Astral to Join OpenAI

by ibraheemdev • 4 months ago

1489 864 4 months ago

https://openai.com/index/openai-to-acquire-astral/

lucrbvi2• 4 months ago

This is a weird pattern accross OpenAI/Anthropic to buy startups building better toolings.

I 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!

0x3f• 4 months ago

it's nice to know that uv (+ ty and many others) and Bun will stay maintained!

Depends if you think the bubble is going to pop, I suppose. In some sense, independence was insulation.

synthc• 4 months ago

`uv agent` and `bun agent` in 3....2.....1....

rgilliotte• 4 months ago

Totally agree

The value for Anthropic / OAI is that they have a strong interest in becoming the "default" agent.

The one that you don't need to install, because it's already provided by your package manager.

LoganDark• 4 months ago

I'm not so sure. I sort of wish they hadn't been acquired because these sort of acquihires usually result in stifling the competition while the incumbent stagnates. It definitely is an acquihire given OpenAI explicitly states they'll be joining the Codex team and only that their existing open-source projects will remain "maintained".

jpalomaki• 4 months ago

Somebody took a deeper look at Claude Code and claims to find evidence of Anthropic's PaaS offering [1]. There's certainly money to be made by offering a nice platform where "citizen developers" can push their code.

From Astral the (fast) linter and type checker are pretty useful companions for agentic development.

[1] https://x.com/AprilNEA/status/2034209430158619084

lucrbvi2• 4 months ago

I wouldn't be surprised if Vercel were bought by Anthropic/OAI (but maybe it would be too expensive?)

DoctorDabadedoo• 4 months ago

Good that they got some money and a longer runaway, but I have my doubts the product will improve rather than be smothered to death.

Embrace, extend, extinguish. Time will tell.

itissid• 4 months ago

Isn't this something to do with their paid pyx(as opposed to ty/ruff etc) thingy?

christina97• 4 months ago

I mean they are “startups” on the way to mega-companies. They need internal tooling to match.

butlike8• 4 months ago

They probably prompted for what they should do next and got this as a half-hallucinated response lol

OutOfHere5• 4 months ago

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.

TheCondor• 4 months ago

Does OpenAI use a lot of python?

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.

jbonatakis• 4 months ago

I don't know about OpenAI using a lot of Python, but Astral builds all their tools in Rust and just exposes Python bindings. Codex is all Rust. It feels like a reasonable acquisition from that perspective. They're banking on at least in part on the Astral team being able to integrate with and supercharge Codex.

FaceValuable• 4 months ago

Yeah, it’s all mostly heaps of Python internally aside from Codex.

luxcem• 4 months ago

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.

insane_dreamer3• 4 months ago

I'm expecting Anthropic to buy Zed

groby_b• 4 months ago

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.

fnands2• 4 months 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).

dcreager4• 4 months 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• 4 months 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™.

a-french-anon• 4 months 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 =)

delfinom• 4 months ago

You know it's absolutely going that way. That's the lifecycle of corporate strategy.

bonesss• 4 months 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…

a3w• 4 months ago

JS vs Python wars, redux?

thewhitetulip3• 4 months ago

Yes just like "Whatsapp is joining Facebook but it'll always be free and independent"!!

Mxbonn• 4 months ago

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.

suddenlybananas3• 4 months ago

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.

backwardation_b• 4 months ago

I like uv, but not sure this is a good path forward for the python ecosystem.

pas• 4 months ago

why? lot's of good work came to Python by people who were sponsored by big tech companies. make Python better for them, and for a lot of other people too.

(sure, it's a bit different than contributing to CPython, but I'd argue not that different)

rkangel• 4 months ago

It is VERY different. One company now has complete control of the activities of the team developing these tools. Contributing to Python (money or time) gets you some influence, but doesn't allow you to dictate anything - there's still a team making the decisions.

UqWBcuFx6NV4r16• 4 months ago

Your heuristic is terrible. It’s not about it being a “big tech company”. I’m sure that you can be more intelligent and nuanced than that. It’s about fit, aligned goals, aligned vision, aligned incentives.

I do not see any alignment between the Astral that I want Astral to be, and OpenAI.

incognito1246• 4 months ago

Possibly the worst possible news for the Python ecosystem. Absolutely devastating. Congrats to the team

vdfs• 4 months ago

On the other hand, we get to see what other thing will try to replace pip

politelemon2• 4 months ago

blitzar• 4 months ago

I hope they got paid, I will be very sad if they didn't at least get G5 money.

fortuitous-frog5• 4 months ago

Curious how well upstream contributors or projects get contributed for these sort of headline-gathering acquisitions (probably not at all, unfortunately).

OpenClaw notably was built around Mario Zechner's pi[0]; uv I believe was highly adapted from Armin Ronacher's rye[1], and uses indygreg's python-build-standalone[2] for distributing Python builds (both of which were eventually transferred to Astral).

[0] https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono

[1] https://github.com/astral-sh/rye

[2] https://github.com/astral-sh/python-build-standalone

PurpleRamen3• 4 months ago

Yeah, no. there are many worse news than this.

In the worst case, Astral will stop developing their tools, someone else will pick them up and will continue polishing them. In the best case, they will just continue as they did until now, and nothing will really change on that front.

Astral is doing good work, but their greatest benefit for the ecosystem so far was showing what's possible and how it's down. Now everyone can take up the quest from here and continue. So any possible harm from here out will be not that deep, at worst we will be missing out on many more cool things they could have built.

dcre3• 4 months ago

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.

throwaway57522• 4 months ago

No they don't have incentive to cultivate developer goodwill. They are monetizing replacing developers everywhere. That is the trillion-dollar valuation. They have the opposite incentive.

marcyb5st• 4 months ago

But what happens to the Astral team if OpenAI flops at the IPO or runs out of companies throwing billions at them?

This is a bad thing IMHO

antod• 4 months ago

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.

stephbook2• 4 months ago

This. Their current approach is open sourced. There's no going back any more.

nsbk• 4 months ago

Let the forks roll!

nacozarina• 4 months ago

as a long-time python-hater, i am jack’s smug smiling face

fnands2• 4 months ago

Related (OpenAI announcement): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47438716

hijodelsol4• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

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.

hijodelsol4• 4 months ago

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)

japhyr3• 4 months ago

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.

llll_lllllll_l• 4 months ago

I don't know how to search for that report, can you share it?

tmaly• 4 months ago

Would single maintainers of critical open source projects be a better situation?

mcdonje3• 4 months ago

Are you not aware of foundations?

Maxion2• 4 months ago

These tools are open source, if they lock them down the community will just fork them.

hijodelsol4• 4 months ago

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.

pjmlp11• 4 months ago

Nice idea in theory, in practice is how many folks down in Nebraska are going to show up.

pjmlp11• 4 months ago

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.

hijodelsol4• 4 months ago

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.

WhyNotHugo• 4 months ago

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).

chis• 4 months ago

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.

materielle• 4 months ago

The problem is funding.

There seems to be a pervasive believe that the Python tooling and interpreter suck and are slow because the maintainers don’t care, or aren’t capable.

The actual problem is that there isn’t enough money to develop all of these systems properly.

Google says that Astral had 15 team members. Or course, it’s so hard to make these projections. But it wouldn’t shock me if uv and ruff are each individually multi-million dollar pieces of software.

If you’d like to invest a million dollars to improve pip, or work for free for 3 years to do it yourself, I’m not sure if anyone would object.

thayne2• 4 months ago

pip isn't exactly a "built-in" tool. Beyond the python distribution having a stub module that downloads pip for you.

adolph• 4 months ago

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.

dadrian• 4 months ago

As opposed to Pip, which is obviously free and sustainable forever.

saghm4• 4 months ago

And takes a lot closer to "forever" to download all of your dependencies

geophph• 4 months ago

Welp. Guess we just wait for the next package management tool to come around. Really thought uv was gonna be the one.

Good for Astral though I guess, they do great work. Just not optimistic this is gonna be good for python devs long term.

tom1337• 4 months ago

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

incognito1246• 4 months ago

Technically the tools are not privately held, they're OSS with a permissive licence. It's just that the bulk of work was done by them. The acquisition (ostensibly) changes none of that

phlakaton2• 4 months ago

I hope OpenAI realizes they cannot buy developer goodwill.

this_user• 4 months ago

They are not trying to buy developer goodwill, they are trying to catch up with Antrophic in terms of getting those B2B contracts, which is currently the most realistic path towards not running out of money.

phlakaton2• 4 months ago

1. The Register reports OpenAI is well ahead of Anthropic in B2B contracts. It's Anthropic playing catch-up, not OpenAI.

2. In any case, the announcement strongly suggests that customer acquisition had little to do with this. The stated purpose of the acquisition, as I read it, is an acquisition (plus acquihire?) to bolster their Codex product.

3. But if they were hoping for some developer goodwill as a secondary effect... well, see my note above.

colesantiago4• 4 months ago

If you don't pay for your tools and support OSS financially, this is what happens.

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.

smahs• 4 months ago

There is nothing wrong with big money backing, often is necessary for long term bets, but rug pulling is a serious threat. VC funded open source has become a pattern/playbook.

colesantiago4• 4 months ago

It would have been fine if the Astral team was acqui-hired and uv, ruff, etc were donated to the PSF or Linux Foundation for further sponsorship and support.

But the pressure because they raised VC funding, I would imagine Astral needed an actual exit and OpenAI saw Astral's tools as an asset.

weakfish• 4 months ago

What happens when OpenAI’s burn dries up their cash?

sourcegrift• 4 months ago

RAM prices go down. My hope though is that the period RAM prices stay up will put electron apps out of market.

genthree• 4 months ago

All the vibe-coded webshitware these companies are putting out seems too be doing the opposite: it's all even more memory- and cycle-hungry than the webshit we were lovingly pooping out by hand for the last decade.

Cthulhu_• 4 months ago

They get more money from investors, go public, or get bought.

throwa3562622• 4 months ago

They mysteriously gain a lot of government contracts.

In a completely unrelated event, Donald sues Sam for 10M$ for calling him old, Sam grudingly agrees to pay him 16M$ and a beer.

prodigycorp3• 4 months ago

$110B will surely last for at least a year.

morphology2• 4 months ago

That money is going directly to Jensen as quickly as possible to secure OpenAI's place in the delivery queue

ZenoArrow• 4 months ago

Was that $110B in cash? I wouldn't be surprised if it's based on something else (paid for using deals for stock).

gedy• 4 months ago

"We must be regulated to contain the nuclear bomb like power of our products. Oh look it escaped again!", etc

Fervicus3• 4 months ago

Taxpayers bail them out.

gmerc• 4 months ago

That's where taxpayers come in a the ultimate bagholder.

brikym2• 4 months ago

`uv` will get PIP'd

dinosor• 4 months ago

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?

