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Posted by seekdeep 6 hours ago

Cirrus Labs to join OpenAI(cirruslabs.org)
192 points | 94 comments
maxloh 5 hours ago|
Note that this is fundamentally different from the Astral acquisition. At the end of their announcement, they stated:

> Cirrus CI will shut down effective Monday, June 1, 2026.

And earlier in the article:

> Joining OpenAI allows us to extend the mission we started with Cirrus Labs: building new kinds of tooling and environments that make engineers more effective, for both human engineers and agentic engineers.

It isn't a product-led acquisition, but more a talent one.

troyvit 2 hours ago||
This is kind-of neat too, at least in the near term:

> In the coming weeks, we will relicense all of our source-available tools, including Tart, Vetu and Orchard under a more permissive license. We have also stopped charging licensing fees for them.

fkorotkov 5 hours ago|||
Just want to note that we will continue maintaining and improving our virtualization solutions actually with even greater attention. SaaS options like Cirrus CI and Cirrus Runners will eventually wind down so we can focus on incorporating pieces internally.
js2 2 hours ago|||
What are your plans for tart licensing going forward?

https://github.com/cirruslabs/tart/blob/main/LICENSE

https://tart.run/licensing/

fkorotkov 2 hours ago|||
You’ll be pleasantly surprised. Updates in the coming weeks.

> In the coming weeks, we will relicense all of our source-available tools, including Tart, Vetu and Orchard under a more permissive license. We have also stopped charging licensing fees for them.

tclancy 2 hours ago|||
That sounds like a British phrase for pimping.
CompoundEyes 4 hours ago||||
If your scope includes making the Codex web app environments have additional functionality I look forward to it. More enterprise features and yaml backed pipelines.
mogili1 2 hours ago||
If you are interested in yaml backed pipelines check out this open source tool I built for exactly this purpose:

https://github.com/smogili1/circuit

elAhmo 48 minutes ago|||
For now.
hirako2000 5 hours ago|||
It could also be a suite of product acquisition, the CI could be a product OpenAI is interested in having, but not sell.
trollbridge 4 hours ago||
Yeah. Much like Astral - acquiring both the product (because they need to use it internally, but don't care about trying to resell / market), and they also want the talent to keep maintaining it / add features they want.
koolhead17 3 hours ago||
Is Sam or family an investor in them anyways?
fkorotkov 3 hours ago|||
We were 100% bootstrapped with no outside capital or support/advisory.
seekdeep 5 hours ago||
This does raise some concerns in major open-source projects:

https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/24990

https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/3ydjipcr7kbss57nvi67no...

elromulous 1 hour ago||
Did anyone else think this was Cirrus Logic?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirrus_Logic

boudin 1 hour ago|
Yes, it brought back some video card memories
jwpapi 3 hours ago||
So AI company buys devs again, but devs are dead
darkwater 32 minutes ago|
They want to kill the last good ones
bombcar 5 hours ago||
I liked “our incredible journey” more when it wasn’t rushing headlong into OpenMawAI
jeltz 4 hours ago|
Every great journey must have an end. As far as I understand Cirrus CI was struggling due to Github Actions eating their market. Cirrus CI was in my opinion much better than Github Actions but it is hard to compete with a bundled solution.
esafak 3 hours ago||
What was good about it? It looks pretty ordinary to me: https://cirrus-ci.org/features/
a1o 1 hour ago|||
It gives a better docker based experience and it also has measurements of memory and cpu usage to help you dimension things quickly.
jeltz 2 hours ago|||
Much better UX for viewing logs, more supported platforms. Github Actions in particular is also very unstable.
MaxLeiter 5 hours ago||
FTA:

> In 2022, we built Tart, which became the most popular virtualization solution for Apple Silicon, along with several other tools along the way.

from Tart's github:

> [Tart is for] macOS and Linux VMs on Apple Silicon to use in CI and other automations

My (naive?) hypothesis is this kind of expertise is why OpenAI chose to acquihire.

threecheese 4 hours ago||
Same; the reason everyone ran out to buy Mac Minis last month is it gave their Claw access to iMessage, their browser cookies, and a residential IP. Cirrus provides a way to provision and orchestrate MacOS VMs, which is exactly what I did for running Openclaw (for a minute …).
jen20 2 hours ago||
Not to sell Tart short (it is quite good), but it's "just" a wrapper around Virtualization.framework with a few extra pieces. This is the kind of thing that Codex driven by experts _should_ be able to build very easily.
w10-1 29 minutes ago|||
Agreed. The benefit from not having anyone else or any partial (container) solutions in the computing chain is huge for secure isolation. Getting rid of the intermediary solves a universe of possible problems.

