 9 hours ago [-]
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.
jitl 8 hours ago [-]
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"
insane_dreamer 9 hours ago [-]
given that they delivered the goods I would not say they were "hyped"
anentropic 10 hours ago [-]
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
gigatexal 12 hours ago [-]
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.
scuff3d 10 hours ago [-]
That's kind of like saying Cargo is a small part of the Rust ecosystem.
uv and ruff is not tiny part anymore, its growing fast
Syntaf 12 hours ago [-]
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.
bbor 4 hours ago [-]
This is so dystopian… they built something that worked and now are being “acquihired” into oblivion, and we’re supposed to be happy about it? I’m glad a few of the early people just got rich I guess, but it seems like a terrible system overall.
heavyset_go 42 minutes ago [-]
It's even worse than that, Astral took over python-build-standalone and uv uses its Python builds on all platforms.
That means OpenAI will be able to do whatever they want to your Python binaries, including every Python binary in your deployments, with whatever telemetry that want to instrument in the builds.
ren_engineer 9 hours ago [-]
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
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 9 hours ago [-]
> 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.
dwd 5 hours ago [-]
It is exactly the strategy of all platforms - they get greedy to the point of screwing over their own customers. I've lost count of number of times I've seen a platform get popular and then expand to offer the same services as its customers, often even undercutting market rates.
Just wait till they offer "Developer Certification" so you have to pay them to get a shiny little badge and a certificate while they go around saying no badge = you're shit.
tw1984 4 hours ago [-]
> 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?
because AGI doesn't grow in a cage, it requires a piece of software running somewhere. someone has to build both to get that happen. that is like a high school level question.
Escapade5160 2 hours ago [-]
Theoretically it only requires it for birth. One can argue that once we achieve the singularity, it could immediately scale on its own as it decides.
ai_fry_ur_brain 2 hours ago [-]
Typical llm user, thinks they're a genius.
volkercraig 14 hours ago [-]
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 14 hours ago [-]
> 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.
shimman 9 hours ago [-]
"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 8 hours ago [-]
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
rchaud 2 hours ago [-]
These cases will be settled out of court long before they ever reach a jury. Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5bn in a class action suit [0]. Others will follow.
No IP will stand up to AI, from Star Wars to Linear. Things are about to change.
goku12 13 hours ago [-]
> 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.
islandfox100 13 hours ago [-]
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"?
darkwater 13 hours ago [-]
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 12 hours ago [-]
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 9 hours ago [-]
As a real world example, Redis was both Company A and BigCo. Project One is now ValKey.
eru 13 hours ago [-]
There's basically no different between GPL and BSD in that case.
worldsayshi 12 hours ago [-]
If clean-room re-implementations are allowed to bypass copyright/licenses (software) copyright is dead in general?
justcool393 10 hours ago [-]
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
LtWorf 4 hours ago [-]
The problem is that, is it clean room if you read all of the code in advance?
dirkc 12 hours ago [-]
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.
petcat 13 hours ago [-]
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.
kjksf 13 hours ago [-]
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.
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?
thayne 11 hours ago [-]
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.
supern0va 12 hours ago [-]
>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.
xorcist 12 hours ago [-]
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 11 hours ago [-]
> 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.
leetrout 13 hours ago [-]
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.
roryirvine 11 hours ago [-]
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 11 hours ago [-]
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 11 hours ago [-]
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 10 hours ago [-]
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 10 hours ago [-]
> 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].
You probably mean AGPL. Companies hated GPL from the start and nothing has changed to this day. But the cloud is specifically against AGPL.
eru 13 hours ago [-]
Huh? When you deploy something in the cloud, you don't have to share your GPL'ed stuff either. Google doesn't.
WorldPeas 6 hours ago [-]
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.
munk-a 9 hours ago [-]
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.
PaulHoule 8 hours ago [-]
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.
pixelsort 12 hours ago [-]
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 11 hours ago [-]
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.
dabbz 6 hours ago [-]
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.
pixelsort 11 hours ago [-]
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 11 hours ago [-]
> 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
slopinthebag 5 hours ago [-]
This is pure fantasy. Even if LLM's eventually became this capable (they will not), your whole scenario doesn't make sense any sense.
What is far more likely is that governments use AI to oppress their citizens with robots and drones. That is the thing to be scared of.
nunez 9 hours ago [-]
And never forget that we collectively cheered it on as the asteroid's crater got deeper and wider.
rTX5CMRXIfFG 14 hours ago [-]
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 14 hours ago [-]
If LLMs turn out to be such a force multiplier, the way to fight it is to ensure that there are open source LLMs.
captainbland 14 hours ago [-]
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 13 hours ago [-]
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 13 hours ago [-]
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 8 hours ago [-]
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.
smilekzs 4 hours ago [-]
New Strix Halo (395+) user here. It is very librating to be able to "just" load the larger open-weight MoEs. At this param count class, bigger is almost always better --- my own vibe check confirms this, but obviously this is not going to be anywhere close to the leading cost-optimized closed-weight models (Flash / Sonnet).
The tradeoff with these unified LPDDR machines is compute and memory throughput. You'll have to live with the ~50 token/sec rate, and compact your prefix aggressively. That said, I'd take the effortless local model capability over outright speed any day.
Hope the popularity of these machines could prompt future models to offer perfect size fits: 80 GiB quantized on 128 GiB box, 480 GiB quantized on 512 GiB box, etc.
fnordpiglet 14 hours ago [-]
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.
lukeschlather 12 hours ago [-]
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.
palmotea 13 hours ago [-]
> 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?
13 hours ago [-]
supern0va 12 hours ago [-]
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.
nunez 9 hours ago [-]
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.
heavyset_go 3 hours ago [-]
Local models are more like browsers than servers. The user doesn't care where they're hosted, they click an icon and ask questions either way.
runarberg 14 hours ago [-]
That would be accepting the framing of your class enemy, there is no reason to do that.
metalliqaz 14 hours ago [-]
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
bix6 14 hours ago [-]
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 14 hours ago [-]
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.
hot_iron_dust 14 hours ago [-]
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.
munk-a 9 hours ago [-]
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.
12 hours ago [-]
cube2222 14 hours ago [-]
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 14 hours ago [-]
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 8 hours ago [-]
> 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.
ffsm8 9 hours ago [-]
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).
TrackerFF 13 hours ago [-]
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 13 hours ago [-]
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.
getpokedagain 10 hours ago [-]
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 10 hours ago [-]
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 8 hours ago [-]
Well if it's GPL without CLA and they accept outside contributions, they can't relicense / make it propriatary. Unlike with MIT.
kpcyrd 3 hours ago [-]
Step 1: discontinue the public repository, step 2: sell access to your GPL codebase.
The GPL (and even the AGPL) doesn't require you to make your modified source code publicly available (Debian explicitly considers licenses with this requirement non-free). The GPL only states you need to provide your customers with source code.
selcuka 3 hours ago [-]
Sure, but it also allows your customers to modify the source code you provided, and distribute/sell it. With MIT they can simply relicence it and sell binary-only versions. The open-ness stops at that point.
Rapzid 7 hours ago [-]
Vercel did this as well. I called it "ecosystem capture" but I like "means of production" too.
birdfood 5 hours ago [-]
These companies are telling us software development is over. They are positioning themselves as the means of production. You want to build anything you do it through them. And since ‘software is solved’ this is not a software but a user acquisition.
Escapade5160 2 hours ago [-]
The means of production are just files with special extensions.
LtWorf 3 hours ago [-]
Why do they need to acquire users who are developers if software development is over?
stingrae 7 hours ago [-]
The risk is one of them buys it and pulls an Oracle / Java (Sun) stunt.
jillesvangurp 6 hours ago [-]
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.
butlike 13 hours ago [-]
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 13 hours ago [-]
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 12 hours ago [-]
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
12 hours ago [-]
nazgulnarsil 11 hours ago [-]
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 10 hours ago [-]
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 7 hours ago [-]
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. `
andrepd 11 hours ago [-]
"Bearded German philosopher" once again being uncannily applicable to 21st century happenings...
thegrim33 9 hours ago [-]
>> "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".
kpcyrd 3 hours ago [-]
I stopped programming in python about 8-9 years ago because the tooling was so bad.
charcircuit 9 hours ago [-]
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.
bargainbin 12 hours ago [-]
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?
pitcock 5 hours ago [-]
They’re not ahead on code though, and they recently announced giving up on rich media AI entirely lmao
The fuck does OpenAI have to offer?
Nothing I need.
The only reason Gemini is the best is UX, really running my own Mistral 7b is more than fine.
Because slow ass Gemini is still a slightly more convenient experience I use that.