T-A• 4 months ago

"OpenAI is focusing employee and investor attention on its enterprise business as the artificial intelligence startup gears up to go public, potentially by the end of the year, CNBC has learned."

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/17/openai-preps-for-ipo-in-2026...

applfanboysbgon9• 4 months ago

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.

avaer• 4 months ago

As good as the team is, that's not what they're buying in this case.

suddenlybananas3• 4 months ago

What are they buying?

waynesonfire2• 4 months ago

And, they buy a company writing tooling for Python in not Python.

LollipopYakuza• 4 months ago

A tool might not be the best tool to build itself, doesn't mean it is not good. You don't use a screwdriver to craft screwdrivers. Doesn't mean screwdrivers are inherently bad

UqWBcuFx6NV4r16• 4 months ago

Next you’ll complain about CPython being written in C.

lm284692• 4 months ago

They said it'll be good enough in two weeks, give them some time!

XCSme• 4 months ago

Which year was that?

largbae• 4 months ago

They're writing the software to end all softwares!

siva73• 4 months ago

They're not buying developers, they are buying the whole ecosystem to produce software. Still aligned with their original message.

applfanboysbgon9• 4 months ago

If the product did what it was advertised to do, they could simply build their own ecosystem for producing software and train the model to use it.

tripledry• 4 months ago

When someone at work talks about all software devs being replaced I link them to the Anthropic career pages.

tedsanders• 4 months ago

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.

applfanboysbgon9• 4 months ago

This seems like a reasonable take. Maybe you could inform your CEO, the media and influencer sycophants, the tech companies that are laying off tens of thousands of developers while mandating the use of your company's tool, and everyone else responsible for us being inundated with outlandish claims that software engineering is dead on a literally daily basis. Hey, while I'm asking for wishes that won't be granted, maybe get people in your company to stop thinking they're so important that it's okay to buy 40% of the world's RAM supply with borrowed money, making it cost 4.5x as much for the rest of us?

KolmogorovComp• 4 months 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.

huksley• 4 months ago

UV_DISABLE_AGENT=1 UV_DISABLE_AI_HINTS=1 uv add

emmettm• 4 months ago

lol, underrated comment

rafaelgoncalves• 4 months ago

:D, and i think they would add some optout telemetry flags too to make this even funnier

photon_collider• 4 months ago

Reading this news only leaves me worried about long-term future of these open source tools.

Ekaros2• 4 months ago

I have long since found the VC model for open source questionable. If you are not selling popular enough direct enterprise support what is the model to actually make money.

Take ruff, I have used it, but I had no idea it even had a company behind it... And I must not be only one and it must not be only tool like it...

readitalready• 4 months ago

I'd expect OpenAi to make some type of Github clone next, perhaps with Astral, or maybe with jujutsu.

PurpleRamen3• 4 months ago

Why? Github is already owned by Microsoft, who are deep in with OpenAI. And what worth would a Github-clone even have for the world? It's not like there is any important innovation left in that space at the moment, or are there any?

0x500x79• 4 months ago

Better uptime? https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-is-developing-altern...

WhereIsTheTruth• 4 months ago

Greed knows no limit

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!"

jedahan• 4 months ago

great for astral, sucks for uv. was nice to have sane tooling at least for a few years, thanks for the gift.

ziml77• 4 months 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 :(

butlike8• 4 months 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.

pennomi• 4 months ago

Time for the PSF to consider something inspired by uv as a native solution.

Kwpolska3• 4 months ago

The core-adjacent people have completely failed to produce reasonable packaging tools for decades, why would you want another new tool from them?

FergusArgyll• 4 months ago

Hn's favorite company meets hn's most hated company.

Hilarity in the comments will ensue

incognito1246• 4 months ago

Thank you n-gate

Imustaskforhelp2• 4 months ago

Genuinely. UV is so awesome and OpenAI is so meh.

I am not even sure how to feel about this news but feel a bit disappointed as a user even if I might be happy for the devs that they got money for such project but man, I would've hoped any decent company could've bought them out rather than OpenAI of all things.

Maybe OpenAI wants to buy these loved companies to lessen some of the hate but what its doing is lessening the love that we gave to corporations like astral/uv sadly, which is really sad because uv is/(was?) so cool but now we don't know where this tool might be headed next given its in the hands of literally OpenAI :(

sakesun2• 4 months ago

Pyright and ty are under the same roof now.

codethief2• 4 months ago

How so? Pyright is being developed by Microsoft.

sakesun2• 4 months ago

The pioneer is now at Codex team.

999900000999• 4 months ago

Congrats!

This of course means more VC funding for FOSS tools since a successful exit is a positive signal.

baq• 4 months ago

Funding is as good as gone until the Iran mess is over.

bogwog• 4 months ago

a successful exit is a positive signal

This is peak finance brainrot. In no scenario is abandoning ship a positive signal, even if you managed to pocket some valuables on the way out.

Let's stop celebrating dysfunctional business models and consolidation of the industry around finance bros who give zero fucks about said industry.

afavour• 4 months ago

And so, more core functionality developers depend on becomes dependent on a continuing stream of billions in VC funding. What could go wrong?

Hackbraten• 4 months ago

Don’t you dare enshittify my uv.

odie5533• 4 months ago

Can we rename it to Codex?

hollow-moe• 4 months ago

rip uv

holografix2• 4 months ago

Solid move by Altman - good signal they’re serious about capturing the Claude Code market from Anthropic.

What I don’t understand is why hasn’t anyone bought Jetbrains yet.

Atlassian? AWS? Google?

hirako2000• 4 months ago

Because Jetbrain strategy wasn't to burn money with free tools to eventually exit with the jackpot. They have been profitable for over a decade, simply asking users to pay a fair price for great product.

wiseowise19• 4 months ago

Judging by all their mistakes in the last years, Russian war and AI, it’s only a matter of time until someone buys them out.

user34283• 4 months ago

Atlassian? Bitbucket as a platform for agentic development.. shudder

KeplerBoy4• 4 months ago

Most likely because Jetbrains is not for sale. Google almost certainly offered to buy at some point.

wiseowise19• 4 months ago

Never did. I remember someone replied to my comment here that Google isn’t paying a penny to JetBrains. They’re quite happy with the relationship primarily because they don’t have to pay anything. If anything, JetBrains is the one who needs Google more than the other way around.

amterp• 4 months ago

Happy for the devs, they deserve the presumably massive payout for the amount of value they’ve brought to the Python community.

pjmlp11• 4 months ago

Great that I keep using traditional Python tools.

throwa3562622• 4 months ago

"Sir, you now have twice as many private jets as Dario"

"But he owns a tooling company. WHY can't I have that? :( :("

sublime_happen• 4 months ago

these (uv and bun) are not acquihires, they're acqui-rootaccess

OutOfHere5• 4 months ago

We need to explore this angle. With OpenAI already strongly being intelligence gathering apparatus for the US, now with this acquisition, it will potentially have access to the code and environment variables of a good chunk of private projects even when Codex doesn't.

edelbitter2• 4 months ago

Have you looked at the .github/ folder of any actively developed python packages lately? It has become difficult to find one where there isn't a few interesting people with code-execution-capable push/publish/cache-write access somewhere along the blown up transitive dependency/include chains.

AnishLaddha• 4 months ago

F*CK. take everything from me why dontcha?

noodletheworld2• 4 months ago

I really love uv.

Its always hard to really trust these corporate funded open source products, but they've honestly been great.

…but I find it difficult to believe openai owning the corner stone of the python tooling ecosystem is good thing for the python ecosystem.

There is no question openai will start selling/bundling codex (and codex subscriptions) with uv.

I dont think I want my package manger doing that.

bethekidyouwant• 4 months ago

“There is no question openai will start selling/bundling codex (and codex subscriptions) with uv.” What does that even mean?

NiloCK• 4 months ago

A concern:

More and more plainly, OpenAI and Anthropic are making plays to own (and lease) the "means of production" in software. OK - I'm a pretty happy renter right now.

As they gobble up previously open software stacks, how viable is it that these stacks remain open? It seems perfectly sensible to me that these providers and their users alike have an interest in further centralizing the dev lifecycle - eg, if Claude-Code or Codex are interfaces to cloud devenvs, then the models can get faster feedback cycles against build / test / etc tooling.

But when the tooling authors are employees of one provider or another, you can bet that those providers will be at least a few versions ahead of the public releases of those build tools, and will enjoy local economies of scale in their pipelines that may not be public at all.

rTX5CMRXIfFG• 4 months ago

If it ever goes bad, well I hope that that’s an impetus for new open source projects to be started — and with improvements over and lessons learned from incumbent technologies, right at the v1 of said projects.

Maxion2• 4 months ago

If LLMs turn out to be such a force multiplier, the way to fight it is to ensure that there are open source LLMs.

hot_iron_dust• 4 months ago

What would the new open source projects do differently from the "old" ones? I don't think you can forbid model training on your code if your project is open source.

bix62• 4 months ago

If it goes bad? It’s too late by that point. And how is open source going to compete with billions of investment dollars?

cube2222• 4 months ago

Honestly, for now they seem to be buying companies built around Open Source projects which otherwise didn't really have a good story to pay for their development long-term anyway. And it seems like the primary reason is just expertise and tooling for building their CLI tools.

As long as they keep the original projects maintained and those aren't just acqui-hires, I think this is almost as good as we can hope for.

(thinking mainly about Bun here as the other one)

bix62• 4 months ago

And how likely is that?

Once you’re acquired you have to do what the boss says. That means prioritizing your work to benefit the company. That is often not compatible with true open source.

How frequently do acquired projects seriously maintain their independence? That is rare. They may have more resources but they also have obligations.

And this doesn’t even touch on the whole commodification and box out strategy that so many tech giants have employed.

volkercraig• 4 months ago

It's not any different from the launch of the FSF. There's a simple solution. If you don't want your lunch eaten by a private equity firm, make sure whatever tool you use is GPL licensed.

palmotea2• 4 months ago

If you don't want your lunch eaten by a private equity firm, make sure whatever tool you use is GPL licensed.

1. For the record: the GPL is entirely dependent on copyright.

2. If AI "clean-room" re-implementations are allow to bypass copyright/licenses, the GPL won't protect you.

petcat• 4 months ago

The biggest scam the mega-clouds and the Githubs ever pulled was convincing open source developers that the GPL was somehow out of vogue and BSD/MIT/Apache was better.

All so they could just vacuum it all up and resell it with impunity.

dirkc2• 4 months ago

While the license is important, it's the community that plays the key role for me. VC funder open source is not the same as community developed open source. The first can very quickly disappear because of something like a aquihire, the second has more resilience and tends to either survive and evolve, or peter out as the context changes.

