Astral to Join OpenAI • Hacker News Board

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#51

Post by jpalomaki » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 1:46 PM UTC

lucrbvi wrote: post #3

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!

Somebody took a deeper look at Claude Code and claims to find evidence of Anthropic's PaaS offering [1]. There's certainly money to be made by offering a nice platform where "citizen developers" can push their code.

From Astral the (fast) linter and type checker are pretty useful companions for agentic development.

[1] https://x.com/AprilNEA/status/2034209430158619084

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#52

Post by philipallstar » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 1:46 PM UTC

afavour wrote: post #43

And so, more core functionality developers depend on becomes dependent on a continuing stream of billions in VC funding. What could go wrong?

[flagged]

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#53

Post by holografix » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 1:46 PM UTC

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?

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#54

Post by amterp » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 1:46 PM UTC

Happy for the devs, they deserve the presumably massive payout for the amount of value they’ve brought to the Python community.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#55

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 1:47 PM UTC

Great that I keep using traditional Python tools.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#56

Post by hijodelsol » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 1:47 PM UTC

rst wrote: post #36

hijodelsol wrote: post #12

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…

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.

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)

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#57

Post by Maxion » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 1:47 PM UTC

hijodelsol wrote: post #12

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…

These tools are open source, if they lock them down the community will just fork them.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#58

Post by throwa356262 » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 1:47 PM UTC

"Sir, you now have twice as many private jets as Dario"

"But he owns a tooling company. WHY can't I have that? :( :("

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#59

Post by baq » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 1:47 PM UTC

999900000999 wrote: post #42

Congrats! This of course means more VC funding for FOSS tools since a successful exit is a positive signal.

Funding is as good as gone until the Iran mess is over.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#60

Post by suddenlybananas » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 1:47 PM UTC

avaer wrote: post #48

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #25

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.

As good as the team is, that's not what they're buying in this case.

What are they buying?