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Astral to Join OpenAI

astral.sh

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Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#221
post #212
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

anecdotally every place ive worked at has switched over and never looked back.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#222

I (along with many others) always thought that Astral being VC backed is going to lead to a future disappointment for the community.

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.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#223
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)

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#224
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.

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.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#225
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

They raised 4M USD, they have 26 full-time employees (they pay 120 200K / yr, cf https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/523411-93 ). 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 dist…

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)

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#227
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…

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.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#228
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…

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.
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