I'm careful to not rely too heavily on VC funded open source whenever I can avoid it.

munk-a2• 4 months ago

A GPL license helps but if support for a dependency is pulled you'll likely end up needing to divert more resources to maintain it anyways. There really isn't any guarantee against this cost - you either pay someone else to maintain it and hope they do a good job, build it in house and become an "also that thing" company, or follow a popular project without financially supporting it and just hope other people pick up your slack.

Preferring GPL licensed software means that you're immune to a sudden cut off of access so it's always advisable - but it's really important to stay on top of dependencies and be willing to pay the cost if support is withdrawn. So GPL helps but it isn't a full salve.

WorldPeas• 4 months ago

Since when has GPL stopped any company from doing so? I'd genuinely be happy to hear of a single time someone was actually pressed about their GPL compliance after FSF v. Cisco, it's like some immaterial sword of Damocles, the entire weight of which is the shame of losing face, which is fleeting in a society post-appeal-to-authority.

throwaway634672• 4 months ago

It’s a small tool shop building a tiny part of the Python ecosystem, let’s not overstate their importance. They burned through their VC money and needed an exit and CLI tool chains are hyped now for LLMs, but this mostly sounds like an acquihire to me. Dev tools are among the hardest things to monetize with very few real winners, so good for them to get a good exit.

druml2• 4 months ago

Small tool shop, burning VC money, true. "Tiny part of the Python ecosystem" is an understatement given how much impact uv has made alone.

throwaw12• 4 months ago

uv and ruff is not tiny part anymore, its growing fast

woodruffw3• 4 months ago

As a point of information: Astral did not, in fact, burn through its VC money. I agree that dev tools are difficult to monetize, though.

(Source: I'm an Astral employee.)

__mharrison__2• 4 months ago

uv is the best thing to happen to package management in Python.

It's not perfect, but it is light-years better than what preceded it.

I jumped ship to it and have not looked back. (So have many of my clients).

gigatexal2• 4 months ago

Uv is the defacto way to do projects. Ty is really really good. Ruff is the defacto linter. I mean they’ve earned a lot of clout.

giancarlostoro4• 4 months ago

Dev tools are among the hardest things to monetize with very few real winners, so good for them to get a good exit.

I'm on the fence about cancelling my JetBrains subscription I've had for nearly 10 years now. I just don't use it much. Zed and Claude Code cover all my needs, the only thing I need is a serious DataGrip alternative, but I might just sit down with Claude and build one for myself.

raincole• 4 months ago

tiny part of the Python ecosystem

https://xkcd.com/2347/

scuff3d4• 4 months ago

That's kind of like saying Cargo is a small part of the Rust ecosystem.

It's not there yet, but it's getting there.

anentropic• 4 months ago

That was my feeling - more than 'owning' uv etc I could see this as being about getting people onboard who had a proven track record delivering developer tooling that was loved enough to get wide adoption

192058172• 4 months ago

They were hyped here without any pushback. Maybe OpenAI thinks the Astral folks will now evangelize and foist Codex and ChatGPT onto the open source "community".

People need to be very careful about resisting. OpenAI wants to make everyone unemployed, works with the Pentagon, steals IP, and copyright whistleblowers end up getting killed under mysterious circumstances.

screye• 4 months ago

UV is arguably this decade's most important addition to the python ecosystem. They are a small, but they are important.

bbor2• 4 months ago

This is so dystopian… they built something that worked and now are being “acquihired” into oblivion, and we’re supposed to be happy about it? I’m glad a few of the early people just got rich I guess, but it seems like a terrible system overall.

AndrewKemendo• 4 months ago

Explain to me how this is any different than Microsoft, Blackrock, Google, Oracle, Berkshire or any other giant company acquiring their way to market share?

TrackerFF• 4 months ago

But how does this work out in the long run, in the case of AGI?

If AGI becomes available, especially at the local and open-source level, shouldn't all these be democratized - meaning that the AGI can simply roll out the tooling you need.

After all, AGI is what all these companies are chasing.

butlike8• 4 months ago

Let us assume AGI never comes. I don't plan scenarios for when aliens land, why should I for AGI? It's not particularly close.

butlike8• 4 months ago

If it becomes too antagonistic, people will change. The desire to build things is larger than any given iron fist du jour. Just ask Oracle or IBM.

goku123• 4 months ago

Could you say the same about the Chrome browser? Google is using it to EEE the web (Embrace, Extend and Extend it till it's a monstrosity that nobody else can manage). That's pretty antagonistic. But did people change?

pixelsort2• 4 months ago

In the many darker timelines that one can extrapolate, capturing essential tech stacks is just a pre-cursor to capturing hiring.

Once we start seeing Open AI and Anthropic getting into the certifications and testing they'll quickly become the gold standard. They won't even need to actually test anyone. People will simply consent to having their chat interactions analyzed.

The models collect more information about us than we could ever imagine because definitionally, those features are unknown unknowns for humans. For ML, the gaps in our thinking carry far richer information about is than our actual vocabularies, topics of interest, or stylometric idiosyncrasies.

echelon• 4 months ago

As if there will be hiring in the fullness of time.

There will come a day when you can will an entire business into existence at the press of a button. Maybe it has one or two people overseeing the business logic to make sure it doesn't go off the rails, but the point is that this is a 100x reduction in labor and a 100,000x speed up in terms of delivery.

They'll price this as a $1M button press.

Suddenly, labor capital cannot participate in the market anymore. Only financial capital can.

Suddenly, software startups are no longer viable.

This is coming.

The means of production are becoming privatized capital outlays, just like the railroads. And we will never own again.

There is nothing that says our careers must remain viable. There is nothing that says our output can remain competitive, attractive, or in demand. These are not laws.

Knowledge work may be a thing of the past in ten years' time. And the capital owners and hyperscalers will be the entirety of the market.

If we do not own these systems (and at this point is it even possible for open source to catch up?), we are fundamentally screwed.

I strongly believe that people not seeing this - downplaying this - are looking the other way while the asteroid approaches.

This. Is. The. End.

dismalaf• 4 months ago

Of course they're trying to capture existing tech stacks. The models themselves are plateauing (most advancement is coming from the non-LLM parts of the software), they took too much VC money so they need to make some of it back. So gobbling up wafers, software, etc... is the new plan for spending the money and trying to prevent catastrophic losses.

bargainbin• 4 months ago

This is a logical conclusion of most open source tools in a capitalist economy, it's been this way for decades.

Equivalent or better tools will pop up eventually, heck if AI is so fantastic then you could just make one of your own, be the change you want to see in the world, right?

justinhj• 4 months ago

These are MIT/Apache 2. Sure they can buy and influence the direction but they can't prevent forks if they stray from what users want.

gigatexal2• 4 months ago

If our corporate overlords are gonna buy up all that is good I’d rather it have been Anthropic and not that wierdo humans-need-food-and-care-for-inference-so-LLMs aren’t-that-power-hungry Sam Altman. Man that guy is weird.

Oh well. They’ll hopefully get options and make millions when the IPO happens. Everyone eventually sells out. Not everyone can be funded by MIT to live the GNU maximalist lifestyle.

andrepd• 4 months ago

"Bearded German philosopher" once again being uncannily applicable to 21st century happenings...

nazgulnarsil2• 4 months ago

it never made sense to have devs all over the world doing the same task with tiny variation. Centralization was inevitable. LLMs might have been a step change but the trajectory was already set.

Zopieux• 4 months ago

The exact opposite has started: every single developer with an LLM subscription now has 45 variations of any foundational tool and library, to cater to their weird use-case, because it was easier for the LLM to just modify it rather than adapting to it. Almost nobody upstreams such improvements (or they are too niche anyway).

The ecosystem will be this way for a while, if not the new normal.

getpokedagain• 4 months ago

Stop using MIT licensed software being run by small vc backed operations if you value stability. They are risky and often costly Trojan horses.

brabel• 4 months ago

What do you mean? MIT is essentially as open as you can get. The worst that can happen is that they will relicense, eventually, to force big users to pay, but when that happens everybody knows how it goes: some consortium of other big companies forks it and continues development as if nothing happened.

ren_engineer• 4 months ago

somebody looked at Claude Code's binaries and Anthropic is testing out their own app platform called antspace. Not sure why people are shocked, they've been cloning features of their API customers and adding them to their core products since day 1. Makes sense they will take user data and do it for Claude Code by copying features or buying up what developers are using so they can lock people into a stack. These are the same people that trained on every scrap of data they could get their hands on and now complain about distilling models from their output

https://x.com/AprilNEA/status/2034209430158619084

Ironically this type of stuff really makes me doubt their AGI claims, why would they bother with this stuff if they were confident of having AGI within the next few years? They would be focused on replacing entire industries and not even make their models available at any price. Why bother with a PaaS if you think you are going to replace the entire software industry with AGI?

Frieren• 4 months ago

they've been cloning features of their API customers and adding them to their core products since day 1

Is this not just the strategy of all platforms. Spy on all customers, see what works for them and copy the most valuable business models. Amazon does that with all kinds of products.

Platforms will just grow to own all the market and hike prices and lower quality, and pay close to nothing to employees. This is why we used to have monopoly regulations before being greedy became a virtue.

tw19842• 4 months ago

this type of stuff really makes me doubt their AGI claims, why would they bother with this stuff if they were confident of having AGI within the next few years?

because AGI doesn't grow in a cage, it requires a piece of software running somewhere. someone has to build both to get that happen. that is like a high school level question.

munk-a2• 4 months ago

I think the good news here is that since OpenAI is a zombie company at this point this particular acquisition shouldn't be too concerning - and from what I've seen Anthropic has been building out in a direction of increased specialization. That said vertical integration is as much of a problem as it always was and it'd be excellent to see some sane merger oversight from the government.

ffsm8• 4 months ago

Hmm, from my perspective, an essential step to legitimize "vibecoding" in an enterprise setting is to to have a clearly communicated best practice - and have the LLM be hyper optimized for that setting.

Like having a system prompt which takes care of the project structure, languages, libraries etc

It's pretty much the first step to replacing devs, which is their current "North Star" (to be changed to the next profession after)

Once they've nailed that, the devs become even more of a tool then they're already are (from the perspective of the enterprise).

charcircuit• 4 months ago

As the cost of building software trends towards $0 I don't see how one can realistic own "the" means of production rather than "a" means. Any competitor can generate a similar product cheaply.

thegrim33• 4 months ago

> "means of production" in software

Ah yes, it was impossible to write software before these companies existed, and the only way to write software is via the products from these companies. They sure do control the "means of production".

kpcyrd3• 4 months ago

I stopped programming in python about 8-9 years ago because the tooling was so bad.