That said, I've been free-riding on tart because they've often surfaced issues I needed to address. Free riders like me are possibly the reason these companies can't make their own way.

TheTaytay 2 hours ago||||
Yes, but it’s also currently the best one. They have OCI compatible Mac VM images that are prebuilt. It’s quite good.
zackify 1 hour ago|||
interesting that was what i thought this was, it keeps boggling my mind the sums being paid for what really could be built by experienced devs on their own teams
qqasG12 2 hours ago||
It looks like OpenAI has no clue what to do and does what every software company without a plan does: create new dev tools and a new dev stack.

So they want an integrated solution with CI, Python packaging and vibe coding.

That is a $100 million valuation at best, not a $1 trillion one.

danny_codes 37 minutes ago||
“We will replace white collar workers”

Proceeds to buy white collar workers.

zackify 2 hours ago||
yeah super confused, it looks like some tools to manage vms in ci? what is unique about that vs lxc or docker or apple's native container cli?
faangguyindia 5 hours ago||
I've moved most companies away from using others stuff

Today we use Hertzner and OVH and roll out our own solution whenever possible.

Running lean and mean.

Depending on such third party services is a trap.

Aurornis 3 hours ago||
Been there, done that, and I still find value in 3rd party services despite the occasional need to migrate.

Self hosting is the way to go if you need to keep monthly services spend as low as possible but you have extra time to spend, such as with a hobby project.

Whenever I’ve worked on real startup projects, self-hosting became a constant source of little tasks for the engineering team to mix into our weekly workload. There were always little tasks to upgrade this service, investigate why that one server was slow, or to migrate something to a bigger server because we were bottlenecked on some resource. Then we had to manage backups and do our recovery drills, along with changing the backup strategy every 6 months because someone had a better idea.

When we started to add up all of the time spent managing everything it starts to look like spending dollars (of engineer time) to save pennies on SaaS bills.

Probably not a popular thing to say on HN, but I now try to stay away from teams that go to extremes to self-host everything because I just want to get my work done, not also be constantly involved in running the underlying services. I do it for my own hobby projects at home but I don’t want to be doing it at work where we have money to spend to lighten the load. If the cost is the occasional migration to a different 3rd party service that’s not a big workload relative to everything involved in self-hosting.

causal 3 hours ago|||
That is something of a broken promise in the SaaS world; it was supposed to be convenience but instead it became a hundred broken integration points as you struggle to keep up with deprecated APIs and acqui-hires killing off shims you wouldn't have needed if everything had been on-prem to begin with.
jeltz 4 hours ago|||
What software do you use to run your CI?
rglullis 2 hours ago|||
Not OP, but to me the answer is:

  - gitea
  - woodpecker CI
  - my own docker registry
  - portainer running on my docker swarm

I then define the docker stack in the git repository, and CI builds the images and pushes to build the new image to the docker repository. The portainer API allows to deploy a stack, with the image tag as a parameter.
zackify 1 hour ago||||
not op either, github actions, self hosted runner on bare metal with lxc containers for each runner.

Cost savings are insane and the speed of latest amd epycs are miles ahead of the default ci instances on github and other places.

surgical_fire 3 hours ago||
This is the way.
yoyohello13 3 hours ago||
Incredible how many people are perfectly fine working for a company making AI powered murder bots.
taurath 3 hours ago||
This is a VC site. Morality or changing the world for the better is window dressing on earning as much money as possible and damn anyone who gets in the way. Morality is only good in as much as it’s good for business to be seen as moral. Money people have been majority running things for over 2 decades at least but the mythos lives on.
brap 32 minutes ago|||
Killing bad people is changing the world for the better
emptysongglass 6 hours ago|
Wow Cirrus was like the one cool CI thing with first-class Podman support. RIP. Guess I'm looking elsewhere (and not at Dagger which refuses to support rootless Podman).
fkorotkov 5 hours ago|
Thank you! Cirrus CLI is still around and can run your tasks locally in either Podman or Docker. Can also be used in any other CI.
emptysongglass 1 hour ago||
I mean, yes it is, but we all know what happens to these projects when their primary devs move on or get acquihired. Keybase, anyone?
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