Nobody OWNS nor will own the means of essentially thoughts. It’s such a silly idea I wonder if it’s propaganda.
justinhj 12 hours ago [-]
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.
dismalaf 12 hours ago [-]
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.
cyanydeez 8 hours ago [-]
Not a concern: LLMs can fork all these products while they're still open licensed.
AndrewKemendo 13 hours ago [-]
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?
gigatexal 12 hours ago [-]
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.
paseante 11 hours ago [-]
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devnotes77 14 hours ago [-]
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mountainriver 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
vaylian 9 hours ago [-]
What language is universally better than Python? I don't think Python is perfect, but it is definitely one of the best languages out there. It is elegant and it is has a huge ecosystem of libraries, frameworks and tutorials. There is a lot of battle-tested software in Python that is running businesses.
pabs3 1 hours ago [-]
Maybe something with dependent typing like Idris2 or a future Haskell release?
mountainriver 8 hours ago [-]
What?! It's one of the slowest languages on the planet, it's not type safe, it has not real concurrency.
I can't believe people say this with a straight face
vaylian 8 hours ago [-]
> It's one of the slowest languages on the planet
It's fast enough for many use cases. That doesn't mean that there is no room for optimization, but this is far less a deciding factor these days.
> it's not type safe
You can do static analysis with Mypy and other tools.
> it has not real concurrency.
There's different mechanisms for running things concurrently in Python. And there's an active effort to remove the GIL. I also have to ask: What is "real" concurrency?
Admittedly, the things you mention are not Python's strongest points. But they are far from being dealbreakers.
stuxnet79 11 hours ago [-]
> cost of significantly better languages is essentially free
Is it? We still need meatspace humans to vet what these AI agents produce. Languages like C++ / Rust etc still require huge cognitive overhead relative to Python & that will not change anytime soon.
Unless the entire global economy can run on agents with minimal human supervision someone still has to grapple with the essential complexity of getting a computer to do useful things. At least with Python that complexity is locked away within the CPython interpreter.
Also an aside, when has a language ever gotten traction based solely on its technical merits? Popularity is driven by ease-of-use, fashion, mindshare, timing etc.
mountainriver 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah that's sort of fair today, although we have switched over most of our org to Rust and it hasn't been much of a problem. The LLM can usually explain small parts of code with high accuracy if you are unsure.
Overall the switch has been very much loved. Everything is faster and more stable, we haven't seen much of a reduction in output
sho_hn 11 hours ago [-]
Your stance is aggressive and provocative, but no less so than the challenge AI poses to software developers in general. I think what you say should be seriously entertained.
And as someone who loves Python and has written a lot of it, I tend to agree. It's increasingly clear the way to be productive with AI coding and the way to make it reliable is to make sure AI works within strong guardrails, with testsuites, etc. that combat and corral the inherent indeterminism and problems like prompt injection as much as possible.
Getting help from the language - having the static tooling be as strict and uncompromising as possible, and delegating having to deal with the pain to AI - seems the right way.
raincole 11 hours ago [-]
It's such a laughable take. First of all a language is never getting popular simply because it's good. Actually most used languages are usually terrible.[0]
Secondly it's non factual. Python's market share grew in 2025[1][2][3]. Probably driven by AI demand.
Yes most languages are terrible except the ones that are actually performant and good like Rust.
Do you really think AI agents of the future will be coding in Python??? What advantage would that possibly give them? That's the only laughable take here
raincole 7 hours ago [-]
Define future. If it means the next five years, yes, I absolutely expect people and machines to keep writing Python.
windexh8er 7 hours ago [-]
I think there are many examples throughout history of better performing options not displacing counterparts. I think, really, the only "laughable" thing here is the ignorance on display that's riding atop the arrogance.
Rust is great. But AI isn't displacing Python anytime soon.
Moreso it sucks that Astral's been bought by a company with such a horrible leader at the helm.
whattheheckheck 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah the swath of billions of new devs that have a lower barrier to try out coding will navigate them to python
kevin42 11 hours ago [-]
That's an interesting take, but I'm not sure 'easy to write' is the only advantage.
There is also a really good ecosystem of libraries, especially for scientific computing. My experience has been that Claude can write good c++ code, but it's not great about optimization. So, curated Python code can often be faster than an AI's reimplementation of an algorithm in c++.
mountainriver 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah ML is the one of the only spaces I could see it living on, but even then doing it in C++ isn't that much harder for an LLM
jakeydus 11 hours ago [-]
I feel like this is a relatively hot take. Python has advantages beyond being easy to write. It's simple. It can do just about anything any other language can do. It's not the most performant on its own, but it's performant enough for 99% of use cases, and in the 1% you can write a new or use an existing C library instead. Its simplicity and ease of adoption make python very well represented in the training data.
If I ask an LLM or agentic AI to build something and don't specify what language to use, I'd wager that it'll choose python most of the time. Casual programmers like academics or students who ask ChatGPT to help them write a function to do X are likely to be using Python already.
I'm not a Python evangelist by any means but to suggest that AI is going to kill Python feels like a major stretch to me.
EDIT: when I say that Python can do anything any other language can do, that's with the adage in mind. Python is the second best language for every task.
mountainriver 8 hours ago [-]
> it's performant enough for 99% of use cases
My last two companies went all in on python and really regretted it. It's performance and concurrency primitives really hurt as you scale
amunozo 10 hours ago [-]
Isn't that also an advantage for LLMs? Apart from more available data.
arw0n 11 hours ago [-]
Let's see how it plays out. My current assumption is that degrees and CVs will become more important in the workplace. Things like good architecture, maintainability, coherence, they are all hard to measure. A true 10x developer without a college degree will lose to the PhD without any hard skills. And these types only speak python, so they will instruct the AI to type python. Or maybe they'll vibecode rust and elixir, I don't know. But the cynic in me strongly thinks this will make all our bullshitty jobs way more bullshitty, and impostors will profit the most.
Bnjoroge 9 hours ago [-]
hilariously bold take with no evidence to support the claim
saltyoldman 10 hours ago [-]
Absolutely agree with this. I'm hoping via advent of agentic, Rust dominates in the next few years. It may even cause Wasm to be dominant as the new "applet" language.
dahlia 12 hours ago [-]
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 11 hours ago [-]
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 11 hours ago [-]
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.
sbinnee 5 hours ago [-]
I cannot agree more though I have little experience in open source. I knew that Korean environment for open source software would be touch before coming back from Europe, it seems much easier to target international traction rather than focusing on domestic interest.
Personally, I'd like to know, since you have been active in Korea, if there is any groups that I can attend to.
rtpg 8 hours ago [-]
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 5 hours ago [-]
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.
jackbravo 10 hours ago [-]
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.
JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago [-]
> it doesn't have a built-in betrayal baked into the structure
Astral was founded as a private company. Its team has presumably worked hard to build something valuable. Calling their compensation for that work 'betrayal' is unfair.
Community-based software development sounds nice. But with rare exception, it gets outcompeted by start-ups. Start-ups work, and they work well. What is problematic is the tech giants' monopoly of the acquisition endpoint. Figuring out ways for communities to compete with said giants as potential acquirers is worth looking into–maybe public loans to groups of developers who can show (a) they're committed to keep paying for the product and (b) aren't getting kicked back.
theallan 11 hours ago [-]
> 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?
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 8 hours ago [-]
capitalism / the bazaar is faster than communism / the cathedral, news at 11
hijodelsol 15 hours ago [-]
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 14 hours ago [-]
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.
japhyr 14 hours ago [-]
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 14 hours ago [-]
Private package hosting sounds like a commodity that would be hard to differentiate.
nunez 9 hours ago [-]
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.
EatFlamingDeath 12 minutes ago [-]
I've used JFrog Artifactory before and I wish I didn't.
ttul 5 hours ago [-]
There’s always room for improvement…
atomicnumber3 13 hours ago [-]
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.
IshKebab 13 hours ago [-]
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.
nunez 9 hours ago [-]
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 6 hours ago [-]
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?
japhyr 13 hours ago [-]
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 12 hours ago [-]
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 11 hours ago [-]
We have some kind of simple pip repo that is private where I work. What would astral bring to the table?
quadrifoliate 10 hours ago [-]
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.
y1n0 1 hours ago [-]
Close to a thousand I’m sure.
tempest_ 9 hours ago [-]
I mean that was a thing at one point but I feel like it is baked into github/gitlab etc now
pjmlp 13 hours ago [-]
What would be the added value against JFrog or Nexus, for example?
r_lee 13 hours ago [-]
that was never going to work, let's be honest
justcool393 10 hours ago [-]
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
hijodelsol 14 hours ago [-]
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 14 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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 11 hours ago [-]
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 11 hours ago [-]
pip isn't exactly a "built-in" tool. Beyond the python distribution having a stub module that downloads pip for you.
zahlman 6 hours ago [-]
`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).