PaulHoule5• 4 months ago

You know until today I dismissed all those concerns about uv being a commercial product but now I am very concerned.

Microsoft has been a reasonable steward of github and npm considering everything but I don't feel so good about OpenAI this makes me reconsider my use of uv and Python as a whole because uv did a lot to stop the insanity. Not least Microsoft has been around since 1975 whereas I could picture OpenAI vanishing instantly in a fit of FOMO.

conartist62• 4 months ago

Perhaps a reasonable steward, but no more than a steward.

All the passion and vision is gone from GitHub and NPM. They're now too big and too stale not to (eventually) be replaced by projects which do still have excitement and leadership

cyanydeez3• 4 months ago

Not a concern: LLMs can fork all these products while they're still open licensed.

Rapzid3• 4 months ago

Vercel did this as well. I called it "ecosystem capture" but I like "means of production" too.

stingrae• 4 months ago

The risk is one of them buys it and pulls an Oracle / Java (Sun) stunt.

jillesvangurp• 4 months ago

It's open source. Forking it is an option. And with AI, one-shotting a replacement is an option as well. Or having it make changes to your fork. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should do that of course.

The point is that the value of accumulated know how and skill that lead to things like uv isn't lost even if the worst would happen to the company or people behind it. I don't think there are many signs of that. I don't think they had much of a revenue model around providing OSS tools. It's problematic for a lot of VC funded companies. An exit like this is as good as it gets. OpenAI now pays them to do their thing. Investors are probably pretty happy. And we maybe get to skip the enshittification that seems inevitable with the whole IPO/hedge funds circus that many vc funded OSS companies end up being subjected to. Problem solved. Congratulations to the team. They can continue doing what they love doing in a company that clearly loves all things python. And who knows what they can do next when freed from having to worry about making investors happy?

Big companies and OSS have always had symbiotic relationships. Some of the largest contributors to open source are people working in big companies. OpenAI fits this tradition beautifully. Most big software companies actively contribute to OSS projects that are relevant or important to them. Even very secretive companies like Apple or profit focused sharks like Oracle. Google, Meta, IBM. There are very few large software companies that aren't doing that. OSS without this very large scale corporate sponsor ships would just be a niche thing. Yes there are a lot of small projects. I have a few of my own even. But most of the big ones have some for profit businesses behind them.

The real meta question is of course if we still need a lot of the people centered development tooling when AIs are starting to do essentially all of the heavy lifting in terms of coding. I think we might need very different tools soon.

birdfood• 4 months ago

These companies are telling us software development is over. They are positioning themselves as the means of production. You want to build anything you do it through them. And since ‘software is solved’ this is not a software but a user acquisition.

LtWorf5• 4 months ago

Why do they need to acquire users who are developers if software development is over?

Escapade51602• 4 months ago

The means of production are just files with special extensions.

pitcock• 4 months ago

They’re not ahead on code though, and they recently announced giving up on rich media AI entirely lmao

The fuck does OpenAI have to offer?

Nothing I need.

The only reason Gemini is the best is UX, really running my own Mistral 7b is more than fine.

Because slow ass Gemini is still a slightly more convenient experience I use that.

Nobody OWNS nor will own the means of essentially thoughts. It’s such a silly idea I wonder if it’s propaganda.

mrweasel2• 4 months ago

The fuck does OpenAI have to offer?

That's the problem isn't it. OpenAI have nothing to offer, neither does many of the other AI companies, nothing that's not replaceable at least.

They need to gobble up these other actors in an attempt to own something that someone might actually pay for. Anthropic seems successful with Claude Code and can drive sales that way.

OpenAI struggles to sell ChatGPT as a standalone offering, so they need products and services that will consume it, allowing them to push sales via that route. They also need to control those products, because LLMs are pretty much plug-able at this point, and that's no good. OpenAI needs a lock in.

heavyset_go3• 4 months ago

It's even worse than that, Astral took over python-build-standalone and uv uses its Python builds on all platforms.

That means OpenAI will be able to do whatever they want to your Python binaries, including every Python binary in your deployments, with whatever telemetry that want to instrument in the builds.

DeathArrow• 4 months ago

As they gobble up previously open software stacks, how viable is it that these stacks remain open?

My question is if them gobbling up the alternatives will make room for other alternatives to grow.

virgildotcodes• 4 months ago

Also notable that after Anthropic’s acquisition of Bun, the vast majority of the communication and seeming effort from Jared on twitter seemed to shift to fixing issues with Claude Code.

I imagine many of these efforts benefitted the community as a whole, but it does make sense that the owners will have these orgs at least prioritize their own internal needs.

pjmlp11• 4 months ago

Great someone cashed out, time for the next startup idea.

AlexeyBelov3• 4 months ago

Selling out is good?

overflowy• 4 months ago

Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47438716

world2vec• 4 months ago

Just when I moved from poetry to uv.

kkirsche• 4 months ago

Happy for the team, sad for users. I just don’t believe their work will continue under new ownership

time0ut• 4 months 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.

nusl• 4 months ago

I am actually quite saddened by this. It's very unlikely that' I'll keep using uv, now. I don't trust this kind of shit.

prodigycorp3• 4 months ago

Codex team now has the legends who created Pyright and UV/Ruff/Ty.

hmokiguess• 4 months ago

Mixed feelings, happy for the guy, he deserves it. Unhappy about whom he went with, though not sure if he had other buyers / offers in the mix?

Hamuko2• 4 months ago

So, any good alternatives to uv?

ragebol3• 4 months ago

pixi? https://pixi.prefix.dev/latest/

Have not tried it too much yet because I was pretty content with `uv`, but I've heard lots of good things about it

Zizizizz• 4 months ago

Pretty sure that uses UV to do it's magic

__siru__• 4 months ago

It literally says on the homepage/the page you linked, that pixi is just a frontend for uv in the background to interface with PyPI and the project TOML files.

roflcopter692• 4 months ago

Definitely pixi imo. At least for me it works just as well as uv and imo does even more than uv by giving you the ability to mix dependencies from pypi.org and Conda. And the great thing about Conda is that they still build PyTorch for Intel Macs or OpenCV for macOS 11+ which is not the case for the wheels you'll find on pypi.org so it's really great if you want to build software that is shipped to a variety of old platforms.

jjice• 4 months ago

Not who I would've liked to acquire Astral. As long as OpenAI doesn't force bad decisions on to Astral too hard, I'm very happy for the Astral team. They've been making some of the best Python tooling that has made the ecosystem so much better IME.

smallpipe• 4 months ago

If Codex’s core quality is anything to go by, it’s time to create a community fork of UV

pronik• 4 months ago

Maybe they are being acquired to improve the quality of Codex.

piskov• 4 months ago

At least it’s in rust.

Unlike those react-game-engine guys over at Claude

lern_too_spel• 4 months ago

The priorities of the tooling will change to help agents instead of human users directly. That's all that's happening.

supriyo-biswas• 4 months ago

Eh, if it turns out to be too bad I guess I’ll just end up switching back to pipenv, which is the closest thing to uv (especially due to the automatic Python version management, but not as fast).

zbentley3• 4 months ago

Does pipenv download and install prebuilt interpreters when managing Python versions? Last I used it it relied on pyenv to do a local build, which is incredibly finicky on heterogenous fleets of computers.

dec0dedab0de4• 4 months ago

I would much rather use pipenv, if it only had the speed of uv.

Every interface kenneth reitz originally designed was fantastic to learn and use. I wish the influx of all these non-pythonistas changing the language over the last 10 years or so would go back and learn from his stuff.

Rapzid3• 4 months ago

People would just make pipenv fast? There are some new tools that can help with that..

Tyrubias• 4 months ago

I think it’s impossible to predict what will happen with this new trend of “large AI company acquires company making popular open source project”. The pessimist in me says that these products will either be enshittified over time, killed when the bubble bursts, or both. The pragmatist in me hopes that no matter what happens, uv and ruff will survive just like how many OSS projects have been forked or spun out of big companies. The optimist in me hopes that the extra money will push them to even greater heights, but the pessimist and the pragmatist beat the optimist to death a long time ago.

renewiltord• 4 months ago

It’s open source. If you want it to go in a different direction fork it and take it in that direction. Instead of the optimist, the pessimist, and the pragmatist the guy you need is the chap who does some work.

UqWBcuFx6NV4r16• 4 months ago

And which one are you again? The least useful of them all.

acedTrex• 4 months ago

damn it, another one bites the dust sadly

bobajeff• 4 months ago

This might not be bad as long as Astral is allowed to continue to work on improving ty, uv and ruff. I do worry about they'll get distracted by their Codex job duties though.

cess113• 4 months ago

If I were to engage in Python development, what's the alternative to uv?

umren• 4 months ago

no real alternative

bikelang2• 4 months ago

Poetry was the best alt-package manager before uv came along. That said - uv completely outclassed it.

cess113• 4 months ago

Looks like I can wrap my head around it, thanks.

duskdozer8• 4 months ago

What are you having an issue with? Environments? pyenv. Dependency management? pip+requirements.

cess113• 4 months ago

I'll make a note of this, thanks.

japhyr3• 4 months ago

This has me thinking about VS Code and VS Codium. I've used VS Code for a while now, but recently grew annoyed at the increasingly prevalent prompts to subscribe to various Microsoft AI tools. I know you can make them go away, but if you bounce between different systems, and particularly deal with installing VS Code on a regular basis, it becomes annoying.

I started using VS Codium, and it feels like using VS Code before the AI hype era. I wonder if we're going to see a commercial version of uv bloated with the things OpenAI wants us all to use, and a community version that's more like the uv we're using right now.

sschueller• 4 months ago

MS is actively making your life using VS Codium a pain. They removed the download button the extension marketrplace making it very difficult to download extensions and installing them in VS Codium since VS Codium does not have access to the official MS extension marketplace. Many don't publish outside the marketplace for example Platformio. [1]

[1] https://github.com/platformio/platformio-vscode-ide/issues/1...

matkoniecz• 4 months ago

Luckily I avoided extensions before switching to VS Codium.

Glad to hear that I am avoiding Microsoft's spam.

barnabee2• 4 months ago

I've not struggled to find the things I need at https://open-vsx.org (usually by searching directly within VSCodium), but then I only use it for editing things like markdown docs and presentations, LaTeX/Typst, rather than coding, which I prefer to do in a terminal and with a modal editor.

NewsaHackO2• 4 months ago

Also, Microsoft does not allow use of their LSP for python. You have to use the barebones Jedi LSP.

stephbook2• 4 months ago

1. You can add a bookmark that executes enough JavaScript to download the VSIX as usual. 2. I think you can patch the product.json from VSCodium to use VSCode. Gets overwritten on every update probably.

