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Astral to Join OpenAI
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Re: Astral to Join OpenAI
#152Re: Astral to Join OpenAI
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
As good as the team is, that's not what they're buying in this case.
What are they buying?
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.
Re: Astral to Join OpenAI
#154I hope OpenAI realizes they cannot buy developer goodwill.
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.
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.
Re: Astral to Join OpenAI
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?)
No no - SpaceX/xAi must now buy Vercel so that we can deploy our bloated Next apps to space.
Re: Astral to Join OpenAI
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are they buying?
> 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.
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.
Re: Astral to Join OpenAI
#157A 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 Clau…
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)
Re: Astral to Join OpenAI
#158Not often that I audibly groan at a HN headline :-(
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.
Re: Astral to Join OpenAI
#159Associated OpenAI post: https://openai.com/index/openai-to-acquire-astral/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47438716)
Re: Astral to Join OpenAI
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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!
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™.
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".