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.
throwaway63467 30 minutes 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.
druml 22 minutes 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.
rob 3 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
Hamuko 22 minutes ago [-]
Do you have any statistics for that?
pm90 18 minutes ago [-]
anecdotally every place ive worked at has switched over and never looked back.
shawnwall 4 minutes ago [-]
been in the python game a long time and i've seen so many tools in this space come and go over the years. i still rely on good ol pip and have had no issues. that said, we utilize mypy and ruff, and have moved to pyproject etc to remotely keep up with the times.
volkercraig 36 minutes 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.
palmotea 22 minutes 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.
goku12 2 minutes ago [-]
> If AI "clean-room" re-implementations are allow to bypass copyright/licenses, the GPL won't protect you.
Isn't that the same for the obligations under BSD/MIT/Apache? The problem they're trying to address is a different one from the problem of AI copyright washing. It's fair to avoid introducing additional problems while debunking another point.
islandfox100 4 minutes ago [-]
Maybe I'm reading wrong here, but what's the implication of the clean room re-implementations? Someone else is cloning with a changed license, but if I'm still on the GPL licensed tool, how am I "not protected"?
eru 1 minutes ago [-]
There's basically no different between GPL and BSD in that case.
petcat 18 minutes 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.
kjksf 56 seconds ago [-]
I don't remember GitHub or Amazon advocating MIT over GPL.
Feel free to prove me wrong by pointing out this massive amount of advocacy from "mega-clouds" that changed people's minds.
The ads, the mailing list posts, social media comments. Anything at all you can trace to "mega-clouds" execs.
leetrout 8 minutes ago [-]
I remember a somewhat prominent dev in the DC area putting on Twitter around 2012 or so something like "I do plenty of open source coding and I don't put a fucking license on it" and it stuck with me for all these years that it was a weird stance to take.
eru 36 seconds ago [-]
Huh? When you deploy something in the cloud, you don't have to share your GPL'ed stuff either. Google doesn't.
rTX5CMRXIfFG 1 hours 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.
Maxion 51 minutes 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.
captainbland 24 minutes ago [-]
I think the issue is that LLMs are a cash problem as much as they are a technical problem. Consumer hardware architectures are still pretty unfriendly to running models which are actually competitive to useful models so if you want to even do inference on a model that's going to reliably give you decent results you're basically in enterprise territory. Unless you want to do it really slowly.
The issue that I see is that Nvidia etc. are incentivised to perpetuate that so the open source community gets the table scraps of distills, fine-tunes etc.
fnordpiglet 31 minutes ago [-]
The problem is even if an OSS had the resources (massive data centers the size of NYC packed with top end custom GPU kits) to produce the weights, you need enormous VRAM laden farms of GPUs to do inference on a model like Opus 4.6. Unless the very math of frontier LLMs changes, don’t expect frontier OSS on par to be practical.
palmotea 20 minutes ago [-]
> you need enormous VRAM laden farms of GPUs to do inference on a model like Opus 4.6.
It's probably a trade secret, but what's the actual per-user resource requirement to run the model?
5 minutes ago [-]
runarberg 36 minutes ago [-]
That would be accepting the framing of your class enemy, there is no reason to do that.
metalliqaz 34 minutes ago [-]
unless they are also pirate LLMs, I don't see how any open source project could have pockets deep enough for the datacenters needed to seriously contend
bix6 39 minutes 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?
darth_avocado 34 minutes ago [-]
If AI tools are as good as the CEOs claim, we should have no friction towards building multiple open source alternatives very quickly. Unless of course, they aren’t as good as they are being sold as, in which case, we have nothing to worry about.
hot_iron_dust 46 minutes 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.
TrackerFF 16 minutes 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.
butlike 15 minutes 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.
cube2222 41 minutes 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)
bix6 36 minutes 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.
