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hijodelsol | on: Astral to Join OpenAI
This is a serious risk for the open source ecosystem and particularly the scientific ecosystem that over the last years has adopted many of these technologies. Having their future depend on a cap-ex heavy company that is currently (based on reporting) spending approx. 2.5 dollars to make a dollar of revenue and must have hypergrowth in the next years or perish is less than ideal. This should discourage anybody doing serious work to adopt more of the upcoming Astral technologies like ty and pyx. Hopefully, ruff and uv are large enough to be forked should (when) the time comes.
rst | parent | next
On the flip side, I'm not sure I ever saw a revenue plan or exit strategy for Astral other than acquihire. And most plausible bidders are unfortunate in one way or another.
japhyr | root | parent | next
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.
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pjmlp | root | parent | next
What would be the added value against JFrog or Nexus, for example?
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hijodelsol | root | parent
They could have joined projects like the Linux Foundation which try to not depend on any single donor, even though complete independence from big tech is not possible. I don't know the motivation behind Astral's approach, but this acquisition does leave a weird taste behind about how serious they were about truly open source software. Time will tell, I guess. (Edit: typo)
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chis | parent | next
My hope would be that this eventually pushes pip to adopt a similar feature-set and performance improvements. It's always a better story when the built-in tool is adequate instead of having to pick something. And yes UV is rust but it's pretty clear that Python could provide something within 2-5x the speed.
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Maxion | parent | next
These tools are open source, if they lock them down the community will just fork them.
pjmlp | root | parent | next
Nice idea in theory, in practice is how many folks down in Nebraska are going to show up.
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hijodelsol | root | parent
This might be true for uv and ruff, and hopefully that will happen. But pyx is a platform with associated hosting and if successful would lock people into the Astral ecosystem, even if the code itself was open source.
pjmlp | parent | next
I never adopted them, keep using mostly Python written stuff.

Either pay for the product, or use stuff that isn't dependent on VC money, this is always how it ends.

hijodelsol | root | parent | next
There are ways to independently fund open source projects, though. I have previously contributed to the Python Software Foundation and to individual open source maintainers through GitHub donations (which are not dependent on GitHub, as there are many alternatives). Projects like the Linux Foundation exist, too. And government funding, especially for scientific endeavors or where software is used to fulfill critical state tasks, is an option, too. I refuse to subject to the hypercommercialization of software and still believe in the principles behind open source.
pjmlp | root | parent
Which is why I mentioned "....use stuff that isn't dependent on VC money...".
WhyNotHugo | root | parent
> I never adopted them, keep using mostly Python written stuff.

Maybe you use non-transitive pure Python dependencies, but it's likely that your tools and dependencies still rely on stuff in Rust or C (e.g.: py-cryptography and Python itself respectively).

pjmlp | root | parent
I use mostly the batteries, given that the only purpose I have for Python, since version 1.6, is UNIX scripting tasks, beyond shell.

As mentioned multiple times, since my experience with Tcl and continuously rewriting stuff in C, I tend to avoid languages that don't come with JIT, or AOT, in the reference tooling.

I tend to work with Java, .NET, node, C++, for application code.

Naturally AI now changes that, still I tend to focus on approaches that are more classical Python with pip, venv, stuff written in C or C++ that is around for years.

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tmaly | parent | next
Would single maintainers of critical open source projects be a better situation?
mcdonje | root | parent
Are you not aware of foundations?
kjksf | root | parent
The issue is lack of money not lack of legal structure.

Consider ffmpeg. You can donate via https://www.ffmpeg.org/spi.html

How much money do they make from donations? I don't know but "In practice we frequently payed for travel and hardware."

Translation: nothing at all.

If such a fundamental project that is a revenue driver for so many companies, including midas-level rich companies like Google, can't even pay decent salaries for core devs from donations, then open source model doesn't work in terms of funding the work even at the smallest possible levels of "pay a reasonable market rate for devs".

You either get people who just work for free or businesses built around free work by providing something in addition to free software (which is hard to pull off, as we've seen with Bun and Astral and Deno and Node).

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llll_lllllll_l | parent | next
I don't know how to search for that report, can you share it?
adolph | parent
> This is a serious risk for the open source ecosystem and particularly the scientific ecosystem that over the last years has adopted many of these technologies.

At worst, it's just Anaconda II AI Boogaloo. The ecosystems will evolve and overcome, or will die and different ecosystems rise to meet the need going forward.

I anticipate OpenAI will get bored and ignore Astral's tools. Software entropy will do its thing and we will remember an actively developed uv as the good old days until something similar to cargo gets adopted as part of Python's standard distribution.