Maxion 14 hours ago [-]
These tools are open source, if they lock them down the community will just fork them.
pjmlp 14 hours ago [-]
Nice idea in theory, in practice is how many folks down in Nebraska are going to show up.
zem 9 hours ago [-]
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 7 hours ago [-]
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 6 hours ago [-]
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 6 hours ago [-]
isn't that's the point of open source software? like when Oracle bought Sun. someone forked mysql and created mariadb.
pjmlp 3 hours ago [-]
Indeed, and how much has it kept the pace versus the alternatives?
Also, the survivors are the exception, not the rule.
hijodelsol 14 hours ago [-]
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 14 hours ago [-]
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.
WhyNotHugo 14 hours ago [-]
> 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 13 hours ago [-]
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.
hijodelsol 14 hours ago [-]
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 14 hours ago [-]
Which is why I mentioned "....use stuff that isn't dependent on VC money...".
dadrian 11 hours ago [-]
As opposed to Pip, which is obviously free and sustainable forever.
saghm 5 hours ago [-]
And takes a lot closer to "forever" to download all of your dependencies
tmaly 14 hours ago [-]
Would single maintainers of critical open source projects be a better situation?
mcdonje 14 hours ago [-]
Are you not aware of foundations?
kjksf 13 hours ago [-]
The issue is lack of money not lack of legal structure.
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 11 hours ago [-]
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
saghm 5 hours ago [-]
There's a wide gap between the arguments "the open source model doesn't work" and "the open source model failed to produce anything as good as uv after a couple decades of python tooling churn". The latter is why people are understandably unsure of where things go from here.
mcdonje 3 hours ago [-]
Seems like you're responding to the wrong person. The person I replied to said the open source model doesn't work. Nobody said the thing in your second quote.
I get the point you're making, but the way you introduced it isn't conducive to productive conversation.
llll_lllllll_l 14 hours ago [-]
I don't know how to search for that report, can you share it?
adolph 11 hours ago [-]
> 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.
incognito124 15 hours ago [-]
Possibly the worst possible news for the Python ecosystem. Absolutely devastating. Congrats to the team
dcre 12 hours ago [-]
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 12 hours ago [-]
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 11 hours ago [-]
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.
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 10 hours ago [-]
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 10 hours ago [-]
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?
bmitc 4 hours ago [-]
> Just look at what Altman and Brockman tweet about.
Those two are pathological liars, so what they write about means very, very little.
antod 10 hours ago [-]
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 9 hours ago [-]
This. Their current approach is open sourced. There's no going back any more.
blitzar 14 hours ago [-]
I hope they got paid, I will be very sad if they didn't at least get G5 money.
fortuitous-frog 13 hours ago [-]
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).
On the other hand, we get to see what other thing will try to replace pip
politelemon 10 hours ago [-]
wx
nacozarina 4 hours ago [-]
as a long-time python-hater, i am jack’s smug smiling face
PurpleRamen 14 hours ago [-]
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.
nsbk 10 hours ago [-]
Let the forks roll!
huksley 15 hours ago [-]
UV_DISABLE_AGENT=1 UV_DISABLE_AI_HINTS=1 uv add
rafaelgoncalves 7 hours ago [-]
:D, and i think they would add some optout telemetry flags too to make this even funnier
emmettm 9 hours ago [-]
lol, underrated comment
jjice 14 hours ago [-]
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 14 hours ago [-]
If Codex’s core quality is anything to go by, it’s time to create a community fork of UV
pronik 13 hours ago [-]
Maybe they are being acquired to improve the quality of Codex.
OutOfHere 12 hours ago [-]
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 9 hours ago [-]
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 6 hours ago [-]
> why we keep trusting venture capital to be the community's stewards I have no idea.
They bought the trust.
JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago [-]
> we keep trusting venture capital to be the community's stewards
OpenAI isn't a VC. It's VC-backed. But so is Astral.
throwaway613746 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
piskov 9 hours ago [-]
At least it’s in rust.
Unlike those react-game-engine guys over at Claude
supriyo-biswas 13 hours ago [-]
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).
dec0dedab0de 11 hours ago [-]
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.
zbentley 12 hours ago [-]
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.
Rapzid 7 hours ago [-]
People would just make pipenv fast? There are some new tools that can help with that..
lern_too_spel 13 hours ago [-]
The priorities of the tooling will change to help agents instead of human users directly. That's all that's happening.
japhyr 14 hours ago [-]
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 12 hours ago [-]
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]
Also, Microsoft does not allow use of their LSP for python. You have to use the barebones Jedi LSP.
satya71 9 hours ago [-]
Fortunately, there are competing LSPs of reasonable quality now. I'm using pyrefly. Not sure if ty/ruff have one too.
barnabee 10 hours ago [-]
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.
stephbook 8 hours ago [-]
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.
matkoniecz 12 hours ago [-]
Luckily I avoided extensions before switching to VS Codium.
Glad to hear that I am avoiding Microsoft's spam.
kayson 9 hours ago [-]
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...
ragebol 14 hours ago [-]
Not often that I audibly groan at a HN headline :-(
alex_suzuki 14 hours ago [-]
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.
pprotas 12 hours ago [-]
Monkey paw curls tight
Microsoft acquires Astral
Wish comes with a cost
BoorishBears 2 hours ago [-]
That'd be fine, MS is a blue-chip
I'm not worried about OpenAI messing up uv, I'm worried about OpenAI running out of money and cutting an unnecessary team.
saalweachter 11 hours ago [-]
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 9 hours ago [-]
I cant see how the ecosystem evolves being a bad thing?
ragebol 14 hours ago [-]
Ty, Ruff, UV, all great tools I recently started really using and I couldn't be happier with them.
Sigh
krick 13 hours ago [-]
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 12 hours ago [-]
> it just feels like betrayal
It was a VC backed tool. What did you expect?
krick 12 hours ago [-]
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.
lucrbvi 15 hours ago [-]
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!
jpalomaki 14 hours ago [-]
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.
I wouldn't be surprised if Vercel were bought by Anthropic/OAI (but maybe it would be too expensive?)
bikelang 14 hours ago [-]
No no - SpaceX/xAi must now buy Vercel so that we can deploy our bloated Next apps to space.
GCUMstlyHarmls 14 hours ago [-]
Next now renamed to Xext.
dirkc 12 hours ago [-]
At least in space there is lots of space and no heat /s - I'd love for Next to exist in a vacuum
jimmydoe 14 hours ago [-]
Nothing is too expensive. It will be a bidding war.
synthc 15 hours ago [-]
`uv agent` and `bun agent` in 3....2.....1....
rgilliotte 14 hours ago [-]
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 14 hours ago [-]
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.
dec0dedab0de 11 hours ago [-]
until "uv add $openai_competitor" mysteriously breaks in odd, difficult to troubleshoot ways.
siva7 13 hours ago [-]
You fool think they are targeting developers with this purchase?
everforward 13 hours ago [-]
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.
DoctorDabadedoo 14 hours ago [-]
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.
luxcem 9 hours ago [-]
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.
TheCondor 10 hours ago [-]
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 9 hours ago [-]
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 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah, it’s all mostly heaps of Python internally aside from Codex.
butlike 13 hours ago [-]
They probably prompted for what they should do next and got this as a half-hallucinated response lol
0x3f 15 hours ago [-]
> 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.
itissid 14 hours ago [-]
Isn't this something to do with their paid pyx(as opposed to ty/ruff etc) thingy?
LoganDark 15 hours ago [-]
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".
insane_dreamer 9 hours ago [-]
I'm expecting Anthropic to buy Zed
christina97 14 hours ago [-]
I mean they are “startups” on the way to mega-companies. They need internal tooling to match.
OutOfHere 12 hours ago [-]
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.
jedahan 14 hours ago [-]
great for astral, sucks for uv. was nice to have sane tooling at least for a few years, thanks for the gift.
ziml77 14 hours ago [-]
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 13 hours ago [-]
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.
mrbombastic 1 hours ago [-]
As much as I dislike facebook they have been pretty good stewards of their open source projects and mostly seem to let them stay isolated.
pennomi 13 hours ago [-]
Time for the PSF to consider something inspired by uv as a native solution.
Kwpolska 13 hours ago [-]
The core-adjacent people have completely failed to produce reasonable packaging tools for decades, why would you want another new tool from them?
zahlman 6 hours ago [-]
Who said anything about it coming from core-adjacent people?