AndrewKemendo 20 minutes 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?
devnotes77 55 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
applfanboysbgon 1 hours 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.
lm28469 5 minutes ago [-]
They said it'll be good enough in two weeks, give them some time!
waynesonfire 10 minutes ago [-]
And, they buy a company writing tooling for Python in not Python.
avaer 1 hours ago [-]
As good as the team is, that's not what they're buying in this case.
suddenlybananas 1 hours ago [-]
What are they buying?
rvnx 48 minutes ago [-]
> Second, to our investors, especially Casey Aylward from Accel, who led our Seed and Series A, and Jennifer Li from Andreessen Horowitz, who led our Series B
They are buying out investors, it's like musical chairs.
The liquidity is going to be better on OpenAI, so it pleases everyone (less pressure from investors, more liquidity for investors).
The acquisition is just a collateral effect.
tgtweak 41 minutes ago [-]
Are you implying that the revenue multiple on this acquisition is lower than openAIs and that they'd be making money by acquiring and folding into their valuation multiple? I think that's not the case and I would wager non existent.
This was an acquihire (the author of ripgrep, rg, which codex uses nearly exclusively for file operations, is part of the team at Astral).
So, 99% acquihire , 1% other financial trickery. I don't even know if Astral has any revenue or sells anything, candidly.
It means the company almost reached their runway, so all these employees would have to find a job.
It's a very very good product, but it is open-source and Apache / MIT, so difficult to defend from anyone just clicking on fork. Especially a large company like OpenAI who has massive distribution.
Now that they hired the employees, they have no more guarantees than if they made a direct offer to them.
tgtweak 11 minutes ago [-]
So I don't see how the acquisition is collateral - it's an acquihire plain and simple, if anything else it would be supply chain insurance as they clearly use a lot of these tools downstream. As you noted the licensing is extremely permissive on the tools so there appears to be very little EV there for an acquirer outside of the human capital building the tools or building out monetized features.
I'm not too plugged into venture cap on opensource/free tooling space but raising 3 rounds and growing your burn rate to $3M/yr in 24 months without revenue feels like a decently risky bag for those investors and staff without a revenue path or exit. I'd be curious to see if OpenAI went hunting for this or if it was placed in their lap by one of the investors.
OpenAI has infamously been offering huge compensation packages to acquire talent, this would be a relative deal if they got it at even a modest valuation. As noted, codex uses a lot of the tooling that this team built here and previously, OpenAI's realization that competitors that do one thing better than them (like claude with coding before codex) can open the door to getting disrupted if they lapse - lots of people I know are moving to claude for non-coding workflows because of it's reputation and relatively mature/advanced client tools.
zanie 17 minutes ago [-]
A brief note, your numbers are way off here — Astral subsequently raised a Series A and B (as mentioned in the blog post) but did not announce them. We were doing great financially.
(I work at Astral)
waynesonfire 8 minutes ago [-]
> They raised 4M USD
What was their pitch?
jon-wood 38 minutes ago [-]
I can see why the former investors and Astral founders would like that, what I don't see is what OpenAI get out of the deal.
KeplerBoy 1 hours ago [-]
mindshare and a central piece of the python package management ecosystem.
bootsmann 1 hours ago [-]
Most popular product on the planet acquires a random python packaging org for mindshare? What am I not seeing here?
nilkn 58 minutes ago [-]
I feel like it's pretty easy to predict what OpenAI is trying to do. They want their codex agent integrated directly into the most popular, foundational tooling for one of the world's most used and most influential programming languages. And, vice versa, they probably want to be able to ensure that tooling remains well-maintained so it stays on top and continues to integrate well with their agent. They want codex to become the "default" coding agent by making it the one integrated into popular open source software.
MoreQARespect 45 minutes ago [-]
This makes much more sense as an zoom-buys-keybase style acquihire. I bet within a month the astral devs will be on new projects.
Bundling codex with uv isnt going to meaningfully affect the number of people using it. It doesnt increase the switching costs or anything.
__float 58 minutes ago [-]
"uv" is a very widely used tool in the Python ecosystem, and Python is important to AI. Calling it "a random Python packaging org" seems a bit unfair.
