It's not just greenfield-ness but the fact it's a commercial endeavor (even if the code is open-source).
Building a commercial product means you pay money (or something they equally value) to people to do your bidding. You don't have to worry about politics, licensing, and all the usual FOSS-related drama. You pay them to set their opinions aside and build what you want, not what they want (and if that doesn't work, it just means you need to offer more money).
In this case it's a company that believes they can make a "good" package manager they can sell/monetize somehow and so built that "good" package manager. Turns out it's at least good enough that other people now like it too.
This would never work in a FOSS world because the project will be stuck in endless planning as everyone will have an opinion on how it should be done and nothing will actually get done.
Similar story with systemd - all the bitching you hear about it (to this day!) is the stuff that would've happened during its development phase had it been developed as a typical FOSS project and ultimately made it go nowhere - but instead it's one guy that just did what he wanted and shared it with the world, and enough other people liked it and started building upon it.
> You don't have to worry about politics, licensing, and all the usual FOSS-related drama. You pay them to set their opinions aside and build what you want, not what they want (and if that doesn't work, it just means you need to offer more money).
Money is indeed a great lubricator.
However, it's not black-and-white: office politics is a long standing term for a reason.
Sounds like you’re really down on FOSS and think FOSS projects don’t get stuff done and have no success? You might want to think about that a bit more.
That doesn't make any sense. You can do open source by yourself and not accept any input.
How's the company behind uv making money?
nah, a lot of people working on `uv` have a massive amount of experience working on the rust ecosystem, including `cargo` the rust package manager. `uv` is even advertised as `cargo` for python. And what is `cargo`? a FLOSS project.
Lots of lessons from other FLOSS package managers helped `cargo` become great, and then this knowledge helped shape `uv`.
Is there any sign telling Astral is actually making money via uv? How sustainable is it?
I suggest everyone save this comment and review it five years later.
Since uv and systemd are both FOSS how are they not part of the FOSS world?
You often pay them for their opinions too!
it wouldn't work in a foss world because there's like 5 guys doing that shit it in their spare time. that said... github...
Why doesn't anaconda disprove this?
I 100% agree with this
And it's true, while I disagree with a lot of systemd decisions focus has a leveraging effect that's disproportional
IIRC correctly uv was started before Astral (the company working on uv)
I don't know what you think "typical Foss projects" are but in my experience they are exactly like your systemd example: one person that does what they want and share it with the world. The rest of your argument doesn't really make any sense with that in mind.