Honestly though, it's easier to disable ~three settings in VSCode and call it a day.

kayson• 4 months ago

I really wanted to use vscodium but had to go back to vscode proper because the remote ssh extension is just nowhere near as good. The open source one uses a JS library to implement the SSH protocol rather than using a system binary which means many features (GSSAPI) aren't supported. Also just seems like a bad idea to use an SSH implementation that's not nearly as battle tested as openssh...

Imustaskforhelp2• 4 months ago

I really loved uv, I am happy for the developers at astral but I am sad as a user seeing this :(

Any good alternatives to uv/plans for community fork of uv?

ragebol3• 4 months ago

Not often that I audibly groan at a HN headline :-(

alex_suzuki• 4 months ago

Same here. I’ve adopted uv across all of my Python projects and couldn’t be happier. ty looks very promising as well.

Probably inevitable, and I don’t blame the team, I just wish it were someone else.

ragebol3• 4 months ago

Ty, Ruff, UV, all great tools I recently started really using and I couldn't be happier with them.

Sigh

pprotas• 4 months ago

Monkey paw curls tight

Microsoft acquires Astral

Wish comes with a cost

saalweachter• 4 months ago

I kind of feel like the nature of the Python ecosystem is a dozen or so extremely useful frameworks/tools that everyone uses heavily for 3 years and then abandons and never speaks of again.

I'm not very deep in Python anymore, but every time I dip my toes back in it's a completely different set of tools, with some noticably rare exceptions (eg, numpy).

krick5• 4 months ago

I think, it may be the first time I am actually upset by acquire announcement. I am usually like "well, it is what it is", but this time it just feels like betrayal.

Fervicus3• 4 months ago

it just feels like betrayal

It was a VC backed tool. What did you expect?

articsputnik• 4 months ago

to be expected at some point, but for the independence and best interest of the Python ecosystem, I don't think it's a plus.

JoshTriplett5• 4 months 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.

krick5• 4 months 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• 4 months ago

25 years of Python behind me, please let me tell you that hopefully you're wrong : we don't "need" uv :)

JoshTriplett5• 4 months 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.

ex-aws-dude• 4 months ago

I write python all the time and I've never used it

fortuitous-frog5• 4 months 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...

petercooper• 4 months 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 :-)

zoobab• 4 months ago

Undisclosed amount?

ddxv2• 4 months ago

This is why I still like to setup projects and environments with my own `make` `venv` and `pip`.

UqWBcuFx6NV4r16• 4 months ago

No it’s not. You do it because you didn’t see the point in changing what you do. Don’t pretend that this is your “I told you so” moment. The QOL improvement offered by uv over your approach is certainly substantial, but it’s also easy to get off of uv. Nobody here feels legitimately “trapped” in the uv “ecosystem”. For 99.999% of Python projects, if they need to get off of uv, it’s going to be a very quick thing to do.

The disappointment and anger is because we’ve had a nice QOL improvement which is now more directly threatened in a way that it was before, and it’s always hard to go backwards. A QOL improvement that you never had in the first place. So…congrats?

Unless your point is “this is why I deprive myself of nice things, because they can go away”…which is just silly.

ddxv2• 4 months ago

Yes, I think we are mostly in agreement. I tried `uv` several times and never wanted to add it as a dependency because I wasn't convinced by the QOL. That being said, the biggest concern I always had was just that it was adding another layer of complexity and similar to Conda or pyenv it just wasn't something I was going to like.

I probably did come off a bit 'told you so' but I guess it was more that it felt like this was finally an answer to a question/curiosity I've had about `uv` where I didn't understand the dissonance between how others felt about it and how I did.

JackSlateur2• 4 months ago

Hopefully, you are writing PEP621-style pyproject.toml, yes ?

Then replacing uv with poetry or probably other thing is easy, because this is the standard packaging format

CuriouslyC• 4 months ago

The Bun acquisition made a little sense, Boris wanted Daddy Jarred to come clean up his mess, and Jarred is 100% able to deliver.

This doesn't make as much sense. OpenAI has a better low level engineering team and they don't have a hot mess with traction like Anthropic did. This seems more about acquiring people with dev ergonomics vision to push product direction, which I don't see being a huge win.

morphology2• 4 months ago

They do have a hot mess with traction amongst developers. Codex is far behind Claude Code (in both the GUI and TUI forms), and OpenAI's chief of applications recently announced a pivot to focus more on "productivity" (i.e. software and enterprise verticals) because B2B yields a lot more revenue than B2C.

cute_boi• 4 months ago

Honestly, I like codex performance compared to claude code.

JoshPurtell2• 4 months ago

Codex is not far behind Claude Code

cozzyd2• 4 months ago

This will solve the problem of when the package you want to install doesn't exist yet.

clickety_clack• 4 months 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.

h1fra• 4 months ago

what happen when openai goes brankrupt?

jimmydoe2• 4 months ago

It’s meant to be bought so at least no more guessing.

Ant is building their app distribution platform, so no wonder OpenAI thinking the same, it will only surprise me if they move so slow.

tgtweak5• 4 months ago

Amusing that the best python tools are written entirely in rust.

Kwpolska3• 4 months ago

That's what you get with toy languages.

wiseowise19• 4 months ago

…amusing how? CPython is written in C, JVM is written in mix of cpp and Java, Rust was written using OCaml initially. Don’t know why you’re snickering. Do you also find it amusing that by the time cpp/rust team scaffolds and compiles initial boilerplate, python team is already making money?

ChrisArchitect• 4 months ago

Associated OpenAI post: https://openai.com/index/openai-to-acquire-astral/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47438716)

petterroea• 4 months ago

How does this make sense

wrqvrwvq2• 4 months ago

So instead of finally building an enterprise-grade package manager where you could pay for validated, verified and secure packages, we're going to vibe project management and let a slop-spiggot fill the trough. Brilliant. Incredibly pleased that the last sane tools in the entire python ecosystem are getting gutted to discourage the last few non-braindead devs from bothering.

wrqvrwvq2• 4 months ago

Don't get me wrong I love getting 300 dependabot updates per day. It's a huge productivity booster and even if you devote 1/2 your dev team to keeping this shit up to date, you'd still be vulnerable to repo-jacking, because the entire pkg ecosystem is broken. The other thing i love about npm and pypi is the way a single small team will re-download in ci (regardless of caching) a TiB of packages all day long for no reason. Love waiting for gh actions to re-import infinite packages for the nth time before it times out and you restart it manually. makes so much sense. Great work all. glad openai is putting the nails in this retard coffin.

duskdozer8• 4 months ago

Not surprised at all on this. I've been really suspicious about how hard `uv` was being pushed in 24/25.

zemo• 4 months ago

"was being pushed" ... by whom? I think there's widespread grassroots support for it because it's a good tool.

moregrist2• 4 months ago

I think the push has been entirely organic. Compared to existing tooling, uv is fantastically fast.

One of the bigger pain points I’ve faced in Python is dependency resolution. conda could take 30-60 minutes in some cases. uv took seconds.

A serious quality of life improvement.

optionalsquid2• 4 months ago

uv replaces pip (and venv, and pipx, and more), not conda. If you want a uv-equivalent that replaces conda, then look at pixi: https://pixi.prefix.dev/

edelbitter2• 4 months ago

dependency resolution. conda could take 30-60 minutes

Quite literally this is what first raised the alarm bells for me. Dependency resolution complexity is more of a symptom. If that delay ends up being the point where Ops finally agrees that things have gone very wrong, then fixing that delay is not really helping hire the maintenance folks that can make those dependencies.. well, "dependable" again.

a_t48• 4 months ago

Hey now, I was a completely organic shill! I worked for free!

yoyohello135• 4 months ago

uv and ruff are incredible tools for python development, and I've loved my time using ty. This acquisition is absolutely terrible.

UqWBcuFx6NV4r16• 4 months ago

Are you legitimately unable to tell the difference between something being “pushed” and people just legitimately liking and using something?

If you’re going to be a grump about everything, sometimes your broken clock is going to be right. It’s still not worth showing off.

0xDEFACED• 4 months ago

will private packages hosted on pyx be available for openai to use as training data?

UqWBcuFx6NV4r16• 4 months ago

Dude, no. That’s not how licenses work. That’s absurd. You really think that whatever little code is in pyx is providing any material training edge over the code that OpenAI already has access to? Get off it.

maltelau• 4 months ago

Wtf!? Is this an early April's fools? I've been recommending astral tools left and right, Looks like I'm out a good chunk of social capital on that.

Who's organizing a fork, or is python back to having only shitty packaging available? :(

the__alchemist4• 4 months ago

I can get pyflow back to a maintained state and iron out the bugs if that would help. It's the same concept as uv, just kind of buggy and I haven't touched it in 6 years.

kseniamorph• 4 months ago

i feel like moves like this make it even harder for new open-source tools to break through. there's already evidence that LLMs are biased toward established tools in their training data (you can check it here https://amplifying.ai/research/claude-code-picks). when a dominant player acquires the most popular toolchain in an ecosystem, that bias only deepens. not because of any skewing, but because the acquired tools get more usage, more documentation, more community content. getting a new project into model weights at meaningful scale is already really hard. acquisitions like this make it even harder.

fortuitous-frog5• 4 months ago

I'm also concerned about this, but I feel as though uv and ruff's explosive growth happening alongside and despite that of LLMs demonstrates that it's not a show-stopper. I vividly recall LLM coding agents defaulting to pip/poetry and black/flake8, etc. for new projects. It still does that to some extent, but I see them using uv and ruff by default -- without any steering from me -- with far greater frequency.

Perhaps it's naive optimism, but I generally have hope that new and improved tools will continue to gain adoption and shine through in the training data, especially as post-training and continual learning improve.

dheatov2• 4 months ago

However when improved tools are obtained by these capitalists whose business model has no hint of sustainability, what's next is a modern Phoebus cartel situation where further improvement will be restricted or even prohibited to fabricate need for things like "uv Enterprise Pro".

merrvk• 4 months ago

Who advises on these acquisitions?

Or are they just using a dartboard?

Fervicus3• 4 months ago

I (along with many others) always thought that Astral being VC backed is going to lead to a future disappointment for the community.

duskdozer8• 4 months ago

I don't understand how anyone is surprised at this point. VC project trying to build a brand just isn't going to lead to some utopic community.

yoyohello135• 4 months ago

I at least thought we'd get a few more good years before the rug pull.

