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Astral to Join OpenAI

astral.sh

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Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#721

Post by jillesvangurp »

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 open source. Forking it is an option. And with AI, one-shotting a replacement is an option as well. Or having it make changes to your fork. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should do that of course.

The point is that the value of accumulated know how and skill that lead to things like uv isn't lost even if the worst would happen to the company or people behind it. I don't think there are many signs of that. I don't think they had much of a revenue model around providing OSS tools. It's problematic for a lot of VC funded companies. An exit like this is as good as it gets. OpenAI now pays them to do their thing. Investors are probably pretty happy. And we maybe get to skip the enshittification that seems inevitable with the whole IPO/hedge funds circus that many vc funded OSS companies end up being subjected to. Problem solved. Congratulations to the team. They can continue doing what they love doing in a company that clearly loves all things python. And who knows what they can do next when freed from having to worry about making investors happy?

Big companies and OSS have always had symbiotic relationships. Some of the largest contributors to open source are people working in big companies. OpenAI fits this tradition beautifully. Most big software companies actively contribute to OSS projects that are relevant or important to them. Even very secretive companies like Apple or profit focused sharks like Oracle. Google, Meta, IBM. There are very few large software companies that aren't doing that. OSS without this very large scale corporate sponsor ships would just be a niche thing. Yes there are a lot of small projects. I have a few of my own even. But most of the big ones have some for profit businesses behind them.

The real meta question is of course if we still need a lot of the people centered development tooling when AIs are starting to do essentially all of the heavy lifting in terms of coding. I think we might need very different tools soon.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#722

Post by linsomniac »

FuckButtons wrote: post #418
rob wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a tiny project with over 100 million downloads every month, over 4 million every day. No big deal. Just a small shop, don't overstate its importance. https://pypistats.org/packages/uv

Sure, but if tomorrow uv and ruff ceased to exist, we could all go back to any number of other solutions.

>Sure, but if tomorrow uv and ruff ceased to exist, we could all go back to any number of other solutions.

Or, more relevant to this conversion: If they closed source tomorrow, the community could fork the current version.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#723

Post by pxc »

PaulHoule wrote: post #655
eviks wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

i think the main problem was that people didn't believe that pip was broken, or didn't think there was any value in a 100% correct package manager over a 97% correct package manager (e.g. misread "worse is better") I had the problem basically understood in 2018 and I am still pissed that everybody wanted to keep taking their chances with pip just like they like to gamble with agent coders today. Now that people know…

Idk how anyone could sustain the impression that pip was not broken unless they had basically never used anything else (including Linux package managers) long enough to have even a basic understanding of it.

And that's a big part of what's so frustrating about Python generally: it seems to be a language used by lots of people who've never used anything else and have an attitude like "why would I ever try anything else"?

Python has a culture where nominal values of user-friendliness, pragmatism, and simplicity often turn into plain old philistinism.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#724

Post by UqWBcuFx6NV4r »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #303
siva7 wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, they could use a battle-proven existing solution because they can.

"Because they can", after spending a bunch of money to acquire an existing solution. I suppose when it's other people's money, there's no problem with burning it by the fistful. Apparently, "because they can" does not extend to building solutions with their own product.

They should just halt development immediately and build their own operating system from scratch!

You realise that there’s certainly at least one Astral dev that uses Copilot or Claude Code or whatever, right?

You’re so anti-AI that you’re making nonsensical arguments. The existence of AI doesn’t mean that human effort and skill and care is worth nothing. OpenAI has never argued that. Nothing is incongruent here except for the completely fictionalised worldview you’ve conjured up and attributed to…a company?

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#725

Post by sitkack »

bodge5000 wrote: post #678
arw0n wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ruff is nice, but not important, uv is one of the few things making the python ecosystem bearable. Python is a language for monkeys, and if you don't give monkeys good tools, they will forever entangle themselves and you . It is all garbage wrapped in garbage. At least let me deploy it without having to manually detangle all that garbage by version. I'm done pretending this is a "right tools for the right job" kind o…

> If no one self-writes code anymore anyway, at least use a language that isn't a clusterfuck of bad design decisions I can get behind the idea that LLM's probably don't need a language designed for humans if humans arent writing it, but the rest of this is just daft. Pythons popularity isn't just pure luck, in fact its only been in recent years that the tooling has caught up to the point where its as easy to setup a…

Python is the blub language now.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#726

Post by zahlman »

Kwpolska wrote: post #339
pennomi wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time for the PSF to consider something inspired by uv as a native solution.

The core-adjacent people have completely failed to produce reasonable packaging tools for decades, why would you want another new tool from them?

Who said anything about it coming from core-adjacent people?

Was Kenneth Reitz "core-adjacent" when Requests was brought under the PSF umbrella?

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#727

Post by UqWBcuFx6NV4r »

waynesonfire wrote: post #232
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #25

Company that repeatedly tells you software developers are obsoleted by their product buys more software developers instead of using said product to create software. Hmm.

And, they buy a company writing tooling for Python in not Python.

Next you’ll complain about CPython being written in C.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#728

Post by Affric »

PaulHoule wrote: post #645
theptip wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree uv is great but let’s not get carried away here. Poetry is good, pip was fine for many use-cases after they added native lock files.

if you are working on one tiny project on your machine that pips in four packages you probably think pip was OK. Circa 2017 I was working on systems that were complex enough that pip couldn't build them and after I got to the bottom of it I knew it not my fault but it was the fault of pip. I built a system which could build usable environments out of pre-built wheels and sketched out the design of a system that was r…

Well said.

I have used them all and UV is the only one that actually solves the problem.

It’s insane that people would suggest that Python can go back.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#730

Post by UqWBcuFx6NV4r »

joshuawright11 wrote: post #543

Wow - this is potentially the most cynical hacker news thread I've ever read. When did this place trade it's curiosity and excitement about technology for constant doomerism? Congrats Astral and co!

Blindly celebrating all accusations is not “curiosity and excitement about technology”. Disappointing that you can’t tell the difference between tech and the SV startup scene. They are different things.
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