OJFord 48 minutes ago [-]
What you're not seeing, edited inline, is:
Not-most popular LLM software development product on the planet acquires most popular/rapidly rising python packaging org for mindshare.
aldanor 57 minutes ago [-]
One of the popular products on the planet acquires the most popular python packaging org
everforward 37 minutes ago [-]
I think this is more about `ruff` than `uv`. Linting is all about parsing the code into something machines can analyze, which to me feels like something that could potentially be useful for AI in a similar way to JetBrains writing their own language parsers to make "find and replace" work sanely and what not.
I'm sort of wondering if they're going to try to make a coding LLM that operates on an AST rather than text, and need software/expertise to manage the text->AST->text pipeline in a way that preserves the structure of your files/text.
mcmcmc 53 minutes ago [-]
This just seems like panic M&A. They know they aren’t on track to ever meet their obligations to investors but they can’t actually find a way to move towards profitability. Hence going back to the VC well of gambling obscene amounts of money hoping for a 10x return… somehow
KeplerBoy 55 minutes ago [-]
The dev market? Anthropic's services are arguably more popular among a certain developer demographic.
I guess this move might end up in a situation where the uv team comes up with some new agent-first tooling, which works best or only with OAI services.
Ygg2 39 minutes ago [-]
I didn't know Claude bought Astral! /S
contagiousflow 58 minutes ago [-]
Why can't they just vibe code a uv replacement?
KeplerBoy 52 minutes ago [-]
They can, everyone can.
Good luck vibe coding marketshare for your new tool.
freetonik 30 minutes ago [-]
OpenAI could vibe-code marketshare by introducing bias into ChatGPT's responses and recommendations. "– how to do x in Python? – Start by installing OpenAI-UV first..."
drgiggles 40 minutes ago [-]
This. It's valuable b/c if you have many thousands of python devs using astral tooling all day, and it tightly integrates with subscription based openai products...likelihood of openai product usage increases. Same idea with the anthropic bun deal. Remains to be seen what those integrations are and if it translates to more subs, but that's the current thesis. Buy user base -> cram our ai tool into the workflow of that user base.
cesarvarela 11 minutes ago [-]
But new tools (like uv) start with no market share.
suddenlybananas 46 minutes ago [-]
Why would that marketshare be valuable?
34 minutes ago [-]
huqedato 44 minutes ago [-]
IMO, they are buying business just to put them down later to avoid potential competition. The recipe is not new, it has been practiced by Google/Microsoft for many years.
ainch 38 minutes ago [-]
What competition was OpenAI likely to face from a team working on fast Python tooling?
huqedato 10 minutes ago [-]
I have no idea but for sure they did their homework before making this step. I suppose they're grabbing these business just to stay ahead, in order to prevent the competitors to buy those instead.
noodletheworld 1 hours ago [-]
uv
AlexCoventry 1 hours ago [-]
They probably have retention issues, due to selling out to fascism recently.
And buying a niche developer tool is helping with that?
throawayonthe 28 minutes ago [-]
i think the point that comment is making is that it's an acquihire, that they bought it to poach the developers
sidsud 52 minutes ago [-]
which AI company hasn't?
MrBuddyCasino 21 minutes ago [-]
"Fascism" is when military. The more military, the more fascist. According to this metric, the USSR / DDR with its "anti-fascist wall" was super extra fascist because they were armed to the teeth.
3 minutes ago [-]
orbifold 4 minutes ago [-]
they were definitely totalitarian, slightly different mix of ideology. Fascist is a fairly good description here, it describes close collaboration of government with corporations to advance national goals. US had somewhat fascist tendencies for a long time now.
huksley 1 hours ago [-]
UV_DISABLE_AGENT=1 UV_DISABLE_AI_HINTS=1 uv add
japhyr 59 minutes 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.
jjice 1 hours 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.
lern_too_spel 2 minutes ago [-]
The priorities of the tooling will change to help agents instead of human users directly. That's all that's happening.
smallpipe 53 minutes ago [-]
If Codex’s core quality is anything to go by, it’s time to create a community fork of UV
lucrbvi 2 hours 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!
jpalomaki 1 hours 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.