Bnjoroge4• 4 months ago

It was pretty obvious that some sort of acquisition was imminent. Astral is vc-funded and has to somehow generate returns for investors. An IPO is extremely unlikley in this market.

am17an• 4 months ago

Welp, back to pip

Bnjoroge4• 4 months ago

This was pretty obvious to just about anyone tbh. FastAPI is probably next

incognito1246• 4 months ago

Don't even joke

Bnjoroge4• 4 months ago

vcs gotta eat somehow, and iirc they were building a "fastapi cloud platform"

incognito1246• 4 months ago

I thought some more about it, and unfortunately it makes sense. IIRC there were several "insider" blogposts from OpenAI that said something along the lines of "Yeah almost every service we write is FastAPI"

wiseowise19• 4 months ago

Where can I find some of those?

Bnjoroge4• 4 months ago

yeah and I wouldnt be surprised if some oltp database platform is in the horizon as well. iirc they already acquired rockset. The eventual goal for these AI platforms is to own the entire e2e platform for e2e agents, from literally the language ecosystem(anthropic betting on TS/Bun) to local dev tooling using their harnesses to production-grade stuff that an agent needs.

vaylian• 4 months ago

The lead dev seems to think about using AI with FastAPI already: https://tiangolo.com/ideas/library-agent-skills/

Patt_• 4 months ago

Whoa, So Sam and Drio are just gonna buy out every popular open source projects now?

isodev• 4 months ago

And this is why we don't use tools by VC funded corps.

the__alchemist4• 4 months ago

Would there be any interest in me fixing the bugs in Pyflow and getting it updated to install newer python versions? It's almost identical to uv in concept, but I haven't touched it in 6 years.

Astral has demonstrated that there is desire for this sort of "just works" thing, which I struggled with, and led me to abandoning it. (I.e.: "pip/venv/conda are fine, why do I want this?", despite my personal experience with those as high-friction)

natemcintosh• 4 months ago

Personally, I'd expect a few good years of stewardship, and then a decline in investment. I can only hope there are enough community members to keep things going by then.

drcongo• 4 months ago

This is the worst possible news. Fantastic team at Astral joining a bunch of scumbag scammers at "Open"AI.

butterlettuce• 4 months ago

This is where POTUS should step in and stop this sale. Not cool.

cesarvarela2• 4 months ago

So vite.dev is next.

godblessamerica• 4 months ago

How are they acquiring it without "open" in their name?

chocks• 4 months ago

Fantastic for the team, huge fan for Ruff and Uv. Hope OpenAI continues with the OSS tooling and not introduce restrictive licensing.

skeledrew• 4 months ago

After investing a bunch in converting my projects to, and evangelizing uv, I feel betrayed. I smell stability troubles ahead. Should've stuck to Conda.

JoshPurtell2• 4 months ago

You most certainly should not have stuck with Conda

opyate2• 4 months ago

This is your friendly PSA that pip-tools still exist.

https://github.com/jazzband/pip-tools

opyate2• 4 months ago

goddammit

https://jazzband.co/news/2026/03/14/sunsetting-jazzband

OutOfHere5• 4 months ago

Discussion: https://github.com/jazzband/pip-tools/discussions/2353

__mharrison__2• 4 months ago

Interesting acquihire. I would have assumed MS would have snagged them (until their __layoffs__ last year). My gut is that this is more for Python expertise, and ruff/ty knowledge of linting code than uv...

I'm a heavy user and instructor of uv. I'm teaching a course next week that features uv and rough (as does my recent Effective Testing book).

Interesting to read the comments about looking for a change. Honestly, uv is so much better than anything else in the Python community right now. We've used projects sponsored by Meta (and other questionable companies) in the past. I'm going to continue enjoying uv while I can.

yoyohello135• 4 months ago

Oh no! This is actually terrible. Get ready for "premium tooling only available in Codex(TM)".

emddudley• 4 months ago

Well shit, I feel betrayed. This is exactly the opposite of what I thought Charlie's goals were. I thought he was focused on making the Python ecosystem better.

brooke2k• 4 months ago

nooooooooooooooo god why. I loved uv. just why

nrvn• 4 months ago

Should I freeze my plans to migrate from `poetry` to `uv` at "${WORK}"?

butlike8• 4 months ago

Sure, why not

tyree731• 4 months ago

Assuming things start getting weird about 18 months from now, poetry and uv have very similar semantics, so 18 months of comically faster workflows sounds nice.

Fiveplus• 4 months ago

The "commitment to open source" line in these press releases usually has a half-life of about 18 months before the telemetry starts getting invasive.

UqWBcuFx6NV4r16• 4 months ago

Telemetry has nothing to do with having a commitment to open-source, other than the same sort of neckbeards having strong opinions about both.

keithluu• 4 months ago

Why do I feel uneasy about this?

gessha• 4 months ago

I see people in this thread complain about the acquisition but the source code of uv is right there [1]. Fork it and move on. If ClosedAI enshittifies uv, gather with a bunch of other people and prop up a new version.

[1] https://github.com/astral-sh/uv

UqWBcuFx6NV4r16• 4 months ago

No, you.

These comments are so silly and condescending. You aren’t being clever or smart. You think that you need to go to GitHub and find the repo for uv and put it in a little footnote? You think that you’re being a clever boy by doing that? Everyone knows how open source works. We are developers.

testfrequency• 4 months ago

I’ve been thinking about purchasing zsh myself

fortuitous-frog5• 4 months ago

While I -- like most other commenters -- am dubious of both OpenAI and this acquisition, I think it's pretty reasonable to wait to see how this turns out before rushing to final judgment.

Everything I've seen from Astral and Charlie indicates they're brilliant, caring, and overall reasonable folks. I think it's unfair to jump to call them sell-outs and cast uv and the rest as doomed projects.

yoyohello135• 4 months ago

We always "wait and see" and it always turns out terrible. Even if the original founders stay on, eventually they will get pushed out when their morals conflict with company goals. Wont happen overnight, but uv will enshitify eventually.

walthamstow• 4 months ago

Charlie's fine. OpenAI are the problem here. Similar situation to steipete. Happy for the person, sad for the tool/ecosystem/everyone else.

wiseowise19• 4 months ago

Not similar at all. One has been a miracle for the Python ecosystem, another was a small scale Twitter hype-fart.

fortuitous-frog5• 4 months ago

I suppose my point is: I would expect that Charlie and co. carried their negotiations with OpenAI with the same laser-focused, careful judgment that catapulted Astral to success in the first place. I don't mean to fanboy, but I generally trust that they made the best decision for not only them, but the Python community as a whole.

krick5• 4 months ago

Sure, I don't think anybody disagrees, I sure don't. You never know, and all. It's just that we (the imaginary crowd you are arguing with) are not hopeful. And your "but wait, guys, I think they are good people!" is some quite pitiful attempt to console us. Sure, good, brilliant and caring, that's why we are upset in the first place. Always more sad when it's somebody you liked that dies.

And framing it as "sell-outs" is cheap rhetoric that means nothing. The fact is, they were the company who never really had a solid business model, but provide a lot of value for the community. Being acquired by some infinite-money company was always the best outcome they could hope for. Well, they did. Probably got a ton of money. Will it require some sacrifice? Well, some people would say that working for a company who makes products for the Department of War of the USA on conditions that even Anthropic found too ugly to satisfy, is enough of a sacrifice on its own. I am pretty sure though that most people would be willing to make this sacrifice for the right amount of money (with "right amount" being a variable part). So calling someone a sell-out is usually just bitterness about the fact that it wasn't you who managed to sell out. I mean, not judging someone for a sacrifice they make isn't the same thing as pretending they didn't make a sacrifice. Sometimes we (the world, they were trying to make better) are a sacrifice. That's all.

mark_l_watson• 4 months ago

I am very unhappy about this. Astral tools like uv are key to my work/experimenting process. I think OpenAI sucks as a company.

That said, I hope the excellent Astral team got a good payday.

speedgoose• 4 months ago

I was hoping that uv and ruff were the ones. I guess Python has a curse.

fithisux• 4 months ago

Astral to Join OpenAI (astral.sh) OpenAI to Acquire Astral(https://openai.com/index/openai-to-acquire-astral/)

what can I say?

CRConrad2• 4 months ago

You can say "acquire", as the URL you linked to does. It's more honest than the mealy-mouthed "join".

pgwalsh• 4 months ago

UV, Ruff, and Ty are all very good things, hopefully that doesn't change and gets better.

nnevatie• 4 months ago

I am so excited to keep building with you.

Fixed: I am so excited to take these millions of dollars.

seanplusplus• 4 months ago

I'm into this.

Anthropic acquiring Bun, now OpenAI acquiring Astral. Both show the big labs recognize that great AI coding tools require great developer tooling, and they are willing to pay for it rather than build inferior alternatives. Good outcome for the teams.

Not exactly a great look for the "AGI is right around the corner" crowd — if the labs had it, they would not need to buy software from humans.

gritspants• 4 months ago

I'm assuming that they were buying great Rust devs (given codex is written in it).

6thbit3• 4 months ago

This wasn't a software acquisition at all. They were already able to use Astral's software just like anyone else. They wanted a good dev-tools team so that's what they bought.

the Astral team will join the Codex team at OpenAI and over time, we’ll explore deeper integrations that allow Codex to interact more directly with the tools developers already use

bmitc4• 4 months ago

we’ll explore deeper integrations that allow Codex to interact more directly with the tools developers already use

Gross.

thewhitetulip3• 4 months ago

That's the cognitive dissonance

How can two things be the same:

Iur AI will replace every SWE in the next 5yrs

Our tooling is bad

We need to buy a company that brought a revolution in python tooling

If LLMs and GTP5 codex is soo good then how isn't all tooling related to OpenAI ebinf written by it?

Same goes for Claude. They say Claude writes Claude... Why isn't Claude Code then writtten by Claude in such a way that it has a platform specific optimized binary rather than an Electron app.

It's almost as if they're generating hype for their sales/valuation

saxwick• 4 months ago

Btw astral repo has Claude as one of its top contributors

s_ting765• 4 months ago

It should have been FastAPI instead.

jredwards2• 4 months ago

As someone who loves Astral and hates OpenAI, this is making me pretty sad.

jmux• 4 months ago

nooo

daredoes• 4 months ago

It would seem to me that purchasing a piece of software as an AI company is just an outright admission that they could not generate an equivalent piece of software for a better price?

If it was cheaper to use their internal AI to create these tools, they would.

wiseowise19• 4 months ago

Extremely stupid argument. It doesn’t matter how good is your car if the driver is lacking.

QuadrupleA2• 4 months ago

Not sure I follow - is the car the coding agent, and the developer the driver?

Agree with OP here, if AI coding tools are as intelligent and amazing as AI influencers and CEOs are saying, just prompt them to "Remake UV but faster & better".

