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

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.

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throwaway5752 8 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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dcre 7 hours ago | parent [-]

They are not. A very large proportion of their revenue comes from developers. A large proportion of their marketing and product work is aimed at developers. You have to work really hard to not see this. Just look at what Altman and Brockman tweet about.

https://xcancel.com/gdb

https://xcancel.com/sama/

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throwaway5752 7 hours ago | parent [-]

All the various APM companies are implementing "Assign to agent" flows. The various foundation model providers will be satisfied getting a subscription for 10% of total comp of a developer, instead of pocketing 60% of the total comp completely replacing them?

The only thing that could prevent this is lack of ability to execute, like how Uber wanted to replace drivers with FSD vehicles.

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dcre 6 hours ago | parent [-]

It's not about what they wish would happen, it's about what they think will happen. In my view they are acting precisely like they believe they will be making a proportion of developer pay by making them more productive rather than replacing developers. I think they understand that the alternative doesn't really work out for them or anyone.

Even if they believe that their systems will eventually tank employment and replace developers rather than augment meant, the fate of Astral doesn't matter at all in that scenario because a) nobody has a job, and b) you can build your own uv replacement for $20.

	▲	dgb23 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Could it be that they want developers to use their stuff so they get telemetry and mind share out of it? As a stepping stone for the ultimate goals so to speak?

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antod 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	stephbook 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This. Their current approach is open sourced. There's no going back any more.

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nacozarina 22 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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blitzar 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

	▲	fortuitous-frog 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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

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vdfs 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

	▲	politelemon 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		wx

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PurpleRamen 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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nsbk 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Let the forks roll!