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Astral to Join OpenAI

astral.sh

211–220 of 951 posts

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#211
post #67

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 Clau…

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.

> 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.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#212
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Small tool shop, burning VC money, true. "Tiny part of the Python ecosystem" is an understatement given how much impact uv has made alone.

Do you have any statistics for that?

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#213

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? :(

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.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#214

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.

[flagged]

"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.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#215

Not surprised at all on this. I've been really suspicious about how hard `uv` was being pushed in 24/25.

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.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#217
post #69
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

that was never going to work, let's be honest

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#219
post #67

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 Clau…

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?

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#220
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If LLMs turn out to be such a force multiplier, the way to fight it is to ensure that there are open source LLMs.

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.

> 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?

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