Was Kenneth Reitz "core-adjacent" when Requests was brought under the PSF umbrella?
Kwpolska 4 hours ago [-]
Is there anyone seriously involved in packaging who is neither working at Astral nor a PyPA member?
zahlman 2 hours ago [-]
Well, if I didn't have a bunch of other ideas for things to work on, and if I felt like anyone cared, there would be me....
fnands 15 hours ago [-]
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 15 hours ago [-]
> 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 15 hours ago [-]
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™.
dcreager 14 hours ago [-]
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 14 hours ago [-]
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!
wiseowise 9 hours ago [-]
> 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 7 hours ago [-]
> 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" ;)
gib444 13 hours ago [-]
Literally there is no public comment you are allowed to make that we haven't heard 100 times before.
Congratulations though!
a3w 13 hours ago [-]
JS vs Python wars, redux?
a-french-anon 14 hours ago [-]
>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 =)
bonesss 14 hours ago [-]
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 14 hours ago [-]
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...
delfinom 14 hours ago [-]
You know it's absolutely going that way. That's the lifecycle of corporate strategy.
aanet 7 hours ago [-]
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]
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?
KolmogorovComp 15 hours ago [-]
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.
selectnull 10 hours ago [-]
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 7 hours ago [-]
You're absolutely correct! Not a single one.
time0ut 14 hours ago [-]
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.
JoshTriplett 14 hours ago [-]
Welp. I used to respect Astral. I hope someone responsible forks their Python tooling and maintains it. Ideally a foundation rather than a company.
fortuitous-frog 12 hours ago [-]
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...
krick 13 hours ago [-]
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 10 hours ago [-]
25 years of Python behind me, please let me tell you that hopefully you're wrong : we don't "need" uv :)
ex-aws-dude 9 hours ago [-]
I write python all the time and I've never used it
JoshTriplett 9 hours ago [-]
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 8 hours ago [-]
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.
dcreager 7 hours ago [-]
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.
JoshTriplett 4 hours ago [-]
> And it would be extremely value-destructive to bring in a team like ours and then undermine what made us valued and successful.
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.
jredwards 13 hours ago [-]
As someone who loves Astral and hates OpenAI, this is making me pretty sad.
heavyset_go 44 minutes ago [-]
Astral took over python-build-standalone, and uv uses its custom Python builds in deployments.
I do not want OpenAI putting their fingers in my Python binaries, nor do I want their telemetry.
petercooper 14 hours ago [-]
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 :-)
clickety_clack 14 hours ago [-]
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.
kkirsche 14 hours ago [-]
Happy for the team, sad for users. I just don’t believe their work will continue under new ownership
talideon 5 hours ago [-]
Well, that's the first shoe dropping. Thankfully uv and ruff are MIT licensed and in a good place, so worst comes to worst...
weakfish 15 hours ago [-]
What happens when OpenAI’s burn dries up their cash?
throwa356262 14 hours ago [-]
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.
gmerc 14 hours ago [-]
That's where taxpayers come in a the ultimate bagholder.
Cthulhu_ 14 hours ago [-]
They get more money from investors, go public, or get bought.
Fervicus 14 hours ago [-]
Taxpayers bail them out.
brikym 7 hours ago [-]
`uv` will get PIP'd
sourcegrift 14 hours ago [-]
RAM prices go down. My hope though is that the period RAM prices stay up will put electron apps out of market.
genthree 13 hours ago [-]
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.
prodigycorp 14 hours ago [-]
$110B will surely last for at least a year.
morphology 14 hours ago [-]
That money is going directly to Jensen as quickly as possible to secure OpenAI's place in the delivery queue
prodigycorp 14 hours ago [-]
The investment version of "can you climb up a falling ladder fast enough to not fall"
ZenoArrow 10 hours ago [-]
Was that $110B in cash? I wouldn't be surprised if it's based on something else (paid for using deals for stock).
gedy 14 hours ago [-]
"We must be regulated to contain the nuclear bomb like power of our products. Oh look it escaped again!", etc
photon_collider 14 hours ago [-]
Reading this news only leaves me worried about long-term future of these open source tools.
Ekaros 14 hours ago [-]
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...
afavour 14 hours ago [-]
And so, more core functionality developers depend on becomes dependent on a continuing stream of billions in VC funding. What could go wrong?
philipallstar 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
kelvinjps10 10 minutes ago [-]
This is feeling weird, like now if the AI bubble pops it will bring core technologies like runtimes (bun) and package managers (astral)
now what's next? vite?
Fiveplus 13 hours ago [-]
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 6 hours ago [-]
Telemetry has nothing to do with having a commitment to open-source, other than the same sort of neckbeards having strong opinions about both.
sota_pop 10 hours ago [-]
> 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
> 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.
sharkjacobs 10 hours ago [-]
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 10 hours ago [-]
As the owner they dictate their priorities, whether around features or tighter integration with their ecosystem.
sharkjacobs 10 hours ago [-]
Yes I agree. And I think that joining OpenAI will probably change their priorities, and that sucks.
mark_l_watson 13 hours ago [-]
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.
isodev 13 hours ago [-]
And this is why we don't use tools by VC funded corps.
seanplusplus 13 hours ago [-]
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.
6thbit 6 hours ago [-]
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
bmitc 4 hours ago [-]
> we’ll explore deeper integrations that allow Codex to interact more directly with the tools developers already use
Gross.
gritspants 13 hours ago [-]
I'm assuming that they were buying great Rust devs (given codex is written in it).
opyate 13 hours ago [-]
This is your friendly PSA that pip-tools still exist.
Ah but that's not a shiny new tool I can add to my cv /s
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 6 hours ago [-]
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.
austinjp 4 hours ago [-]
Note the "/s" at the end of their post, indicating sarcasm.
Mxbonn 15 hours ago [-]
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.
gehsty 4 hours ago [-]
They should be allowed to make money from their work. Their work is MIT licensed, if it goes south it is rescuable by the community.
Things come and go, let’s not beat up some dudes who made some cool stuff, made everyone’s lives easier and then sold up. There is a timeline where this makes UV / python better.
bmitc 4 hours ago [-]
That's all fine. I don't think anyone is upset they got purchased. It's clear it was heading that direction anyway. What everyone is upset about is that they were purchased by OpenAI, who isn't exactly a trustworthy company.
backwardation_b 15 hours ago [-]
I like uv, but not sure this is a good path forward for the python ecosystem.
pas 15 hours ago [-]
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 14 hours ago [-]
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 6 hours ago [-]
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.
hmokiguess 14 hours ago [-]
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?
tuananh 3 hours ago [-]
they said they will keep maintaining uv/ruff/ty ... but that's an impossible promise to keep with their priority changes once they are in the bed with OAI.
cozzyd 14 hours ago [-]
This will solve the problem of when the package you want to install doesn't exist yet.
kaffekaka 8 hours ago [-]
It will simply create it?
bergheim 4 hours ago [-]
Given their statements, influencers and indeed their raison d'être I don't understand why this and bun was acquired? Why did they not just Ralph loop it? Claude is famously not made by humans anymore.
One prompt and call it a weekend. Surely they have the compute.
Oooooh, right.
Same reason we don't have windows 41 either.
jt-hill 9 hours ago [-]
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.
natemcintosh 13 hours ago [-]
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.
zx8080 2 hours ago [-]
Counting days until "uv will stop being dveloped".
ddxv 14 hours ago [-]
This is why I still like to setup projects and environments with my own `make` `venv` and `pip`.
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 6 hours ago [-]
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.
ddxv 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, I think we are mostly in agreement. I tried `uv` several times and never wanted to add it as a dependency because I wasn't convinced by the QOL. That being said, the biggest concern I always had was just that it was adding another layer of complexity and similar to Conda or pyenv it just wasn't something I was going to like.
I probably did come off a bit 'told you so' but I guess it was more that it felt like this was finally an answer to a question/curiosity I've had about `uv` where I didn't understand the dissonance between how others felt about it and how I did.
vinhnx 12 hours ago [-]
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.
fortuitous-frog 13 hours ago [-]
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.
krick 12 hours ago [-]
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.
walthamstow 12 hours ago [-]
Charlie's fine. OpenAI are the problem here. Similar situation to steipete. Happy for the person, sad for the tool/ecosystem/everyone else.
wiseowise 12 hours ago [-]
Not similar at all. One has been a miracle for the Python ecosystem, another was a small scale Twitter hype-fart.
fortuitous-frog 12 hours ago [-]
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 6 hours ago [-]
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.
yoyohello13 13 hours ago [-]
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.
tom1337 15 hours ago [-]
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 14 hours ago [-]
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
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 14 hours ago [-]
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.