EddieLomax• 4 months ago

Goddamnit

wiseowise19• 4 months ago

So begins the uv-Bun war.

seanrrr• 4 months ago

My initial reaction was being weirdly sad about this and I don't fully understand why yet. I read the headline, clicked into the link, and just went noooooooo. I really like uv and I hope it continues to do well, congrats to the team though and hope everyone there gets a good outcome.

vinhnx• 4 months ago

What excites me about the OpenAI + Astral acquisition: Codex CLI, uv, and ruff are all written in Rust. Fast by design, and fully open source.

wraptile• 4 months ago

Haha just migrated everything off openai and on ruff/uv/ty last week. Sorry guys, it's clearly my fault.

ontouchstart2• 4 months ago

It is interesting to see this after yesterday’s announcement of Unsloth Studio:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47414032

Uv did solve a distribution problem for them.

There is still a lot of room to grow in the space of software packaging and distribution.

OutOfHere5• 4 months ago

This acquisition doesn't make too much sense for the longevity of Astral's software because Astral's software is orthogonal to Codex. It seems more like a acqui-hire. If tomorrow OpenAI were to stop funding Astral's software due to a cash crunch, it would be game over for uv et al. Codex doesn't need uv.

fantasizr• 4 months ago

should I be glad I never got off pip?

dahlia3• 4 months ago

What strikes me most about this acquisition isn't the AI angle. It's the question of why so many open source tools get built by startup teams in the first place.

I maintain an open source project funded by the Sovereign Tech Fund. Getting there wasn't easy: the application process is long, the amounts are modest compared to a VC round, and you have to build community trust before any of that becomes possible. But the result is a project that isn't on anyone's exit timeline.

I'm not saying the startup path is without its own difficulties. But structurally, it offloads the costs onto the community that eventually comes to depend on you. By the time those costs come due, the founders have either cashed out or the company is circling the drain, and the users are left holding the bag. What's happening to Astral fits that pattern almost too neatly.

The healthier model, I think, is to build community first and then seek public or nonprofit funding: NLnet, STF, or similar. It's slower and harder, but it doesn't have a built-in betrayal baked into the structure.

Part of what makes this difficult is that public funding for open source infrastructure is still very uneven geographically. I'm based in Korea, and there's essentially nothing here comparable to what European developers can access. I had no choice but to turn to European funds, because there was simply no domestic equivalent. That's a structural problem worth taking seriously. The more countries that leave this entirely to the private sector, the more we end up watching exactly this kind of thing play out.

alexchantavy• 4 months ago

I think this overstates the “betrayal” angle.

A lot of great open source comes out of startups because startups are really good at shipping fast and getting distribution (open source is part of this strategy). Users can try the tool immediately, and VC funding can put a lot of talent behind building something great very quickly.

The startup model absolutely creates incentive risk, but that’s true of any project that becomes important while depending on a relatively small set of maintainers or funders.

I’m not sure an acquisition is categorically different from a maintainer eventually moving on or burning out. In all of those cases, users who depend on the project take on some risk. That’s not unique to startups; it’s true of basically any software that becomes important.

There’s no perfect structure for open source here - public funding, nonprofit support, and startups all suck in their own ways.

And on the point you make about public funding being slow: yeah, talented people can’t work full-time on important things unless there’s serious funding behind it. uv got as good as it is because the funding let exceptional people work on it full-time with a level of intensity that public funding usually does not.

dahlia3• 4 months ago

That's fair, and I don't really blame anyone for taking the startup route. It's often the only realistic path to working full-time on something you care about. My point is more that it shouldn't have to be. The more public funding flows into open source infrastructure, the less that tradeoff becomes necessary in the first place. Korea being almost entirely absent from that picture is part of why I feel this so keenly.

cactusfrog• 4 months ago

I think UV and Ruff showed us how much better Python tooling could be. Just setting a higher bar has move. OS forward

theallan• 4 months ago

I maintain an open source project funded by the Sovereign Tech Fund.

I would absolutely love to know more about this if you are willing to share the story?

dahlia3• 4 months ago

Sure! Here's what I wrote about the story: https://writings.hongminhee.org/2025/10/stf-fedify/

jackbravo• 4 months ago

Most likely, because it is less money :-p. But also because it is less known and harder, as you already mentioned. Personally, I'm based in Mexico, and I would never have thought about trying to get nonprofit funding for a community project, nor would I know where to start to get that.

insane_dreamer3• 4 months ago

open source allows you to build community trust must faster, and community trust/adoption is key

I don't see any betrayal here, since the tools are still OSS - yeah OpenAI might take it a different direction and add a bunch of stuff I don't like/want, but I can still fork

jitl10• 4 months ago

capitalism / the bazaar is faster than communism / the cathedral, news at 11

rtpg4• 4 months ago

uvs success is downstream of paying like 10 very good rust tooling developers to work on uv full time.

Full time effort put into tools gets you a looooot of time to make things work well. Even ignoring the OSS stuff, many vendors seem to consider their own libs to be at best “some engineers spend a bit of time on them” projects!

saghm4• 4 months ago

Yeah, it's pretty hard to argue that at least for the python tooling use case, the typical open source methodologies had failed to solve things as well in a couple decades as uv did in a few years as a startup. The lesson we should take from that is probably more up for debate.

JumpCrisscross2• 4 months ago

it doesn't have a built-in betrayal baked into the structure

Astral was founded as a private company. Its team has presumably worked hard to build something valuable. Calling their compensation for that work 'betrayal' is unfair.

Community-based software development sounds nice. But with rare exception, it gets outcompeted by start-ups. Start-ups work, and they work well. What is problematic is the tech giants' monopoly of the acquisition endpoint. Figuring out ways for communities to compete with said giants as potential acquirers is worth looking into–maybe public loans to groups of developers who can show (a) they're committed to keep paying for the product and (b) aren't getting kicked back.

simplyluke• 4 months ago

It's the question of why so many open source tools get built by startup teams in the first place

The capitalist answer would be that markets are more efficient than governments at capital allocation and thus private companies are better positioned to develop software that solves real-world-problems, and in this case are so much more efficient at it that the stuff those companies give away for free as open source still dwarves publicly funded efforts.

My own opinion is that there are plenty of software problems worth solving that don't fit neatly into that bucket and you're likely right that some increased degree of public funding around them is worthwhile. In the US that tends to end up flowing through the university systems. I mean, the internet itself was DoD funding going to university labs.

ernst_klim• 4 months ago

I don't think government funded projects are any more secure. The political climate changes once in a few years and we had a lot of examples of previous decisions being scrapped. Limux in München was scrapped overnight, usaid was shut down in no time.

You get a little more stability for a lot of headache but nobody guarantees that in a few years political stance won't change drastically and the fund won't be cut or even closed.

apitman• 4 months ago

That didn't take long: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46648627

croes• 4 months ago

So no problem in joining OpenAI after the whole DoD/DoW mess?

I started Astral to make programming more productive.

And now they help make killing more productive

Ylpertnodi2• 4 months ago

And now they help make killing more productive

As do our taxes.

dec0dedab0de4• 4 months ago

Ugh, this isn't good.

I hate relying on anything that is controlled by a single company. Considering that Astral is basically brand new in the python timeline, it is concerning that they are already being acquired.

On the other hand, UV is so fast that it makes up for anything I find annoying about it.

brcmthrowaway• 4 months ago

Can Astral's stuff be forked?

ranaaditya• 4 months ago

congrats team !

jfb• 4 months ago

Don't love it. But, I'm glad the Astral folks are getting the bag.

linhns• 4 months ago

It is increasingly clear to me that Codex is that frontier.

I'm not really sure about this.

klysm• 4 months ago

Damnit I was really rooting for uv :(

wolvesechoes• 4 months ago

Another HN darling falls from grace. But hey, the next one will not follow the same steps!

execution• 4 months ago

I do hope every at Astral got a a nice pay-out for this.

It does look like this is going to be the norm for popular open source projects related to AI ecosystem, but I guess open source developers need to get paid somehow if that project is their only livelihood.

Shame for the end-user though. As you will always be second guessing how they will ruin the tool, i.e. via data collection or AI-sloppifying it. It is likely OpenAI won't, but it is not a great feeling knowing a convenient tool you use is at the whim of a heartless mega-corp.

caidan• 4 months ago

Booooooooooooooooooo

amai• 4 months ago

WAT? uv now belongs to Trump mega-donors? That is not good for the Python ecosystem.

waba99• 4 months ago

I wonder who's going to pick up VoidZero

ajkjk• 4 months ago

what a shame

mhd• 4 months ago

Maybe it's time to get out my Cowlishaw Rexx book again…

yoyohello135• 4 months ago

Time for https://zubanls.com/

mkrd• 4 months ago

Ah shit, back to poetry

imp0cat2• 4 months ago

Ok I laughed, but god, please no.

0dayman• 4 months ago

won't increase your subscriptions, people are dropping out in the millions and no one wants jewPT

UqWBcuFx6NV4r16• 4 months ago

Piss off with that antisemitism. Absolutely cringe.

looneysquash• 4 months ago

I don't get it. Why buy Astral? Why not just fund it? Why not just hire the company to do whatever work you want to get out of the team as part of the merger?

Why buy, when they can rent?

(Not to mention, multiple companies could hire and fund them.)

sesm• 4 months ago

To buy the users

UqWBcuFx6NV4r16• 4 months ago

It’s not a merger.

dheatov2• 4 months ago

They don't really care or like what Astral is doing right now, but they have thoughts about what they can make Astral do for them, and they really fancy those thoughts.

sharkjacobs2• 4 months ago

Congrats to the Astral team, they've done great work and deserve everything.

As a user of uv who was hoping it would be a long term stable predictable uninteresting part of my toolchain this sucks, right?

politelemon2• 4 months ago

As the owner they dictate their priorities, whether around features or tighter integration with their ecosystem.

sharkjacobs2• 4 months ago

Yes I agree. And I think that joining OpenAI will probably change their priorities, and that sucks.

fud1016• 4 months ago

congrats for.. selling out? wut

krick5• 4 months ago

Tested the "Kagi LinkedIn Speak" translator[0] from a couple of days ago[1] on this. Works pretty great! If you translate it back and forth a number of times, it pretty much distills it to the essence.

[0] https://translate.kagi.com/?from=linkedin&to=en

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47408703

Thanemate• 4 months ago

Any move that strengthens future oligopolies is a net loss for all consumers.

I don't care how good/bad a company is, because I lived long enough to know that most of them started off like that. Good luck to the uv team.

sota_pop• 4 months 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.

joshuawright11• 4 months ago

Wow - this is potentially the most cynical hacker news thread I've ever read. When did this place trade it's curiosity and excitement about technology for constant doomerism?