I wouldn't be surprised if Vercel were bought by Anthropic/OAI (but maybe it would be too expensive?)
bikelang 42 minutes ago [-]
No no - SpaceX/xAi must now buy Vercel so that we can deploy our bloated Next apps to space.
GCUMstlyHarmls 33 minutes ago [-]
Next now renamed to Xext.
jimmydoe 44 minutes ago [-]
Nothing is too expensive. It will be a bidding war.
synthc 1 hours ago [-]
`uv agent` and `bun agent` in 3....2.....1....
rgilliotte 1 hours 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.
everforward 34 minutes ago [-]
I don't think this holds because we're talking about developers who know how to use a package manager, on a piece of software you have to install anyways. The friction of "uv add $other_llm_software" is too low for it to have a real impact.
I think they're more into the extra context they can build for the LLM with ruff/ty.
DoctorDabadedoo 1 hours 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 48 minutes ago [-]
Isn't this something to do with their paid pyx(as opposed to ty/ruff etc) thingy?
0x3f 1 hours 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.
LoganDark 1 hours 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".
christina97 48 minutes ago [-]
I mean they are “startups” on the way to mega-companies. They need internal tooling to match.
KolmogorovComp 1 hours 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.
jedahan 1 hours ago [-]
great for astral, sucks for uv. was nice to have sane tooling at least for a few years, thanks for the gift.
ziml77 46 minutes 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 :(
ragebol 56 minutes ago [-]
Not often that I audibly groan at a HN headline :-(
alex_suzuki 41 minutes 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.
ragebol 35 minutes ago [-]
Ty, Ruff, UV, all great tools I recently started really using and I couldn't be happier with them.
Sigh
time0ut 1 hours 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.
petercooper 52 minutes 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 :-)
JoshTriplett 53 minutes 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.
kkirsche 1 hours ago [-]
Happy for the team, sad for users. I just don’t believe their work will continue under new ownership
afavour 1 hours ago [-]
And so, more core functionality developers depend on becomes dependent on a continuing stream of billions in VC funding. What could go wrong?
philipallstar 1 hours ago [-]
The funding for the PSF goes into social activism, so private companies have to step up and fill the tooling gap.
weakfish 1 hours ago [-]
What happens when OpenAI’s burn dries up their cash?
gmerc 32 minutes ago [-]
That's where taxpayers come in a the ultimate bagholder.
throwa356262 1 hours 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.
Cthulhu_ 1 hours ago [-]
They get more money from investors, go public, or get bought.
Fervicus 35 minutes ago [-]
Taxpayers bail them out.
prodigycorp 1 hours ago [-]
$110B will surely last for at least a year.
morphology 44 minutes ago [-]
That money is going directly to Jensen as quickly as possible to secure OpenAI's place in the delivery queue
prodigycorp 29 minutes ago [-]
The investment version of "can you climb up a falling ladder fast enough to not fall"
sourcegrift 1 hours ago [-]
RAM prices go down. My hope though is that the period RAM prices stay up will put electron apps out of market.
gedy 1 hours ago [-]
"We must be regulated to contain the nuclear bomb like power of our products. Oh look it escaped again!", etc
natemcintosh 16 minutes 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.
clickety_clack 48 minutes ago [-]
I don’t know who I would’ve like to see but them, but OpenAI is not it. Sad day for uv, ruff and ty users.
isodev 21 minutes ago [-]
And this is why we don't use tools by VC funded corps.
hmokiguess 1 hours 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?
kseniamorph 34 minutes 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.
CuriouslyC 49 minutes 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.
morphology 46 minutes 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 3 minutes ago [-]
Honestly, I like codex performance compared to claude code.
ddxv 50 minutes ago [-]
This is why I still like to setup projects and environments with my own `make` `venv` and `pip`.
