Astral to Join OpenAI • Hacker News Board

holografix wrote: post #53

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?

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.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#75

Post by KeplerBoy » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 1:50 PM UTC

suddenlybananas wrote: post #60

avaer wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What are they buying?

mindshare and a central piece of the python package management ecosystem.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#76

Post by hijodelsol » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 1:50 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #65

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…

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.

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.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#77

Post by noodletheworld » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 1:50 PM UTC

suddenlybananas wrote: post #60

avaer wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What are they buying?

uv

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#78

Post by lucrbvi » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 1:51 PM UTC

jpalomaki wrote: post #51

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

I wouldn't be surprised if Vercel were bought by Anthropic/OAI (but maybe it would be too expensive?)

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#79

Post by kkirsche » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 1:51 PM UTC

Happy for the team, sad for users. I just don’t believe their work will continue under new ownership

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#80

Post by throwa356262 » Thu, Mar 19, 2026, 1:51 PM UTC

weakfish wrote: post #21

What happens when OpenAI’s burn dries up their cash?

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.