JoshPurtell 11 hours ago [-]
Codex is not far behind Claude Code
cute_boi 13 hours ago [-]
Honestly, I like codex performance compared to claude code.
wraptile 12 hours ago [-]
Haha just migrated everything off openai and on ruff/uv/ty last week. Sorry guys, it's clearly my fault.
looneysquash 10 hours ago [-]
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.)
dheatov 1 hours ago [-]
They don't really care or like what Astral is doing right now, but they have thoughts about what they can make Astral do for them, and they really fancy those thoughts.
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 6 hours ago [-]
It’s not a merger.
sesm 8 hours ago [-]
To buy the users
amterp 14 hours ago [-]
Happy for the devs, they deserve the presumably massive payout for the amount of value they’ve brought to the Python community.
AnishLaddha 14 hours ago [-]
F*CK. take everything from me why dontcha?
pgwalsh 13 hours ago [-]
UV, Ruff, and Ty are all very good things, hopefully that doesn't change and gets better.
krick 10 hours ago [-]
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.
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 13 hours ago [-]
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.
execution 11 hours ago [-]
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.
phlakaton 15 hours ago [-]
I hope OpenAI realizes they cannot buy developer goodwill.
this_user 14 hours ago [-]
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 14 hours ago [-]
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.
__mharrison__ 13 hours ago [-]
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.
19205817 10 hours ago [-]
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 6 hours ago [-]
…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?
sublime_happen 14 hours ago [-]
these (uv and bun) are not acquihires, they're acqui-rootaccess
edelbitter 11 hours ago [-]
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.
OutOfHere 12 hours ago [-]
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 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
geophph 15 hours ago [-]
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.
dinosor 15 hours ago [-]
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 14 hours ago [-]
"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."
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)
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 7 hours ago [-]
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.
bobajeff 14 hours ago [-]
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.
skeledrew 13 hours ago [-]
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 12 hours ago [-]
You most certainly should not have stuck with Conda
fud101 1 hours ago [-]
Well this sucks. So the most evil new company has acquired the most exciting 'open' source company. The vibes are about to get bad. Hopefully this speeds up the next phase of AI destroying the economy and everything good about tech.
chocks 13 hours ago [-]
Fantastic for the team, huge fan for Ruff and Uv. Hope OpenAI continues with the OSS tooling and not introduce restrictive licensing.
testfrequency 13 hours ago [-]
I’ve been thinking about purchasing zsh myself
articsputnik 14 hours ago [-]
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.
ontouchstart 12 hours ago [-]
It is interesting to see this after yesterday’s announcement of Unsloth Studio:
There is still a lot of room to grow in the space of software packaging and distribution.
seanrrr 12 hours ago [-]
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.
pjmlp 14 hours ago [-]
Great that I keep using traditional Python tools.
bilalel 8 hours ago [-]
That's unfortunate for the python community.
I can understand the move by Astral team, but it's still difficult to accept it.
duskdozer 14 hours ago [-]
Not surprised at all on this. I've been really suspicious about how hard `uv` was being pushed in 24/25.
moregrist 13 hours ago [-]
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.
edelbitter 9 hours ago [-]
> 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.
optionalsquid 10 hours ago [-]
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 10 hours ago [-]
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 6 hours ago [-]
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
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 6 hours ago [-]
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.
zemo 14 hours ago [-]
"was being pushed" ... by whom? I think there's widespread grassroots support for it because it's a good tool.
a_t48 13 hours ago [-]
Hey now, I was a completely organic shill! I worked for free!
yoyohello13 13 hours ago [-]
uv and ruff are incredible tools for python development, and I've loved my time using ty. This acquisition is absolutely terrible.
linhns 11 hours ago [-]
> It is increasingly clear to me that Codex is that frontier.
I'm not really sure about this.
portly 9 hours ago [-]
Will this be the beginning of the Great Rust vs Zig battle ?
ebri 9 hours ago [-]
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.
readitalready 14 hours ago [-]
I'd expect OpenAi to make some type of Github clone next, perhaps with Astral, or maybe with jujutsu.
PurpleRamen 14 hours ago [-]
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?
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?
Tyrubias 14 hours ago [-]
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 14 hours ago [-]
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 6 hours ago [-]
And which one are you again? The least useful of them all.
brooke2k 13 hours ago [-]
nooooooooooooooo god why. I loved uv. just why
15 hours ago [-]
applfanboysbgon 15 hours ago [-]
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.
tedsanders 12 hours ago [-]
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 12 hours ago [-]
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?
lm28469 13 hours ago [-]
They said it'll be good enough in two weeks, give them some time!
XCSme 13 hours ago [-]
Which year was that?
lm28469 13 hours ago [-]
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
wilkystyle 13 hours ago [-]
All of them
siva7 13 hours ago [-]
They're not buying developers, they are buying the whole ecosystem to produce software. Still aligned with their original message.
applfanboysbgon 13 hours ago [-]
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 13 hours ago [-]
Or, they could use a battle-proven existing solution because they can.
applfanboysbgon 13 hours ago [-]
"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 6 hours ago [-]
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?
applfanboysbgon 5 hours ago [-]
Not anti-AI, but I am anti-gaslighting, and you are gaslighting just as well as Sam Altman here. Altman won't shut the fuck up about AGI, swapping between "AGI is here" one day and then "AGI is coming in two weeks" the next without a hint of shame as he lies to the public, lies to the media, and lies to investors. "Completely fictionalised worldview", fuck me you're good at this, I must have been imagining the fact that literally every single fucking day there's a thread at the top of HN declaring that anyone who still reads code no longer has a place, I must have been imagining things when the Amazon CEO said he was laying off developers because agents will replace them, I must have been imagining the fact that a ~trillion dollars are being invested into a chatbot on the supposition that if you just give it two more weeks, two more weeks, it will replace the entire white collar labour force.
wiseowise 12 hours ago [-]
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 12 hours ago [-]
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 12 hours ago [-]
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 12 hours ago [-]
> 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 12 hours ago [-]
Why would they diffuse their attention when competition is not sleeping?
applfanboysbgon 12 hours ago [-]
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 10 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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.
largbae 13 hours ago [-]
They're writing the software to end all softwares!
tripledry 13 hours ago [-]
When someone at work talks about all software devs being replaced I link them to the Anthropic career pages.
avaer 14 hours ago [-]
As good as the team is, that's not what they're buying in this case.
suddenlybananas 14 hours ago [-]
What are they buying?
rvnx 14 hours ago [-]
> 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 14 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
tgtweak 13 hours ago [-]
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.
zanie 13 hours ago [-]
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 13 hours ago [-]
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 12 hours ago [-]
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.
waynesonfire 13 hours ago [-]
> They raised 4M USD
What was their pitch?
tgtweak 12 hours ago [-]
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 14 hours ago [-]
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 7 hours ago [-]
Maybe OpenAI literally considers themselves as the ultimate non-profit company. Hmm…
KeplerBoy 14 hours ago [-]
mindshare and a central piece of the python package management ecosystem.
bootsmann 14 hours ago [-]
Most popular product on the planet acquires a random python packaging org for mindshare? What am I not seeing here?
nilkn 14 hours ago [-]
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 14 hours ago [-]
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.
__float 14 hours ago [-]
"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.
everforward 14 hours ago [-]
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 13 hours ago [-]
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.
dcreager 12 hours ago [-]
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!
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 11 hours ago [-]
If you’re talking about magic methods/properties enabled by reflection and macros, then you’re no longer statically analyzing the code.
OJFord 14 hours ago [-]
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.
mcmcmc 14 hours ago [-]
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
KeplerBoy 14 hours ago [-]
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.
aldanor 14 hours ago [-]
One of the popular products on the planet acquires the most popular python packaging org
Ygg2 14 hours ago [-]
I didn't know Claude bought Astral! /S
contagiousflow 14 hours ago [-]
Why can't they just vibe code a uv replacement?
KeplerBoy 14 hours ago [-]
They can, everyone can.
Good luck vibe coding marketshare for your new tool.
freetonik 14 hours ago [-]
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..."
drgiggles 14 hours ago [-]
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.
cesarvarela 13 hours ago [-]
But new tools (like uv) start with no market share.
suddenlybananas 14 hours ago [-]
Why would that marketshare be valuable?
14 hours ago [-]
huqedato 14 hours ago [-]
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 14 hours ago [-]
What competition was OpenAI likely to face from a team working on fast Python tooling?
huqedato 13 hours ago [-]
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 13 hours ago [-]
Sitting on cash as a company also looks bad to investors
cozzyd 13 hours ago [-]
$ uv install claude-agent-sdk
I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that
noodletheworld 14 hours ago [-]
uv
waynesonfire 13 hours ago [-]
And, they buy a company writing tooling for Python in not Python.