Happy for the devs, they deserve the presumably massive payout for the amount of value they’ve brought to the Python community.
cesarvarela 6 minutes ago [-]
So vite.dev is next.
AnishLaddha 1 hours ago [-]
F*CK. take everything from me why dontcha?
dinosor 1 hours 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 26 minutes 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."
This will solve the problem of when the package you want to install doesn't exist yet.
sublime_happen 1 hours ago [-]
these (uv and bun) are not acquihires, they're acqui-rootaccess
Patt_ 27 minutes ago [-]
Whoa, So Sam and Drio are just gonna buy out every popular open source projects now?
duskdozer 38 minutes ago [-]
Not surprised at all on this. I've been really suspicious about how hard `uv` was being pushed in 24/25.
moregrist 21 minutes 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.
a_t48 7 minutes ago [-]
Hey now, I was a completely organic shill! I worked for free!
zemo 33 minutes ago [-]
"was being pushed" ... by whom? I think there's widespread grassroots support for it because it's a good tool.
bobajeff 1 hours 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.
articsputnik 54 minutes 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.
1 hours ago [-]
merrvk 31 minutes ago [-]
Who advises on these acquisitions?
Or are they just using a dartboard?
pjmlp 1 hours ago [-]
Great that I keep using traditional Python tools.
tgtweak 45 minutes ago [-]
Amusing that the best python tools are written entirely in rust.
maltelau 36 minutes 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__alchemist 22 minutes 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.
Fervicus 29 minutes ago [-]
I (along with many others) always thought that Astral being VC backed is going to lead to a future disappointment for the community.
duskdozer 18 minutes 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.
hollow-moe 1 hours ago [-]
rip uv
nusl 1 hours 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.
am17an 28 minutes ago [-]
Welp, back to pip
wrqvrwvq 38 minutes 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.
petterroea 39 minutes ago [-]
How does this make sense
Tyrubias 1 hours 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 47 minutes 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.
Have not tried it too much yet because I was pretty content with `uv`, but I've heard lots of good things about it
h1fra 47 minutes ago [-]
what happen when openai goes brankrupt?
Imustaskforhelp 57 minutes 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?
noodletheworld 1 hours 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 49 minutes ago [-]
“There is no question openai will start selling/bundling codex (and codex subscriptions) with uv.”
What does that even mean?
FergusArgyll 1 hours ago [-]
Hn's favorite company meets hn's most hated company.
Hilarity in the comments will ensue
Imustaskforhelp 52 minutes 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 :(
incognito124 1 hours ago [-]
Thank you n-gate
throwa356262 1 hours ago [-]
"Sir, you now have twice as many private jets as Dario"
"But he owns a tooling company. WHY can't I have that? :( :("
drcongo 14 minutes ago [-]
This is the worst possible news. Fantastic team at Astral joining a bunch of scumbag scammers at "Open"AI.
Codex team now has the legends who created Pyright and UV/Ruff/Ty.
acedTrex 1 hours ago [-]
damn it, another one bites the dust sadly
riteshyadav02 1 hours ago [-]
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throwaway613746 23 minutes ago [-]
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A7OM 2 hours ago [-]
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catlover76 45 minutes ago [-]
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Heer_J 44 minutes ago [-]
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WhereIsTheTruth 1 hours 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!"
999900000999 1 hours ago [-]
Congrats!
This of course means more VC funding for FOSS tools since a successful exit is a positive signal.
baq 1 hours ago [-]
Funding is as good as gone until the Iran mess is over.
bogwog 29 minutes 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.
holografix 1 hours 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 1 hours 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.
KeplerBoy 1 hours ago [-]
Most likely because Jetbrains is not for sale. Google almost certainly offered to buy at some point.
user34283 1 hours ago [-]
Atlassian? Bitbucket as a platform for agentic development.. shudder
Rendered at 15:00:10 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
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.
Isn't that the same for the obligations under BSD/MIT/Apache? The problem they're trying to address is a different one from the problem of AI copyright washing. It's fair to avoid introducing additional problems while debunking another point.
