Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Astral to Join OpenAI

astral.sh

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

591–600 of 951 posts

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#591

Post by Frieren »

ren_engineer wrote: post #586
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…

somebody looked at Claude Code's binaries and Anthropic is testing out their own app platform called antspace. Not sure why people are shocked, they've been cloning features of their API customers and adding them to their core products since day 1. Makes sense they will take user data and do it for Claude Code by copying features or buying up what developers are using so they can lock people into a stack. These are t…

> they've been cloning features of their API customers and adding them to their core products since day 1

Is this not just the strategy of all platforms. Spy on all customers, see what works for them and copy the most valuable business models. Amazon does that with all kinds of products.

Platforms will just grow to own all the market and hike prices and lower quality, and pay close to nothing to employees. This is why we used to have monopoly regulations before being greedy became a virtue.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#592

Post by LtWorf »

zbentley wrote: post #342
1718627440 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Personally I run "apt install whateverineed"

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#593

Post by nunez »

Maxion wrote: post #125
rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it ever goes bad, well I hope that that’s an impetus for new open source projects to be started — and with improvements over and lessons learned from incumbent technologies, right at the v1 of said projects.

If LLMs turn out to be such a force multiplier, the way to fight it is to ensure that there are open source LLMs.

Open-source models will never be _truly_ competitive as long as obtaining quality datasets and training on them remains prohibitively expensive.

Plus, most users don't want to host their own models. Most users don't care that OpenAI, Anthropic and Google have a monopoly on LLMs. ChatGPT is a household name, and most of the big businesses are forcing Copilot and/or Claude onto their employees for "real work."

This is "everyone will have an email server/web server/Diaspora node/lemmy instance/Mastodon server" all over again.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#594

Post by edelbitter »

moregrist wrote: post #215
duskdozer wrote: post #167

Not surprised at all on this. I've been really suspicious about how hard `uv` was being pushed in 24/25.

I think the push has been entirely organic. Compared to existing tooling, uv is fantastically fast. One of the bigger pain points I’ve faced in Python is dependency resolution. conda could take 30-60 minutes in some cases. uv took seconds. A serious quality of life improvement.

> dependency resolution. conda could take 30-60 minutes

Quite literally this is what first raised the alarm bells for me. Dependency resolution complexity is more of a symptom. If that delay ends up being the point where Ops finally agrees that things have gone very wrong, then fixing that delay is not really helping hire the maintenance folks that can make those dependencies.. well, "dependable" again.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#595

Post by munk-a »

volkercraig wrote: post #175
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 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.

A GPL license helps but if support for a dependency is pulled you'll likely end up needing to divert more resources to maintain it anyways. There really isn't any guarantee against this cost - you either pay someone else to maintain it and hope they do a good job, build it in house and become an "also that thing" company, or follow a popular project without financially supporting it and just hope other people pick up your slack.

Preferring GPL licensed software means that you're immune to a sudden cut off of access so it's always advisable - but it's really important to stay on top of dependencies and be willing to pay the cost if support is withdrawn. So GPL helps but it isn't a full salve.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#596

Post by victorbjorklund »

druml wrote: post #209
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.

Small tool shop, burning VC money, true. "Tiny part of the Python ecosystem" is an understatement given how much impact uv has made alone.

They have some nice ideas. But if they turn to shit you can just fork their tools and use that instead.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#598

Post by zem »

pjmlp wrote: post #68
Maxion wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These tools are open source, if they lock them down the community will just fork them.

Nice idea in theory, in practice is how many folks down in Nebraska are going to show up.

as someone who works in the python tooling space I think you underestimate the number of people who would be willing to do this. i would personally help maintain a community fork of ruff if it got to the point where one was needed, though I draw the line at moving to nebraska first.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#599

Post by wiseowise »

dcreager wrote: post #160
piva00 wrote: 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…

> No one can guarantee how motives, incentives, and decisions might change years down the line. But that's why we bake optionality into it with the tools being permissively licensed. That makes the worst-case scenarios have the shape of "fork and move on", and not "software disappears forever".

Okay, so better prepare already, folks!

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#600

Post by ffsm8 »

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…

Hmm, from my perspective, an essential step to legitimize "vibecoding" in an enterprise setting is to to have a clearly communicated best practice - and have the LLM be hyper optimized for that setting.

Like having a system prompt which takes care of the project structure, languages, libraries etc

It's pretty much the first step to replacing devs, which is their current "North Star" (to be changed to the next profession after)

Once they've nailed that, the devs become even more of a tool then they're already are (from the perspective of the enterprise).

Post reply on HN