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Astral to Join OpenAI

astral.sh

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Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#661

Post by jitl »

19205817 wrote: post #585
throwaway63467 wrote: post #194

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.

They were hyped here without any pushback. Maybe OpenAI thinks the Astral folks will now evangelize and foist Codex and ChatGPT onto the open source "community". People need to be very careful about resisting. OpenAI wants to make everyone unemployed, works with the Pentagon, steals IP, and copyright whistleblowers end up getting killed under mysterious circumstances.

Every uv-related post here had a few people going "i don't want to use VC funded stuff!! what about rug pull!!", although perhaps they were drowned out eventually all the people (like me) going "uv is fantastic and solves 15 years of python packaging hell"

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#662

Post by JoshTriplett »

bix6 wrote: post #173
cube2222 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. (th…

And how likely is that? Once you’re acquired you have to do what the boss says. That means prioritizing your work to benefit the company. That is often not compatible with true open source. How frequently do acquired projects seriously maintain their independence? That is rare. They may have more resources but they also have obligations. And this doesn’t even touch on the whole commodification and box out strategy th…

> Once you’re acquired you have to do what the boss says.

Or quit, and take the (Open Source) project and community with you. Companies sometimes discover this the hard way; see, for instance, the story of how Hudson became Jenkins.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#663

Post by sdevonoes »

FuckButtons wrote: post #418
rob wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a tiny project with over 100 million downloads every month, over 4 million every day. No big deal. Just a small shop, don't overstate its importance. https://pypistats.org/packages/uv

Sure, but if tomorrow uv and ruff ceased to exist, we could all go back to any number of other solutions.

I wish that were also true for the case of Claude/Codex/etc

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#664

Post by jitl »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #474
giancarlostoro wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is an MIT licensed project, someone will absolutely fork it.

You seem to be underestestimating the laziness of the people, and overestimating their resolve. Angry forks usually don't last, angst doesn't prevent maintenance burnouts.

clicking "fork" in github is pretty easy

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#665

Post by jitl »

dahlia wrote: post #414

What strikes me most about this acquisition isn't the AI angle. It's the question of why so many open source tools get built by startup teams in the first place. I maintain an open source project funded by the Sovereign Tech Fund. Getting there wasn't easy: the application process is long, the amounts are modest compared to a VC round, and you have to build community trust before any of that becomes possible. But the…

capitalism / the bazaar is faster than communism / the cathedral, news at 11

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#666

Post by FreakLegion »

tomrod wrote: post #422
FuckButtons wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but if tomorrow uv and ruff ceased to exist, we could all go back to any number of other solutions.

Maybe you could. I would stare longingly into the void, wondering if I can ever work another python project after having experienced uv, ruff, and ty. Such an outcome would make me wonder regarding the wisdom of "It is better to have love and lost than to have never loved at all."

Ruff is performant but finds about half the issues Pylint does (see https://github.com/astral-sh/ruff/issues/970). Ty is quantitatively the worst of the well-known type checkers (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47398023). Uv is Astral's only winner.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#667

Post by sesm »

looneysquash wrote: post #525

I don't get it. Why buy Astral? Why not just fund it? Why not just hire the company to do whatever work you want to get out of the team as part of the merger? Why buy, when they can rent? (Not to mention, multiple companies could hire and fund them.)

To buy the users

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#670

Post by rtpg »

theptip wrote: post #616
arw0n wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ruff is nice, but not important, uv is one of the few things making the python ecosystem bearable. Python is a language for monkeys, and if you don't give monkeys good tools, they will forever entangle themselves and you . It is all garbage wrapped in garbage. At least let me deploy it without having to manually detangle all that garbage by version. I'm done pretending this is a "right tools for the right job" kind o…

I agree uv is great but let’s not get carried away here. Poetry is good, pip was fine for many use-cases after they added native lock files.

Poetry and friends are so bad that many people continued just using pip -r requirements.txt despite knowing about this other stuff

Poetry having users isn’t the metric for success. pip having way less users is.

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