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Posted by ibraheemdev 7 hours ago

Astral to Join OpenAI(astral.sh)
https://openai.com/index/openai-to-acquire-astral/
930 points | 596 commentspage 2
sota_pop 2 hours ago|
> uvex init my_new_slop_project —-describe “make me the bestest saas that will make $1M ARR per day” —-disable_thinking —-disable_slop_scaffolded_feature

> uvex add other_slop_project —-disable_peddled_package_recommendations

> implicitly phoning home your project, all source code, its metadata, and inferring whether your idea/use-case is worth steamrolling with their own version.

This is the future of “development”. Congrats to the team.

jedahan 7 hours ago||
great for astral, sucks for uv. was nice to have sane tooling at least for a few years, thanks for the gift.
pennomi 5 hours ago||
Time for the PSF to consider something inspired by uv as a native solution.
Kwpolska 5 hours ago||
The core-adjacent people have completely failed to produce reasonable packaging tools for decades, why would you want another new tool from them?
ziml77 6 hours ago||
I really hope they don't kill off uv or turn it into some way to sell OpenAI services. But I suspect that's exactly what's going to happen :(
butlike 5 hours ago||
I don't know. yarn never really turned into a vehicle to sell Facebook, though you always kind of transiently knew it was FB that offered it. I imagine that sort of transient advertising is it's own value, too.
fnands 7 hours ago||
Woah, first Anthropic buys Bun, now OpenAI Astral?

Seems like the big AI players love buying up the good dev tooling companies.

I hope this means the Astral folks can keep doing what they are doing, because I absolutely love uv (ruff is pretty nice too).

dcreager 7 hours ago||
> I hope this means the Astral folks can keep doing what they are doing, because I absolutely love uv (ruff is pretty nice too).

That is definitely the plan!

piva00 7 hours ago||
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™.

dcreager 6 hours ago||
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 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".
wiseowise 1 hour ago|||
> 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!

bbkane 6 hours ago||||
I personally get a lot of confidence in the permissive licensing (both in the current code quality, and the "backup plan" that I can keep using it in the event of an Astralnomical emergency); thank you for being open source!
gib444 5 hours ago|||
Literally there is no public comment you are allowed to make that we haven't heard 100 times before.

Congratulations though!

a3w 5 hours ago|||
JS vs Python wars, redux?
a-french-anon 7 hours ago||
>Seems like the big AI players love buying up the good dev tooling companies.

Would be a good mustache-twirling cartoon villain tactics, you know, try to prevent advances in developer experience to make vibecoding more attractive =)

bonesss 6 hours ago|||
It also hints even The Big Guys can’t LLM their tooling fully, and that current bleeding edge “AI” companies are doing that IT thing of making IT for IT (ie dev components, tooling, etc), instead of conquering some entire market on one continent or the other…
Ekaros 6 hours ago||
Makes you really think about the true productivity. If these companies have the beyond cutting-edge unreleased models so best possible tools shouldn't they be able to poach just a few most important people for cheaper? And then those people could use AI to build new superior product in very fast time. There is also buying an userbase. But I wonder how the key talent purchase strategy would work in comparison...
delfinom 7 hours ago|||
You know it's absolutely going that way. That's the lifecycle of corporate strategy.
KolmogorovComp 7 hours ago||
It's a good news to me considering their open-source nature. If/when they go downhill there will be still the option to fork, and the previous work will still have been funded.

Now for those wondering who would fork and maintain it for free, that is more of a critic of FOSS in general.

JoshTriplett 6 hours ago||
Welp. I used to respect Astral. I hope someone responsible forks their Python tooling and maintains it. Ideally a foundation rather than a company.
fortuitous-frog 4 hours ago||
I don't think it's a coincidence that a lot of the (stale) tooling that Astral replaced were managed by foundations instead of companies...
krick 5 hours ago||
Yeah, well, the fact is that every person who ever touches Python needed uv, but only Astral folks created it. So, nope, there's no one capable of filling the void, just accept that it's fucked now. The best die first.
MoonZ 2 hours ago|||
25 years of Python behind me, please let me tell you that hopefully you're wrong : we don't "need" uv :)
JoshTriplett 2 hours ago||||
If that were true, Astral wouldn't have been able to build it in the first place. It's an Open Source tool. Perhaps folks excited about working on it can move to the Python Foundation and maintain it there. Perhaps companies who saw today's acquisition and became deeply worried about the future of this tooling could help support and fund such an effort.
aseipp 59 minutes ago||
Part of the reason Astral as a team is so well liked is precisely because they are not part of the main fold or related to "Core Python"; they are an independent vendor, one that delivered high quality code and listened directly to users and their own (extensive) experience to do so, and they succeeded at that repeatedly. Python packaging has {been seen as, actually been} miserable for years, and so by the same token the capacity to believe in/buy into solutions from the "core project" has dwindled. "If it took Astral to fix it, why would it be any different going forward?"

So that's all it really comes down to; uv isn't loved just because it's great but because it is in good hands. This real/perceived change of hands pretty much explains all the downstream responses to the news that you see in this thread. Regardless of who bought them, any fork is going to have very, very big shoes to fill, and filling those shoes appropriately is the big worry.

JoshTriplett 46 minutes ago||
Fair enough. But that does seem like something that'd depend more on the people than the organization. Whoever forks it will need to be trusted to continue to be "good hands", whatever organization they operate under the auspices of.
ex-aws-dude 1 hour ago|||
I write python all the time and I've never used it
jt-hill 2 hours ago||
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.
petercooper 6 hours ago||
I feel some "commoditize your complements" (Spolsky) vibes hearing about these acquisitions. Or, potentially, "control your complements"?

If you find your popular, expensive tool leans heavily upon third party tools, it doesn't seem a crazy idea to purchase them for peanuts (compared to your overall worth) to both optimize your tool to use them better and, maybe, reduce the efficacy of how your competitors use them (like changing the API over time, controlling the feature roadmap, etc.) Or maybe I'm being paranoid :-)

time0ut 7 hours ago||
I love uv and the other tooling Astral has built. It really helped reinvigorate my love for Python over the last year.

Something like this was always inevitable. I just hope it doesn’t ruin a good thing.

jredwards 5 hours ago||
As someone who loves Astral and hates OpenAI, this is making me pretty sad.
clickety_clack 6 hours ago|
I don’t know who I would’ve like to see but them, buy OpenAI is not it. Sad day for uv, ruff and ty users.
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