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Astral to Join OpenAI

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Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#481

Post by execution »

I do hope every at Astral got a a nice pay-out for this.

It does look like this is going to be the norm for popular open source projects related to AI ecosystem, but I guess open source developers need to get paid somehow if that project is their only livelihood.

Shame for the end-user though. As you will always be second guessing how they will ruin the tool, i.e. via data collection or AI-sloppifying it. It is likely OpenAI won't, but it is not a great feeling knowing a convenient tool you use is at the whim of a heartless mega-corp.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#482

Post by andrepd »

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…

"Bearded German philosopher" once again being uncannily applicable to 21st century happenings...

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#483

Post by edelbitter »

sublime_happen wrote: post #62

these (uv and bun) are not acquihires, they're acqui-rootaccess

Have you looked at the .github/ folder of any actively developed python packages lately? It has become difficult to find one where there isn't a few interesting people with code-execution-capable push/publish/cache-write access somewhere along the blown up transitive dependency/include chains.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#484

Post by sho_hn »

mountainriver wrote: post #472
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…

[flagged]

Your stance is aggressive and provocative, but no less so than the challenge AI poses to software developers in general. I think what you say should be seriously entertained.

And as someone who loves Python and has written a lot of it, I tend to agree. It's increasingly clear the way to be productive with AI coding and the way to make it reliable is to make sure AI works within strong guardrails, with testsuites, etc. that combat and corral the inherent indeterminism and problems like prompt injection as much as possible.

Getting help from the language - having the static tooling be as strict and uncompromising as possible, and delegating having to deal with the pain to AI - seems the right way.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#485

Post by alexchantavy »

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…

I think this overstates the “betrayal” angle.

A lot of great open source comes out of startups because startups are really good at shipping fast and getting distribution (open source is part of this strategy). Users can try the tool immediately, and VC funding can put a lot of talent behind building something great very quickly.

The startup model absolutely creates incentive risk, but that’s true of any project that becomes important while depending on a relatively small set of maintainers or funders.

I’m not sure an acquisition is categorically different from a maintainer eventually moving on or burning out. In all of those cases, users who depend on the project take on some risk. That’s not unique to startups; it’s true of basically any software that becomes important.

There’s no perfect structure for open source here - public funding, nonprofit support, and startups all suck in their own ways.

And on the point you make about public funding being slow: yeah, talented people can’t work full-time on important things unless there’s serious funding behind it. uv got as good as it is because the funding let exceptional people work on it full-time with a level of intensity that public funding usually does not.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#486

Post by jakeydus »

mountainriver wrote: post #472
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…

[flagged]

I feel like this is a relatively hot take. Python has advantages beyond being easy to write. It's simple. It can do just about anything any other language can do. It's not the most performant on its own, but it's performant enough for 99% of use cases, and in the 1% you can write a new or use an existing C library instead. Its simplicity and ease of adoption make python very well represented in the training data.

If I ask an LLM or agentic AI to build something and don't specify what language to use, I'd wager that it'll choose python most of the time. Casual programmers like academics or students who ask ChatGPT to help them write a function to do X are likely to be using Python already.

I'm not a Python evangelist by any means but to suggest that AI is going to kill Python feels like a major stretch to me.

EDIT: when I say that Python can do anything any other language can do, that's with the adage in mind. Python is the second best language for every task.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#487

Post by dec0dedab0de »

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).

I would much rather use pipenv, if it only had the speed of uv.

Every interface kenneth reitz originally designed was fantastic to learn and use. I wish the influx of all these non-pythonistas changing the language over the last 10 years or so would go back and learn from his stuff.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#488

Post by nazgulnarsil »

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 never made sense to have devs all over the world doing the same task with tiny variation. Centralization was inevitable. LLMs might have been a step change but the trajectory was already set.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#490

Post by saalweachter »

alex_suzuki wrote: post #158
ragebol wrote: post #112

Not often that I audibly groan at a HN headline :-(

Same here. I’ve adopted uv across all of my Python projects and couldn’t be happier. ty looks very promising as well. Probably inevitable, and I don’t blame the team, I just wish it were someone else.

I kind of feel like the nature of the Python ecosystem is a dozen or so extremely useful frameworks/tools that everyone uses heavily for 3 years and then abandons and never speaks of again.

I'm not very deep in Python anymore, but every time I dip my toes back in it's a completely different set of tools, with some noticably rare exceptions (eg, numpy).

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