LollipopYakuza 13 hours ago [-]
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 6 hours ago [-]
Next you’ll complain about CPython being written in C.
AlexCoventry 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dewey 14 hours ago [-]
And buying a niche developer tool is helping with that?
throawayonthe 14 hours ago [-]
i think the point that comment is making is that it's an acquihire, that they bought it to poach the developers
sidsud 14 hours ago [-]
which AI company hasn't?
MrBuddyCasino 13 hours ago [-]
"Fascism" is when military. The more military, the more fascist. According to this metric, the USSR / DDR with its "anti-fascist wall" was super extra fascist because they were armed to the teeth.
13 hours ago [-]
orbifold 13 hours ago [-]
they were definitely totalitarian, slightly different mix of ideology. Fascist is a fairly good description here, it describes close collaboration of government with corporations to advance national goals. US had somewhat fascist tendencies for a long time now.
edgyquant 10 hours ago [-]
That is most certainly not a definition of fascism nor a thing unique to it.
speedgoose 13 hours ago [-]
I was hoping that uv and ruff were the ones. I guess Python has a curse.
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.
jimmydoe 14 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
pjmlp 14 hours ago [-]
Great someone cashed out, time for the next startup idea.
merrvk 14 hours ago [-]
Who advises on these acquisitions?
Or are they just using a dartboard?
6thbit 7 hours ago [-]
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.
11 hours ago [-]
suddenlybananas 15 hours ago [-]
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.
brikym 7 hours ago [-]
Does this mean pip is finally getting PIP'd?
fastasucan 9 hours ago [-]
This leaves me a bit scared for uv and ruff to be honest.
maltelau 14 hours ago [-]
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 14 hours ago [-]
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.
jfb 11 hours ago [-]
Don't love it. But, I'm glad the Astral folks are getting the bag.
nnevatie 13 hours ago [-]
> I am so excited to keep building with you.
Fixed: I am so excited to take these millions of dollars.
Lws803 10 hours ago [-]
Wonder if they can still use claude code in their repos now
hollow-moe 14 hours ago [-]
rip uv
world2vec 14 hours ago [-]
Just when I moved from poetry to uv.
mhd 10 hours ago [-]
Maybe it's time to get out my Cowlishaw Rexx book again…
nrvn 13 hours ago [-]
Should I freeze my plans to migrate from `poetry` to `uv` at "${WORK}"?
tyree731 12 hours ago [-]
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.
butlike 13 hours ago [-]
Sure, why not
deskamess 9 hours ago [-]
uv has been very useful but I also looking at pixi. Anyone have any experience with that? I hear good things about it.
Patt_ 14 hours ago [-]
Whoa, So Sam and Drio are just gonna buy out every popular open source projects now?
0xDEFACED 14 hours ago [-]
will private packages hosted on pyx be available for openai to use as training data?
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 6 hours ago [-]
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.
joshuawright11 10 hours ago [-]
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!
jdgoesmarching 10 hours ago [-]
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.
dgb23 10 hours ago [-]
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.
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 6 hours ago [-]
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.
barnabee 10 hours ago [-]
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.
daredoes 12 hours ago [-]
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 12 hours ago [-]
Extremely stupid argument. It doesn’t matter how good is your car if the driver is lacking.
QuadrupleA 12 hours ago [-]
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 10 hours ago [-]
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 10 hours ago [-]
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).
Bnjoroge 14 hours ago [-]
This was pretty obvious to just about anyone tbh. FastAPI is probably next
vcs gotta eat somehow, and iirc they were building a "fastapi cloud platform"
incognito124 13 hours ago [-]
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"
Bnjoroge 12 hours ago [-]
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.
How are they acquiring it without "open" in their name?
colesantiago 15 hours ago [-]
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 14 hours ago [-]
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 14 hours ago [-]
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.
wiseowise 9 hours ago [-]
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 6 hours ago [-]
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.
waba99 11 hours ago [-]
I wonder who's going to pick up VoidZero
wrqvrwvq 14 hours ago [-]
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 12 hours ago [-]
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.
tgtweak 14 hours ago [-]
Amusing that the best python tools are written entirely in rust.
wiseowise 12 hours ago [-]
…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?
Kwpolska 12 hours ago [-]
That's what you get with toy languages.
gessha 13 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
Fervicus 14 hours ago [-]
I (along with many others) always thought that Astral being VC backed is going to lead to a future disappointment for the community.
duskdozer 13 hours ago [-]
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 10 hours ago [-]
I at least thought we'd get a few more good years before the rug pull.
nusl 14 hours ago [-]
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.
Unfortunate, wince I trust Astral, and can't say the same about openAI
brcmthrowaway 12 hours ago [-]
Can Astral's stuff be forked?
croes 12 hours ago [-]
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 7 hours ago [-]
> And now they help make killing more productive
As do our taxes.
emddudley 13 hours ago [-]
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.
wiseowise 12 hours ago [-]
So begins the uv-Bun war.
caidan 11 hours ago [-]
Booooooooooooooooooo
cess11 14 hours ago [-]
If I were to engage in Python development, what's the alternative to uv?
bikelang 14 hours ago [-]
Poetry was the best alt-package manager before uv came along. That said - uv completely outclassed it.
cess11 12 hours ago [-]
Looks like I can wrap my head around it, thanks.
duskdozer 14 hours ago [-]
What are you having an issue with? Environments? pyenv. Dependency management? pip+requirements.
cess11 12 hours ago [-]
I'll make a note of this, thanks.
umren 14 hours ago [-]
no real alternative
petterroea 14 hours ago [-]
How does this make sense
dec0dedab0de 12 hours ago [-]
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.
cesarvarela 13 hours ago [-]
So vite.dev is next.
wolvesechoes 11 hours ago [-]
Another HN darling falls from grace. But hey, the next one will not follow the same steps!
yoyohello13 13 hours ago [-]
Oh no! This is actually terrible. Get ready for "premium tooling only available in Codex(TM)".
zoobab 14 hours ago [-]
Undisclosed amount?
butterlettuce 13 hours ago [-]
This is where POTUS should step in and stop this sale. Not cool.
saxwick 13 hours ago [-]
Btw astral repo has Claude as one of its top contributors
am17an 14 hours ago [-]
Welp, back to pip
fantasizr 12 hours ago [-]
should I be glad I never got off pip?
0dayman 10 hours ago [-]
won't increase your subscriptions, people are dropping out in the millions and no one wants jewPT
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 6 hours ago [-]
Piss off with that antisemitism. Absolutely cringe.
elAhmo 9 hours ago [-]
Terrible news for Python ecosystem. I guess the money was too much to reject this ridiculous offer.
OutOfHere 12 hours ago [-]
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.
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?
noodletheworld 14 hours ago [-]
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 14 hours ago [-]
“There is no question openai will start selling/bundling codex (and codex subscriptions) with uv.”
What does that even mean?
FergusArgyll 14 hours ago [-]
Hn's favorite company meets hn's most hated company.
Hilarity in the comments will ensue
Imustaskforhelp 14 hours ago [-]
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 :(
incognito124 14 hours ago [-]
Thank you n-gate
throwa356262 14 hours ago [-]
"Sir, you now have twice as many private jets as Dario"
"But he owns a tooling company. WHY can't I have that? :( :("
ranaaditya 12 hours ago [-]
congrats team !
ajkjk 11 hours ago [-]
what a shame
prodigycorp 14 hours ago [-]
Codex team now has the legends who created Pyright and UV/Ruff/Ty.
jmux 13 hours ago [-]
nooo
amai 11 hours ago [-]
WAT? uv now belongs to Trump mega-donors? That is not good for the Python ecosystem.
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 13 hours ago [-]
Pretty sure that uses UV to do it's magic
notatallshaw 10 hours ago [-]
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__ 11 hours ago [-]
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 10 hours ago [-]
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/
mkrd 10 hours ago [-]
Ah shit, back to poetry
imp0cat 9 hours ago [-]
Ok I laughed, but god, please no.
Hackbraten 14 hours ago [-]
Don’t you dare enshittify my uv.
odie5533 14 hours ago [-]
Can we rename it to Codex?
patcon 4 hours ago [-]
well, fuck.
drcongo 13 hours ago [-]
This is the worst possible news. Fantastic team at Astral joining a bunch of scumbag scammers at "Open"AI.
acedTrex 14 hours ago [-]
damn it, another one bites the dust sadly
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dang 13 hours ago [-]
Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines? We've warned/asked you countless times. You should know not to post like this by now.
