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

601–610 of 951 posts

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#601

Post by tempest_ »

japhyr wrote: post #328
IshKebab wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah you'd think so but somehow JFrog (makers of Artifactory) made half a billion dollars last year. I don't really understand that. Conda also makes an implausible amount of money.

From my understanding there are a lot of companies that need their own package repositories, for a variety of reasons. I listened to a couple podcasts where Charlie Marsh outlined their plans for pyx, and why they felt their entry into that market would be profitable. My guess is that OpenAI just dangled way more money in their faces than what they were likely to get from pyx. Having a private package index gives you…

I mean that was a thing at one point but I feel like it is baked into github/gitlab etc now

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#602

Post by arw0n »

pdntspa wrote: post #402
jitl wrote: 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.

Then can they please figure out some way of invoking it that doesnt require prefixing everything with 'uv'

For any command, you can create an 'alias' in your shell config. That way you can get rid of the prefix.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#603

Post by nunez »

organsnyder wrote: post #195
japhyr wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Astral was building a private package hosting system for enterprise customers. That was their stated approach to becoming profitable, while continuing to fund their open source work.

Private package hosting sounds like a commodity that would be hard to differentiate.

It's also a crowded and super mature space space between JFrog (Artifactory) and Sonatype (Nexus). They already support private PyPI repositories and are super locked in at pretty much every enterprise-level company out there.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#606

Post by nunez »

IshKebab wrote: post #321
organsnyder wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Private package hosting sounds like a commodity that would be hard to differentiate.

Yeah you'd think so but somehow JFrog (makers of Artifactory) made half a billion dollars last year. I don't really understand that. Conda also makes an implausible amount of money.

Makes sense to me.

Most of the companies that spend $$$$ with them can't use public registries for production/production-adjacent workloads due to regulations and, secondarily a desire to mitigate supply chain risk.

Artifactory is a drop-in replacement for every kind of repository they'll need to work with, and it has a nice UI. They also support "pass-through" repositories that mirror the public repositories with the customization options these customers like to have. It also has image/artifact scanning, which cybersecurity teams love to use in their remediation reporting.

It's also relatively easy to spin up and scale. I don't work there, but I had to use Artifactory for a demo I built, and getting it up and running took very little time, even without AI assistance.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#608

Post by influx »

johnisgood wrote: post #545
eviks wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Cannot we at one point consider the tool to be "done"? I mean, what is there to constantly change and improve? Genuinely curious. It sounds like a tool that can be finished. Can it not be?

You’d be surprised how many features the Python runtime adds each release. It’s not trivial for tooling to keep up with language changes.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#609

Post by shimman »

OutOfHere wrote: post #397
pronik wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they are being acquired to improve the quality of Codex.

That's the thing. To me that says that as soon as cash becomes tight at OpenAI, the Astral staff will no longer get to work on Python tooling anymore, namely uv, etc.

Tale as old as time in SV, why we keep trusting venture capital to be the community's stewards I have no idea.

We need public investment in open source, in the form of grants, not more private partnerships that somehow always seem to hurt the community.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#610

Post by luxcem »

lucrbvi wrote: post #3

This is a weird pattern accross OpenAI/Anthropic to buy startups building better toolings. I don't really see the value for OAI/Anthropic, but it's nice to know that uv (+ ty and many others) and Bun will stay maintained!

The value is to control the tool chain from idea to production so it can be automated by agents. It's no secret that the final goal is to fully replace developers, the flow "idea to production". It's easier to control that flow if you control each tool and every step.

I won't be surprised if the next step is to acquire CI/CD tools.

Post reply on HN