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.
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.
Private package hosting sounds like a commodity that would be hard to differentiate.
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What would be the added value against JFrog or Nexus, for example?
i mean ofc but like you can self-host pypi and the "Docker Hub" model isn't like VC-expected level returns especially as ECR and GHCR and the other repos exist
that was never going to work, let's be honest
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)
> 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.
It was because Astral was VC funded.
https://astral.sh/blog/announcing-astral-the-company-behind-...