Private package hosting sounds like a commodity that would be hard to differentiate.

What would be the added value against JFrog or Nexus, for example?

i mean ofc but like you can self-host pypi and the "Docker Hub" model isn't like VC-expected level returns especially as ECR and GHCR and the other repos exist

that was never going to work, let's be honest

> 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.

It was because Astral was VC funded.

https://astral.sh/blog/announcing-astral-the-company-behind-...

`ensurepip` does not "download pip for you". It bootstraps pip from a wheel included in a standard library sub-folder, (running pip's own code from within that wheel, using Python's built-in `zipimport` functionality).

That bootstrapping process just installs the wheel's contents, no Internet connection required. (Pip does, of course, download pip for you when you run its self-upgrade — since the standard library wheel will usually be out of date).

isn't that's the point of open source software? like when Oracle bought Sun. someone forked mysql and created mariadb.

as someone who works in the python tooling space I think you underestimate the number of people who would be willing to do this. i would personally help maintain a community fork of ruff if it got to the point where one was needed, though I draw the line at moving to nebraska first.

Which is why I mentioned "....use stuff that isn't dependent on VC money...".

I use mostly the batteries, given that the only purpose I have for Python, since version 1.6, is UNIX scripting tasks, beyond shell.

As mentioned multiple times, since my experience with Tcl and continuously rewriting stuff in C, I tend to avoid languages that don't come with JIT, or AOT, in the reference tooling.

I tend to work with Java, .NET, node, C++, for application code.

Naturally AI now changes that, still I tend to focus on approaches that are more classical Python with pip, venv, stuff written in C or C++ that is around for years.

The issue is lack of money not lack of legal structure.

Consider ffmpeg. You can donate via https://www.ffmpeg.org/spi.html

How much money do they make from donations? I don't know but "In practice we frequently payed for travel and hardware."

Translation: nothing at all.

If such a fundamental project that is a revenue driver for so many companies, including midas-level rich companies like Google, can't even pay decent salaries for core devs from donations, then open source model doesn't work in terms of funding the work even at the smallest possible levels of "pay a reasonable market rate for devs".

You either get people who just work for free or businesses built around free work by providing something in addition to free software (which is hard to pull off, as we've seen with Bun and Astral and Deno and Node).