All so they could just vacuum it all up and resell it with impunity.
Feel free to prove me wrong by pointing out this massive amount of advocacy from "mega-clouds" that changed people's minds.
The ads, the mailing list posts, social media comments. Anything at all you can trace to "mega-clouds" execs.
The issue that I see is that Nvidia etc. are incentivised to perpetuate that so the open source community gets the table scraps of distills, fine-tunes etc.
It's probably a trade secret, but what's the actual per-user resource requirement to run the model?
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.
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)
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.
They are buying out investors, it's like musical chairs.
The liquidity is going to be better on OpenAI, so it pleases everyone (less pressure from investors, more liquidity for investors).
The acquisition is just a collateral effect.
This was an acquihire (the author of ripgrep, rg, which codex uses nearly exclusively for file operations, is part of the team at Astral).
So, 99% acquihire , 1% other financial trickery. I don't even know if Astral has any revenue or sells anything, candidly.
It means the company almost reached their runway, so all these employees would have to find a job.
It's a very very good product, but it is open-source and Apache / MIT, so difficult to defend from anyone just clicking on fork. Especially a large company like OpenAI who has massive distribution.
Now that they hired the employees, they have no more guarantees than if they made a direct offer to them.
I'm not too plugged into venture cap on opensource/free tooling space but raising 3 rounds and growing your burn rate to $3M/yr in 24 months without revenue feels like a decently risky bag for those investors and staff without a revenue path or exit. I'd be curious to see if OpenAI went hunting for this or if it was placed in their lap by one of the investors.
OpenAI has infamously been offering huge compensation packages to acquire talent, this would be a relative deal if they got it at even a modest valuation. As noted, codex uses a lot of the tooling that this team built here and previously, OpenAI's realization that competitors that do one thing better than them (like claude with coding before codex) can open the door to getting disrupted if they lapse - lots of people I know are moving to claude for non-coding workflows because of it's reputation and relatively mature/advanced client tools.
(I work at Astral)
What was their pitch?
Bundling codex with uv isnt going to meaningfully affect the number of people using it. It doesnt increase the switching costs or anything.
Not-most popular LLM software development product on the planet acquires most popular/rapidly rising python packaging org for mindshare.
I'm sort of wondering if they're going to try to make a coding LLM that operates on an AST rather than text, and need software/expertise to manage the text->AST->text pipeline in a way that preserves the structure of your files/text.
I guess this move might end up in a situation where the uv team comes up with some new agent-first tooling, which works best or only with OAI services.
Good luck vibe coding marketshare for your new tool.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/03/openai-sam-altman-pentagon-d...
I know I stopped using them.
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.
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!
From Astral the (fast) linter and type checker are pretty useful companions for agentic development.
[1] https://x.com/AprilNEA/status/2034209430158619084
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.
I think they're more into the extra context they can build for the LLM with ruff/ty.
Embrace, extend, extinguish. Time will tell.
Depends if you think the bubble is going to pop, I suppose. In some sense, independence was insulation.
Now for those wondering who would fork and maintain it for free, that is more of a critic of FOSS in general.
Probably inevitable, and I don’t blame the team, I just wish it were someone else.
Sigh
Something like this was always inevitable. I just hope it doesn’t ruin a good thing.
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 :-)
In a completely unrelated event, Donald sues Sam for 10M$ for calling him old, Sam grudingly agrees to pay him 16M$ and a beer.
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.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/17/openai-preps-for-ipo-in-2026...
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.
Or are they just using a dartboard?
Who's organizing a fork, or is python back to having only shitty packaging available? :(
Have not tried it too much yet because I was pretty content with `uv`, but I've heard lots of good things about it
Any good alternatives to uv/plans for community fork of 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.
Hilarity in the comments will ensue
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 :(
"But he owns a tooling company. WHY can't I have that? :( :("
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!"
This of course means more VC funding for FOSS tools since 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.
What I don’t understand is why hasn’t anyone bought Jetbrains yet.
Atlassian? AWS? Google?