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Astral to Join OpenAI

astral.sh

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Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#341
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 optio…

Literally there is no public comment you are allowed to make that we haven't heard 100 times before.

Congratulations though!

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#342
post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

uv solved it, it will be the only tool people use in 2 more years. if you’re a python shop / expert then you can do pip etc but uv turned incidental python + deps from a huge PITA for the rest of us, to It Just Works simplicity on the same level or better than Golang.

I don't want software on my computer, that just downloads and installs random stuff. This is the job of the OS in particular the package manager.

Do you not use non-OS package managers?

If not, do you develop software with source dependencies (go, java, node, rust, python)? If so, how do you handle acquiring those dependencies—by hand or using a tool?

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#343

While I -- like most other commenters -- am dubious of both OpenAI and this acquisition, I think it's pretty reasonable to wait to see how this turns out before rushing to final judgment. Everything I've seen from Astral and Charlie indicates they're brilliant, caring, and overall reasonable folks. I think it's unfair to jump to call them sell-outs and cast uv and the rest as doomed projects.

Charlie's fine. OpenAI are the problem here. Similar situation to steipete. Happy for the person, sad for the tool/ecosystem/everyone else.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#344
It would seem to me that purchasing a piece of software as an AI company is just an outright admission that they could not generate an equivalent piece of software for a better price?

If it was cheaper to use their internal AI to create these tools, they would.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#346

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.

As a point of information: Astral did not, in fact, burn through its VC money. I agree that dev tools are difficult to monetize, though. (Source: I'm an Astral employee.)

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Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#347
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…

[deleted]

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#349
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't remember GitHub or Amazon advocating MIT over GPL. Feel free to prove me wrong by pointing out this massive amount of advocacy from "mega-clouds" that changed people's minds. The ads, the mailing list posts, social media comments. Anything at all you can trace to "mega-clouds" execs.

https://choosealicense.com/ https://choosealicense.com/about/ > "GitHub wants to help developers choose an open source license for their source code." This was built by GitHub Inc a very very long time ago.

>This was built by GitHub Inc a very very long time ago.

So long ago, in fact, that it was five years before their acquisition by Microsoft.

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