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Astral to Join OpenAI

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Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#861

Post by solatic »

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…

> a lot of companies that need their own package repositories

Every company needs its own package repository. You need to be able to control what is running on your environment. Supply-chain risk is very, very real and affects anybody selling software for a living.

This is besides the point that in the real world, not every risk is addressed, at least in part because available resources are diverted to address larger risks.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#862

Post by wiseowise »

antonvs wrote: post #712
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…

> making the python ecosystem bearable You should really qualify that statement, it implies that the Python ecosystem is bearable.

Bearable compared to what it was.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#863

Post by oytis »

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.

I am still not sure why everyone jumped on uv. Sure, it's quicker than pip, but an installation rarely takes so long as to become annoying. Anyway, pip is still there, so whatever impact they have made can be rolled back if they try to pull the rug

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#864

Post by rahkiin »

ghshephard wrote: post #758
KaiserPro wrote: post #694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, what am I missing, I've used python for many many years. What does UV give us over pip + venv + pyenv? (I'm not doing this to be a dick, I genuinely want to know what the use case is)

I've used python for roughly 15 years, and 10 of those years I was paid to primarily write and maintain projects written in Python. Things got bearable with virtualenv/virtualenv wrappers, but it was never what I would call great. Pip was always painful, and slow. I never looked forward to using them - and every time I worked on a new system - the amount of finaggling I had to do to avoid problems, and the amount of…

May I ask what OS and filesystem you’re using?

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#865

Post by foo42 »

dahlia wrote: post #510
theallan wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I maintain an open source project funded by the Sovereign Tech Fund. I would absolutely love to know more about this if you are willing to share the story?

Sure! Here's what I wrote about the story: https://writings.hongminhee.org/2025/10/stf-fedify/

I was looking into Fedify just yesterday! I'm trying to decide whether to A) try and make my blog an activity pub instance of some sort, B) host my own Mastodon instance, or C) Use someone else's Mastodon server and link to my blog POSSE style. If I go with option A (which somehow feels like how things are _supposed_ to work) Fedify looks like the way to make it happen.

Thanks for your work.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#866

Post by JodieBenitez »

bmitc wrote: post #774
rtpg wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poetry and friends are so bad that many people continued just using pip -r requirements.txt despite knowing about this other stuff Poetry having users isn’t the metric for success. pip having way less users is.

How is uv awesome and Poetry so bad? They do basically the same things except Astral re-invents the wheel but only part way instead of just relying on the existing tools. uv is fast. As far as I can tell, there's hardly any difference in functionality except for it also replacing PyEnv, which I never use anyway.

Performance aside, uv is more standards compliant than Poetry about the pyproject.toml.

But yes, in terms of user interface they are pretty similar. UV performance really does make the difference.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#867

Post by ACV001 »

ok so the buying frenzy has started. We will end up with a new google basically monopolizing the internet. Only in this case it is much worse. M&As are evil.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#868

Post by globular-toast »

jredwards wrote: post #845
MoonZ wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

25 years of Python behind me, please let me tell you that hopefully you're wrong : we don't "need" uv :)

Need is definitely too strong a word, but I think we can agree that uv has so far been the best solution to a problem that plagued python development for a really long time.

At least we know what the solution should look like now, and now we can rewrite it in Python and make sure it works with pypy so it's fast.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#869

Post by johnisgood »

stabbles wrote: post #853
hatefulheart wrote: post #847

There are so many comments along the lines of: "What's the matter, just fork it when it goes bad?" The problem is that uv in and of itself, whilst a great technical achievement isn't sufficient. Astral run a massive DevOps pipeline that, just to give one example, packages the python distributions. Those who are saying that forking is an option are clearly not arguing it in good faith.

That's overstating things. The biggest piece of infra is PyPI, to which uv is only an interface. They do distribute Python binaries, but that's not very impressive.

Overstating complexity justifies funding, and attracts attention.

Re: Astral to Join OpenAI

#870

Post by mrweasel »

pitcock wrote: post #756
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…

They’re not ahead on code though, and they recently announced giving up on rich media AI entirely lmao The fuck does OpenAI have to offer? Nothing I need. The only reason Gemini is the best is UX, really running my own Mistral 7b is more than fine. Because slow ass Gemini is still a slightly more convenient experience I use that. Nobody OWNS nor will own the means of essentially thoughts. It’s such a silly idea I won…

> The fuck does OpenAI have to offer?

That's the problem isn't it. OpenAI have nothing to offer, neither does many of the other AI companies, nothing that's not replaceable at least.

They need to gobble up these other actors in an attempt to own something that someone might actually pay for. Anthropic seems successful with Claude Code and can drive sales that way.

OpenAI struggles to sell ChatGPT as a standalone offering, so they need products and services that will consume it, allowing them to push sales via that route. They also need to control those products, because LLMs are pretty much plug-able at this point, and that's no good. OpenAI needs a lock in.

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