The leadership and product direction work are at least as hard as the code work. Astral/uv has absolutely proven this, otherwise Python wouldn't be a boneyard for build tools.

Projects - including forks - fail all the time because the leadership/product direction on a project goes missing despite the tech still being viable, which is why people are concerned about these people being locked up inside OpenAI. Successfully forking is much easier said than done.

I had a lot of trouble convincing people that a correct Python package manager was even possible. uv proved it was possible and won people over with speed.

I had a sketched out design for a correct package manager in 2018 but when I talked to people about it I couldn't get any interest in it. I think the brilliant idea that uv had that I missed was that it can't be written in Python because if is written in Python developers are going to corrupt its environment sooner or later and you lose your correctness.

I think that now that people are used to uv it won't be that hard to develop a competitor and get people to switch.