Then it would probably be back to Poetry. Or some other newcomer, or maybe a fork of uv.

uv is very forkable - dual-licensed under Apache and MIT, high quality codebase, it's Rust rather than Python but the Python community has an increasing amount of Rust experience these days.

That's why I'm not personally too nervous about the strategic risk to the Python community of having such a significant piece of the ecosystem from a relatively young VC-backed company.

If you froze uv today it’ll take years for anything to get to a state where the switch would be worth it.

Honestly, given the constant rollercoaster of version management and building tools for Python the move to something else would be expected rather than surprising.

I’ve seems like a great tool, but I remember thinking the same about piping, too.