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Astral to Join OpenAI

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Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#351

Post by zbentley »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #298
jjice wrote: post #95

Not who I would've liked to acquire Astral. As long as OpenAI doesn't force bad decisions on to Astral too hard, I'm very happy for the Astral team. They've been making some of the best Python tooling that has made the ecosystem so much better IME.

Eh, if it turns out to be too bad I guess I’ll just end up switching back to pipenv, which is the closest thing to uv (especially due to the automatic Python version management, but not as fast).

Does pipenv download and install prebuilt interpreters when managing Python versions? Last I used it it relied on pyenv to do a local build, which is incredibly finicky on heterogenous fleets of computers.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#352

Post by tyree731 »

nrvn wrote: post #278

Should I freeze my plans to migrate from `poetry` to `uv` at "${WORK}"?

Assuming things start getting weird about 18 months from now, poetry and uv have very similar semantics, so 18 months of comically faster workflows sounds nice.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#353

Post by benterix »

woodruffw wrote: post #331
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.

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.)

Finally someone competent to answer the crucial question. Taken into account the enormous amount of excellent work you did, and the fact that dev tools are hard to monetize, what was your strategy?

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#355

Post by pixelsort »

NiloCK wrote: 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…

In the many darker timelines that one can extrapolate, capturing essential tech stacks is just a pre-cursor to capturing hiring.

Once we start seeing Open AI and Anthropic getting into the certifications and testing they'll quickly become the gold standard. They won't even need to actually test anyone. People will simply consent to having their chat interactions analyzed.

The models collect more information about us than we could ever imagine because definitionally, those features are unknown unknowns for humans. For ML, the gaps in our thinking carry far richer information about is than our actual vocabularies, topics of interest, or stylometric idiosyncrasies.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#357

Post by moralestapia »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #337
Philpax wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Astral's tooling is excellent and almost makes up for Python being a badly-designed language. Almost.

I work in Python every day and Astral's tools are really what made it bearable. This acquisition is so disappointing.

Agree. As many others have expressed, uv and ruff have brought some sanity to the Python toolkit.

This is a massive backward step for the Python ecosystem, but it's not like a hundred-billion dollar company will care about that.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#358

Post by benterix »

petcat wrote: post #224
volkercraig wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You probably mean AGPL. Companies hated GPL from the start and nothing has changed to this day. But the cloud is specifically against AGPL.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#359

Post by __mharrison__ »

throwaway63467 wrote: post #194
NiloCK wrote: 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 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.

uv is the best thing to happen to package management in Python.

It's not perfect, but it is light-years better than what preceded it.

I jumped ship to it and have not looked back. (So have many of my clients).

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#360

Post by dismalaf »

NiloCK wrote: 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…

Of course they're trying to capture existing tech stacks. The models themselves are plateauing (most advancement is coming from the non-LLM parts of the software), they took too much VC money so they need to make some of it back. So gobbling up wafers, software, etc... is the new plan for spending the money and trying to prevent catastrophic losses.
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