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Astral to Join OpenAI

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Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#571

Post by scuff3d »

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.

That's kind of like saying Cargo is a small part of the Rust ecosystem.

It's not there yet, but it's getting there.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#572

Post by Zopieux »

nazgulnarsil wrote: post #488
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.

The exact opposite has started: every single developer with an LLM subscription now has 45 variations of any foundational tool and library, to cater to their weird use-case, because it was easier for the LLM to just modify it rather than adapting to it. Almost nobody upstreams such improvements (or they are too niche anyway).

The ecosystem will be this way for a while, if not the new normal.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#573

Post by edgyquant »

orbifold wrote: post #245
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Fascism" is when military. The more military, the more fascist. According to this metric, the USSR / DDR with its "anti-fascist wall" was super extra fascist because they were armed to the teeth.

they were definitely totalitarian, slightly different mix of ideology. Fascist is a fairly good description here, it describes close collaboration of government with corporations to advance national goals. US had somewhat fascist tendencies for a long time now.

That is most certainly not a definition of fascism nor a thing unique to it.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#574

Post by anentropic »

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.

That was my feeling - more than 'owning' uv etc I could see this as being about getting people onboard who had a proven track record delivering developer tooling that was loved enough to get wide adoption

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#575

Post by scuff3d »

deadbabe wrote: post #477
tomrod wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Maybe consider something other than python.

Good luck with that. I haven't been successful at convincing anyone to move away from it. I'm so fucking sick of writing Python at work lol

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#576

Post by asa400 »

crdrost wrote: post #541
theLiminator wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I could give up uv, but giving up ruff would suck.

This is just the weirdest thread. Like, the whole point of open source is that this thread is not a thing. The whole point is "if this software is taken on by a malevolent dictator for life, we'll just fork it and keep going with our own thing." Or like if I'm evaluating whether to open-source stuff at a startup, the question is "if this startup fails to get funding and we have to close up shop, do I want the team to…

The leadership and product direction work are at least as hard as the code work. Astral/uv has absolutely proven this, otherwise Python wouldn't be a boneyard for build tools.

Projects - including forks - fail all the time because the leadership/product direction on a project goes missing despite the tech still being viable, which is why people are concerned about these people being locked up inside OpenAI. Successfully forking is much easier said than done.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#578

Post by zem »

eviks wrote: post #542
alsetmusic wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see Apache and MIT license files in their GitHub. What's to prevent the community from forking and continuing development if the licenses change?

The same things that prevented "community" from building the tool in the first place

that makes zero sense to me. developing something like ruff from scratch takes a lot of things happening - someone having the idea, the time to develop it from scratch in their free time, or the money to do it as a job, and perhaps the need to find collaborators if it's too large a project for one person. but now ruff is there, there's no need to build it from scratch. if I wanted to build a python linter or formatter I would simply fork ruff and build on top of it. as others have said in this subthread, that's the whole point of open source!

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#579

Post by vaylian »

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]

What language is universally better than Python? I don't think Python is perfect, but it is definitely one of the best languages out there. It is elegant and it is has a huge ecosystem of libraries, frameworks and tutorials. There is a lot of battle-tested software in Python that is running businesses.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#580

Post by jt-hill »

Astral was always going to have to find some way to sustain itself financially. They weren’t going to just make the best free tools in the ecosystem forever. uv is sufficiently entrenched as infrastructure that I’m sure it’ll take no time for a community fork to show up if they do anything stupid with it.
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