While I do see that the tone of the comment was stingy, it was aimed towards the frustration I have experienced while developing for Python and this piece of news as well.
I didn't see it as a bad thing as it not really aimed at anybody in particular, more like an opinion on Python's shortcomings.
I will try to post more substantive/less emotional comments going forward.
Philpax 14 hours ago [-]
Astral's tooling is excellent and almost makes up for Python being a badly-designed language. Almost.
yoyohello13 13 hours ago [-]
I work in Python every day and Astral's tools are really what made it bearable. This acquisition is so disappointing.
moralestapia 12 hours ago [-]
Agree. As many others have expressed, uv and ruff have brought some sanity to the Python toolkit.
This is a massive backward step for the Python ecosystem, but it's not like a hundred-billion dollar company will care about that.
WhereIsTheTruth 14 hours ago [-]
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!"
999900000999 14 hours ago [-]
Congrats!
This of course means more VC funding for FOSS tools since a successful exit is a positive signal.
baq 14 hours ago [-]
Funding is as good as gone until the Iran mess is over.
bogwog 14 hours ago [-]
> 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.
holografix 14 hours ago [-]
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 14 hours ago [-]
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 12 hours ago [-]
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 12 hours ago [-]
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 14 hours ago [-]
Atlassian? Bitbucket as a platform for agentic development.. shudder
KeplerBoy 14 hours ago [-]
Most likely because Jetbrains is not for sale. Google almost certainly offered to buy at some point.
wiseowise 12 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
https://pypistats.org/packages/uv
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.
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
Speaking as a grey beard myself, I think its safe to say that the grey beards among us will always deride those who didn't have to work as hard as they did.
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!
To make it good, you need to review and interate.
https://peps.python.org/pep-0723/
* disclosure: We are a commercial client of astral.sh
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.
I always looked down on the Java ecosystem but if it turns out Maven had a better story all along and we all overlooked it, that's wild.
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.
Poetry having users isn’t the metric for success. pip having way less users is.
Poetry's CLI would often, for me, just fall over and crash. Crashing a lot is not a fundamental problem in the sense you can fix the bugs, but hey I'm not hitting uv crashes.
pipenv was even worse in terms of just hanging during package resolution. Tools that hang are not tools you want in a CI pipeline!
The end result: `uv run` I expect to work. `pipenv` or `poetry` calls I have to assume don't work, have to put retries into CI pipelines and things like that.
`uv run` a .py with inline script metadata has all the deps installed and your script running in a venv while poetry is still deciding to resolve...
...and then I’ve read the rest of your comment. Please do go read the HN guidelines.
(I'm not doing this to be a dick, I genuinely want to know what the use case is)
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”.
Things got bearable with virtualenv/virtualenv wrappers, but it was never what I would call great. Pip was always painful, and slow. I never looked forward to using them - and every time I worked on a new system - the amount of finaggling I had to do to avoid problems, and the amount of time I spent supporting other people who had problems was significant.
The day I first used uv (about is as memorable to me as the the day I first started using python (roughly 2004) - everything changed.
I've used uv pretty much every single day since then and the joy has never left. Every operation is twitch fast. There has never once been any issues. Combined with direnv - I can create projects/venvs on the fly so quickly I don't even bother using it's various affordances to run projects without a venv.
To put it succinctly - uv gives me two things.
One - zero messing around with virtualenvwrappers and friends. For whatever reason, I've never once run into an error like "virtualenvwrapper.sh: There was a problem running the initialization hooks."
Two - fast. It may be the fastest software I've ever used. Everything is instant - so you never experience any type of cognitive distraction when creating a python project and diving into anything - you think it - and it's done. I genuinely look forward to uv pip install - even when it's not already in cache - the parallel download is epically fast - always a joy.
it just works. i'm not sure how else to describe it other than less faffing about. it just does the right thing, every time. there's a tiny learning curve (mostly unlearning bad or redundant habits), but once you know how to wield it, it's a one stop shop.
and as mentioned, it's crazy fast.
You should really qualify that statement, it implies that the Python ecosystem is bearable.
See the point ?
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."
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
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.
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.
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.
Ruff isn’t stable yet either and has evolved into the de facto standard for new projects. It has more than double the amount of rules than Pylint does. Also downloaded more than 3 times as often as Pylint in the past month.
Pylint has some advantages, sure, but Ruffs adoption speaks for itself. Pylint is 25 years old. You’d hope they do some things better.
Saying that uv is their only winner is a hilarious take.
Then import that tool and and check if __name__ == "__main__"
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.
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.
Or, more relevant to this conversion: If they closed source tomorrow, the community could fork the current version.
() Sure, they were on the shoulders of giants
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.
Not disputing that it's a great and widely used tool, BTW.
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.
- 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...
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.
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.
https://github.com/direnv/direnv/wiki/Python#uv
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?
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.
Go and Rust, specifically, seem a bit odd to be allergic to. Their "package managers" are largely downloading sources into your code repository, not downloading/installing truly arbitrary stuff. How is that different from your (presumably "wget the file into my repo or include path") workflow for depending on a header-only C library from the internet which your OS doesn't repackage?
I understand if your resistance to those platforms is because of how much source code things download, but that still seems qualitatively different to me from "npm install can do god-knows-what to my workstation" or "pip install can install packages that shadow system-wide trusted ones".
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.
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.
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.
(Source: I'm an Astral employee.)
That's a point of information, not a point of order.
[1]: https://astral.sh/blog/introducing-pyx
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).
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.
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 :).
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.
It's not there yet, but it's getting there.
https://xkcd.com/2347/
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.
That means OpenAI will be able to do whatever they want to your Python binaries, including every Python binary in your deployments, with whatever telemetry that want to instrument in the builds.
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?
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.
Just wait till they offer "Developer Certification" so you have to pay them to get a shiny little badge and a certificate while they go around saying no badge = you're shit.
because AGI doesn't grow in a cage, it requires a piece of software running somewhere. someone has to build both to get that happen. that is like a high school level question.
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.
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.
[0] https://legalblogs.wolterskluwer.com/copyright-blog/the-bart...
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.
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.
patents protect ideas, copyright protects artistic expressions of ideas
I'm careful to not rely too heavily on VC funded open source whenever I can avoid it.
All so they could just vacuum it all up and resell it with impunity.
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.
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.
https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/1150/is-my-co...
So long ago, in fact, that it was five years before their acquisition by Microsoft.
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.
The FOSS community at large embraced permissive licenses and it had nothing to do with the interests of big corporations.
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
What is far more likely is that governments use AI to oppress their citizens with robots and drones. That is the thing to be scared of.
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.
The tradeoff with these unified LPDDR machines is compute and memory throughput. You'll have to live with the ~50 token/sec rate, and compact your prefix aggressively. That said, I'd take the effortless local model capability over outright speed any day.
Hope the popularity of these machines could prompt future models to offer perfect size fits: 80 GiB quantized on 128 GiB box, 480 GiB quantized on 512 GiB box, etc.
It's probably a trade secret, but what's the actual per-user resource requirement to run the model?
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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).
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.
The GPL (and even the AGPL) doesn't require you to make your modified source code publicly available (Debian explicitly considers licenses with this requirement non-free). The GPL only states you need to provide your customers with source code.
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.
The ecosystem will be this way for a while, if not the new normal.
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".
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?
The fuck does OpenAI have to offer?
Nothing I need.
The only reason Gemini is the best is UX, really running my own Mistral 7b is more than fine.
Because slow ass Gemini is still a slightly more convenient experience I use that.
Nobody OWNS nor will own the means of essentially thoughts. It’s such a silly idea I wonder if it’s propaganda.
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.
I can't believe people say this with a straight face
It's fast enough for many use cases. That doesn't mean that there is no room for optimization, but this is far less a deciding factor these days.
> it's not type safe
You can do static analysis with Mypy and other tools.
> it has not real concurrency.
There's different mechanisms for running things concurrently in Python. And there's an active effort to remove the GIL. I also have to ask: What is "real" concurrency?
Admittedly, the things you mention are not Python's strongest points. But they are far from being dealbreakers.
Is it? We still need meatspace humans to vet what these AI agents produce. Languages like C++ / Rust etc still require huge cognitive overhead relative to Python & that will not change anytime soon.
Unless the entire global economy can run on agents with minimal human supervision someone still has to grapple with the essential complexity of getting a computer to do useful things. At least with Python that complexity is locked away within the CPython interpreter.
Also an aside, when has a language ever gotten traction based solely on its technical merits? Popularity is driven by ease-of-use, fashion, mindshare, timing etc.