Congrats Astral and co!

dgb232• 4 months ago

I think it was always that way. When an org gets big and its leaders become powerful, then there's always a good portion of snark and mistrust from this community.

jdgoesmarching2• 4 months ago

Open source tools are being snapped up by a company famous for reneging on its non-profit mission as soon as they sniffed some profit. Wow gee, imagine the cynicism.

barnabee2• 4 months ago

Sorry, but I don't think cheering on OpenAI represents curiosity and excitement about technology.

I'm happy for the Astral team but in my opinion, big tech especially is incompatible with curiosity and hacker ethos.

UqWBcuFx6NV4r16• 4 months ago

Blindly celebrating all accusations is not “curiosity and excitement about technology”. Disappointing that you can’t tell the difference between tech and the SV startup scene. They are different things.

Lws803• 4 months ago

Wonder if they can still use claude code in their repos now

192058172• 4 months ago

Astral threads here have been surprisingly flag resistant and plentiful. This takeover explains a lot.

I suspect some OpenClaw "secure" sandbox is coming (Nvidia jealousy) with Astral delivering the packages for Docker within Docker within Qemu within Qubes. A self respecting AI stack must be convoluted.

I can't wait until all this implodes after the IPOs.

UqWBcuFx6NV4r16• 4 months ago

…what? Flag-resistant?

Astral’s tools have been a huge QOL improvement for a great many developers using what’s, what? The second most piously programming language ever?

Does the level of attention surprise you? Or do you just flag things that you personally aren’t into?

selectnull• 4 months ago

I see a lot of comments that are "somebody should fork this" or "community will fork it" or similar.

I didn't see a single comment of "I will fork it" type.

Ylpertnodi2• 4 months ago

You're absolutely correct! Not a single one.

jt-hill• 4 months 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.

portly• 4 months ago

Will this be the beginning of the Great Rust vs Zig battle ?

ebri• 4 months ago

I will start migrating from uv, ty and ruff first thing this weekend. It will be painful but not being dependent on OpenAI will be more than worth it.

wiseowise19• 4 months ago

So many negative comments but not a single:

- I'm willing to pay for Astral ecosystem so it stays independent/open source

- I'm willing to fork the project

UqWBcuFx6NV4r16• 4 months ago

Here you go: I am willing to pay for Astral ecosystem so it stays independent / open-source.

Nobody gave me that opportunity.

Not everybody puts every thought they have into a HN comment. Saying “ I am willing to pay for Astral ecosystem so it stays independent / open-source” just isn’t a very useful thing to say at the moment.

Get off your high-horse.

wiseowise19• 4 months ago

What high-horse? The point is community is all talk, but no walk.

fastasucan2• 4 months ago

This leaves me a bit scared for uv and ruff to be honest.

elAhmo• 4 months ago

Terrible news for Python ecosystem. I guess the money was too much to reject this ridiculous offer.

deskamess• 4 months ago

uv has been very useful but I also looking at pixi. Anyone have any experience with that? I hear good things about it.

roflcopter692• 4 months ago

Can highly recommend pixi. It really is the "uv but for Conda" and actually quite a bit more imo. Don't know how relevant this is for you, but many packages like PyTorch are not being built for Intel Macs anymore or some packages like OpenCV are built such that they require macOS 13+. That's usually not too much of a problem on your most likely pretty modern dev machine but when shipping software to customers you want to support old machines. In the Conda ecosystem, stuff is being built for a wide variety of platforms, much more than the wheels you'd find on pypi.org so that can be very useful.

So I can really recommend you trying pixi. You can even mix dependencies from pypi.org with the ones from Conda so for most cases you really get the best of both worlds. Also the maintainers are really nice and responsive on their Discord server.

bilalel• 4 months ago

That's unfortunate for the python community. I can understand the move by Astral team, but it's still difficult to accept it.

brikym2• 4 months ago

Does this mean pip is finally getting PIP'd?

6thbit3• 4 months ago

py stuff aside for a sec, having this team working on Codex will be huge.

I didn’t see a way they ever dethroned Claude until now.

Happy as a Codex user, gloomy as a Python one.

crimecanada• 4 months ago

good job

aanet• 4 months ago

Uff. Reading all the comments made my head hurt.

I love(d) `uv`. I think it's one of the best tools around for Python ecosystem... Therefore the pit in my tummy when I read this.

Yes, congrats to the team and all that.

I'm more worried about the long term impact on the ecosystem, as are almost everybody who dropped a comment here.

My own thoughts echo somewhat what @SimonW wrote here [1]

[1] https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/19/openai-acquiring-astra...

However, a forking strategy is may (or may not) be the best for `uv`.

Could we count on the Astral team to keep uv in a separate foundation?

jimbob742• 4 months ago

Yeah - that would be a good move. It’s one thing to say something in a press release, it’s another to setup an ownership structure then ensures the tools aren’t dependent on Open.ais continuing goodwill.

UqWBcuFx6NV4r16• 4 months ago

This is like, the worst outcome for Astral. This is severely disappointing. I say this as someone that uses Astral and OpenAI products practically every day. This is such a terrible fit.

I just hope that Charlie doesn’t trot around the dev circuit (like he has in years past) trying to sell everyone on this “being a good thing, actually”. I hope that he isn’t given the space to sell any story other than “we took the AI money despite it being a terrible fit”, because that story would just be a lie. The fact that this blog post is already trying to preemptively justify it—“well in my launch post what I said is…”—is extremely, extremely telling.

This is so hugely disappointing. And again, I am at this point quite bullish on AI. This isn’t a philosophical or anti-AI take at all, because those are easier to dismiss.

I’m not going to pretend to “congratulate the team” or whatever. As far as I’m concerned, that’s HN culture brain rot. Some of y’all in ‘startup culture’ may see getting acquired by OpenAI as some sort of big prize or worth celebrating or whatever, but I certainly don’t.

atoav• 4 months ago

Unfortunate, wince I trust Astral, and can't say the same about openAI

talideon• 4 months ago

Well, that's the first shoe dropping. Thankfully uv and ruff are MIT licensed and in a good place, so worst comes to worst...

bergheim• 4 months ago

Given their statements, influencers and indeed their raison d'être I don't understand why this and bun was acquired? Why did they not just Ralph loop it? Claude is famously not made by humans anymore.

One prompt and call it a weekend. Surely they have the compute.

Oooooh, right.

Same reason we don't have windows 41 either.

gehsty• 4 months ago

They should be allowed to make money from their work. Their work is MIT licensed, if it goes south it is rescuable by the community.

Things come and go, let’s not beat up some dudes who made some cool stuff, made everyone’s lives easier and then sold up. There is a timeline where this makes UV / python better.

bmitc4• 4 months ago

That's all fine. I don't think anyone is upset they got purchased. It's clear it was heading that direction anyway. What everyone is upset about is that they were purchased by OpenAI, who isn't exactly a trustworthy company.

patcon• 4 months ago

well, fuck.

tuananh• 4 months ago

they said they will keep maintaining uv/ruff/ty ... but that's an impossible promise to keep with their priority changes once they are in the bed with OAI.

zx8080• 4 months ago

Counting days until "uv will stop being dveloped".

fud1016• 4 months ago

Well this sucks. So the most evil new company has acquired the most exciting 'open' source company. The vibes are about to get bad. Hopefully this speeds up the next phase of AI destroying the economy and everything good about tech.

heavyset_go3• 4 months ago

Astral took over python-build-standalone, and uv uses its custom Python builds in deployments.

I do not want OpenAI putting their fingers in my Python binaries, nor do I want their telemetry.

kelvinjps10• 4 months ago

This is feeling weird, like now if the AI bubble pops it will bring core technologies like runtimes (bun) and package managers (astral) now what's next? vite?

rockstar2001• 4 months ago

All other devtools now will follow suit - to get acquihired by openai or anthropic.

dankwizard• 4 months ago

OpenAI continue to send mixed messaging.

"Our AI can do anything a human can do, better, faster, cheaper" -> Buys a product instead of asking their AI to just make it.

Really doesn't give me confidence in your product!!!!

moezd• 4 months ago

Noooo, uv, you were the chosen one! (meme)

Jokes aside, these tools are currently absolutely free to use, but imagine a future when your employers demand you use Claude Code because that's the only license agreement they have, and they stop their AI agents from using uv. Sure, we all know how to use uv, but there will also come a time and place when they will ask us to not write a single line of code manually, especially if you have your agents running in "feared the most by clueless middle managers" "production".

Are you ready for factionalism and sandbox wars? Because I'm not. I just want to write my code, push to "production" as I see fit and be happy as pixels start shifting around.

hatefulheart2• 4 months ago

There are so many comments along the lines of:

"What's the matter, just fork it when it goes bad?"

The problem is that uv in and of itself, whilst a great technical achievement isn't sufficient. Astral run a massive DevOps pipeline that, just to give one example, packages the python distributions.

Those who are saying that forking is an option are clearly not arguing it in good faith.

stabbles• 4 months ago

That's overstating things. The biggest piece of infra is PyPI, to which uv is only an interface. They do distribute Python binaries, but that's not very impressive.

hatefulheart2• 4 months ago

So when Charlie Marsh goes on a podcast saying that the majority the complications they face with their work is in DevOps, he's also overstating things?

But you know best it seems!

johnisgood3• 4 months ago

Overstating complexity justifies funding, and attracts attention.

ACV001• 4 months ago

ok so the buying frenzy has started. We will end up with a new google basically monopolizing the internet. Only in this case it is much worse. M&As are evil.

CRConrad2• 4 months ago

"Join"... Sigh. Disgusting LI-slop language. Say "be acquired" when you mean "be acquired".

globular-toast2• 4 months ago

Well that's ruined my morning.

I was always wary of uv being written in Rust. Even if we can make a community fork, how big is the intersection between great Rust developers and people really into Python packaging and infrastructure? Not big, I would assume.

I do wonder if we should just rewrite something in Python, but make sure it runs with pypy. Pypy should give at least similar performance as Rust but being still regular Python means there is a far bigger pool of devs able to maintain it.

Astral has shown us the way, but I think it's time to take control of our own destiny as Python devs.

submeta• 4 months ago

I hope OpenAI will be here long enough so we have uv in twenty years from now. uv totally changed the way I work with Python, so I wouldn't want to miss it.

RS-232• 4 months ago

Does it go without saying that OpenAI/majority shareholder Microsoft can unilaterally change the licenses and take Astral’s repos offline (completely against the will of Charlie or the community)?

Regardless of how likely/inevitable this scenario is, the public should make offline backups and forks immediately.

Astral to Join OpenAI

Related Stories