Why do you think that uv, etc. will stay maintained? They will for now, but as soon as cash is tight at OpenAI, they'll get culled so fast that you won't see it coming. This is the risk.
There is the literal benefit of "we use the hell out of this tool, we need to make sure it stays usable for us" and then there is what they can learn from or coerce the community in to doing.
The value is to control the tool chain from idea to production so it can be automated by agents. It's no secret that the final goal is to fully replace developers, the flow "idea to production". It's easier to control that flow if you control each tool and every step.
I won't be surprised if the next step is to acquire CI/CD tools.
The most straightforward one: They run a lot of computational sandboxes that need fast setup. Making sure you can shape the package manager to your needs is a pretty straightforward desire.
uv and ruff are one of the best things that happened in the python ecosystem the last years. I hope this acquisition does not put them on a path to doom.
If they just give Astral money to keep going, great, but I have difficulty believing they would be so altruistic. This is quite an upsetting acquisition.
Can't blame you for not trusting OpenAI, but it seems to me they would gain very little from fucking up uv (or more precisely doing things that have a side effect of fucking up uv), and they have tons of incentive to cultivate developer good will. Better to think of buying and supporting a project like this as a very cheap way to make developers think they're not so bad.
One thing to keep in mind is that uv was the product of a whole lot of packaging PEPs finally landing and standards being set. That combined with not having to support all the old baggage meant they could have an effect modernizing community packaging standards.
I hope those two factors mean that if things go really wrong, then the clean(ish) break with all the non standard complex legacy means an easier future for community packaging efforts.
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.
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.
> 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.
As a non python dev I really thought UV and TY are great tools and liked their approaches but I don't know how good it is that they are privately held... no a fan
I'm confused as to what will happen to their platform product which was in closed beta - pyx. Since they no longer need to worry about money (I assume) they no longer need to chase after enterprise customers?
Company that repeatedly tells you software developers are obsoleted by their product buys more software developers instead of using said product to create software. Hmm.
I work at OpenAI. Software developers are not obsoleted by Codex or Claude Code, nor will they be soon.
For our teams, Codex is a massive productivity booster that actually increases the value of each dev. If you check our hiring page, you’ll see we are still hiring aggressively. Our ambitions are bigger than our current workforce, and we continue to pay top dollar for talented devs who want to join us in transforming how silicon chips provide value to humans.
Akin to how compilers reduced the demand for assembly but increased the demand for software engineering, I see Codex reducing the demand for hand-typed code but increasing the demand for software engineering. Codex can read and write code faster than you or me, but it still lacks a lot of intelligence and wisdom and context to do whole jobs autonomously.
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.
288 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadI don't really see the value for OAI/Anthropic, but it's nice to know that uv (+ ty and many others) and Bun will stay maintained!
There is the literal benefit of "we use the hell out of this tool, we need to make sure it stays usable for us" and then there is what they can learn from or coerce the community in to doing.
I won't be surprised if the next step is to acquire CI/CD tools.
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).
This is a bad thing IMHO
I hope those two factors mean that if things go really wrong, then the clean(ish) break with all the non standard complex legacy means an easier future for community packaging efforts.
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.
Good for Astral though I guess, they do great work. Just not optimistic this is gonna be good for python devs long term.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Although Astral being VC funded was already headed this way anyway.
Deno, Pydantic (Both Sequoia) will go the same way as with many other VC backed "open source" dev tools.
It will go towards AI companies buying up the very same tools, putting it in their next model update and used against you.
Rented back to you for $20/mo.
For our teams, Codex is a massive productivity booster that actually increases the value of each dev. If you check our hiring page, you’ll see we are still hiring aggressively. Our ambitions are bigger than our current workforce, and we continue to pay top dollar for talented devs who want to join us in transforming how silicon chips provide value to humans.
Akin to how compilers reduced the demand for assembly but increased the demand for software engineering, I see Codex reducing the demand for hand-typed code but increasing the demand for software engineering. Codex can read and write code faster than you or me, but it still lacks a lot of intelligence and wisdom and context to do whole jobs autonomously.
Now for those wondering who would fork and maintain it for free, that is more of a critic of FOSS in general.
OpenAI is Microslop, so it's the classic EEE, nothing new to see
It's like with systemd now planning to enforce gov. age verification
People will censor you if you dare say something negative on this website
So i guess, wears a clown hat "congrats!"
Hilarity in the comments will ensue