Overall the switch has been very much loved. Everything is faster and more stable, we haven't seen much of a reduction in output
And as someone who loves Python and has written a lot of it, I tend to agree. It's increasingly clear the way to be productive with AI coding and the way to make it reliable is to make sure AI works within strong guardrails, with testsuites, etc. that combat and corral the inherent indeterminism and problems like prompt injection as much as possible.
Getting help from the language - having the static tooling be as strict and uncompromising as possible, and delegating having to deal with the pain to AI - seems the right way.
Secondly it's non factual. Python's market share grew in 2025[1][2][3]. Probably driven by AI demand.
[0]: even truer for natural languages.
[1]: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology#most-popular...
[2]: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#most-popular...
[3]: https://pypl.github.io/PYPL.html
Do you really think AI agents of the future will be coding in Python??? What advantage would that possibly give them? That's the only laughable take here
Rust is great. But AI isn't displacing Python anytime soon.
Moreso it sucks that Astral's been bought by a company with such a horrible leader at the helm.
There is also a really good ecosystem of libraries, especially for scientific computing. My experience has been that Claude can write good c++ code, but it's not great about optimization. So, curated Python code can often be faster than an AI's reimplementation of an algorithm in c++.
If I ask an LLM or agentic AI to build something and don't specify what language to use, I'd wager that it'll choose python most of the time. Casual programmers like academics or students who ask ChatGPT to help them write a function to do X are likely to be using Python already.
I'm not a Python evangelist by any means but to suggest that AI is going to kill Python feels like a major stretch to me.
EDIT: when I say that Python can do anything any other language can do, that's with the adage in mind. Python is the second best language for every task.
My last two companies went all in on python and really regretted it. It's performance and concurrency primitives really hurt as you scale
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.
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.
Personally, I'd like to know, since you have been active in Korea, if there is any groups that I can attend to.
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!
Astral was founded as a private company. Its team has presumably worked hard to build something valuable. Calling their compensation for that work 'betrayal' is unfair.
Community-based software development sounds nice. But with rare exception, it gets outcompeted by start-ups. Start-ups work, and they work well. What is problematic is the tech giants' monopoly of the acquisition endpoint. Figuring out ways for communities to compete with said giants as potential acquirers is worth looking into–maybe public loans to groups of developers who can show (a) they're committed to keep paying for the product and (b) aren't getting kicked back.
I would absolutely love to know more about this if you are willing to share the story?
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
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.
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?
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.
Plus the obvious need for a place to host proprietary internal libraries.
It was because Astral was VC funded.
https://astral.sh/blog/announcing-astral-the-company-behind-...
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.
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).
Also, the survivors are the exception, not the rule.
Either pay for the product, or use stuff that isn't dependent on VC money, this is always how it ends.
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).
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.
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).
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
I get the point you're making, but the way you introduced it isn't conducive to productive conversation.
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.
https://xcancel.com/gdb
https://xcancel.com/sama/
The only thing that could prevent this is lack of ability to execute, like how Uber wanted to replace drivers with FSD vehicles.
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.
Those two are pathological liars, so what they write about means very, very little.
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.
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
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.
We need public investment in open source, in the form of grants, not more private partnerships that somehow always seem to hurt the community.
They bought the trust.
OpenAI isn't a VC. It's VC-backed. But so is Astral.
Unlike those react-game-engine guys over at Claude
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.
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.
[1] https://github.com/platformio/platformio-vscode-ide/issues/1...
Honestly though, it's easier to disable ~three settings in VSCode and call it a day.
Glad to hear that I am avoiding Microsoft's spam.
Probably inevitable, and I don’t blame the team, I just wish it were someone else.
Microsoft acquires Astral
Wish comes with a cost
I'm not worried about OpenAI messing up uv, I'm worried about OpenAI running out of money and cutting an unnecessary team.
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).
Sigh
It was a VC backed tool. What did you expect?
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!
From Astral the (fast) linter and type checker are pretty useful companions for agentic development.
[1] https://x.com/AprilNEA/status/2034209430158619084
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.
I think they're more into the extra context they can build for the LLM with ruff/ty.
Embrace, extend, extinguish. Time will tell.
I won't be surprised if the next step is to acquire CI/CD tools.
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.
Depends if you think the bubble is going to pop, I suppose. In some sense, independence was insulation.
Was Kenneth Reitz "core-adjacent" when Requests was brought under the PSF umbrella?
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).
That is definitely the plan!
Only time will tell if it will not affect the ecosystem negatively, best of luck though, I really hope this time is different™.
Okay, so better prepare already, folks!
I've also been in the industry for similarly long and I believe you 100% that's "all you can say" ;)
Congratulations though!
Would be a good mustache-twirling cartoon villain tactics, you know, try to prevent advances in developer experience to make vibecoding more attractive =)
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?
Now for those wondering who would fork and maintain it for free, that is more of a critic of FOSS in general.
I didn't see a single comment of "I will fork it" type.
Something like this was always inevitable. I just hope it doesn’t ruin a good thing.
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.
It would be, and yet: https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
I do not want OpenAI putting their fingers in my Python binaries, nor do I want their telemetry.
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 :-)
In a completely unrelated event, Donald sues Sam for 10M$ for calling him old, Sam grudingly agrees to pay him 16M$ and a beer.
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...
> 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.
As a user of uv who was hoping it would be a long term stable predictable uninteresting part of my toolchain this sucks, right?
That said, I hope the excellent Astral team got a good payday.
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.
> 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
Gross.
https://github.com/jazzband/pip-tools
https://jazzband.co/news/2026/03/14/sunsetting-jazzband
* 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.
Things come and go, let’s not beat up some dudes who made some cool stuff, made everyone’s lives easier and then sold up. There is a timeline where this makes UV / python better.
(sure, it's a bit different than contributing to CPython, but I'd argue not that different)
I do not see any alignment between the Astral that I want Astral to be, and OpenAI.
One prompt and call it a weekend. Surely they have the compute.
Oooooh, right.
Same reason we don't have windows 41 either.
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.
I probably did come off a bit 'told you so' but I guess it was more that it felt like this was finally an answer to a question/curiosity I've had about `uv` where I didn't understand the dissonance between how others felt about it and how I did.
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.
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.
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.
Why buy, when they can rent?
(Not to mention, multiple companies could hire and fund them.)
[0] https://translate.kagi.com/?from=linkedin&to=en
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47408703
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Good for Astral though I guess, they do great work. Just not optimistic this is gonna be good for python devs long term.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/17/openai-preps-for-ipo-in-2026...
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Was there a better option? I’m sure. Choices were made. Regrets were had. Switching to uv was a huge improvement for our purposes.
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.
I'm not really sure about this.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(I work at Astral)
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.
What was their pitch?
Bundling codex with uv isnt going to meaningfully affect the number of people using it. It doesnt increase the switching costs or anything.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2R1PTGcwrE
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).
Not-most popular LLM software development product on the planet acquires most popular/rapidly rising python packaging org for mindshare.
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.
Good luck vibe coding marketshare for your new tool.
Ant is building their app distribution platform, so no wonder OpenAI thinking the same, it will only surprise me if they move so slow.
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.
Or are they just using a dartboard?
I didn’t see a way they ever dethroned Claude until now.
Happy as a Codex user, gloomy as a Python one.
Who's organizing a fork, or is python back to having only shitty packaging available? :(
Fixed: I am so excited to take these millions of dollars.
Congrats Astral and co!
I'm happy for the Astral team but in my opinion, big tech especially is incompatible with curiosity and hacker ethos.
If it was cheaper to use their internal AI to create these tools, they would.
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".
> 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”.
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.
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.
- I'm willing to pay for Astral ecosystem so it stays independent/open source
- I'm willing to fork the project
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.
[1] https://github.com/astral-sh/uv
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.
> I started Astral to make programming more productive.
And now they help make killing more productive
As do our taxes.
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.
what can I say?
Any good alternatives to uv/plans for community fork of 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.
Hilarity in the comments will ensue
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 :(
"But he owns a tooling company. WHY can't I have that? :( :("
Have not tried it too much yet because I was pretty content with `uv`, but I've heard lots of good things about it
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
While I do see that the tone of the comment was stingy, it was aimed towards the frustration I have experienced while developing for Python and this piece of news as well.
I didn't see it as a bad thing as it not really aimed at anybody in particular, more like an opinion on Python's shortcomings.
I will try to post more substantive/less emotional comments going forward.
This is a massive backward step for the Python ecosystem, but it's not like a hundred-billion dollar company will care about that.
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!"
This of course means more VC funding for FOSS tools since 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.
What I don’t understand is why hasn’t anyone bought Jetbrains yet.
Atlassian? AWS? Google?
I've only been a JetBrains user for five years but it's felt like it's only getting worse the whole time.