alt Hacker NewsAstral to Join OpenAI
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Happy for the devs, they deserve the presumably massive payout for the amount of value they’ve brought to the Python community.
My initial reaction was being weirdly sad about this and I don't fully understand why yet. I read the headline, clicked into the link, and just went noooooooo. I really like uv and I hope it continues to do well, congrats to the team though and hope everyone there gets a good outcome.
F*CK. take everything from me why dontcha?
Astral took over python-build-standalone, and uv uses its custom Python builds in deployments.
I do not want OpenAI putting their fingers in my Python binaries, nor do I want their telemetry.
I hope OpenAI realizes they cannot buy developer goodwill.
i feel like moves like this make it even harder for new open-source tools to break through. there's already evidence that LLMs are biased toward established tools in their training data (you can check it here https://amplifying.ai/research/claude-code-picks). when a dominant player acquires the most popular toolchain in an ecosystem, that bias only deepens. not because of any skewing, but because the acquired tools get more usage, more documentation, more community content. getting a new project into model weights at meaningful scale is already really hard. acquisitions like this make it even harder.
UV, Ruff, and Ty are all very good things, hopefully that doesn't change and gets better.
they said they will keep maintaining uv/ruff/ty ... but that's an impossible promise to keep with their priority changes once they are in the bed with OAI.
There are so many comments along the lines of:
"What's the matter, just fork it when it goes bad?"
The problem is that uv in and of itself, whilst a great technical achievement isn't sufficient. Astral run a massive DevOps pipeline that, just to give one example, packages the python distributions.
Those who are saying that forking is an option are clearly not arguing it in good faith.
I don't get it. Why buy Astral? Why not just fund it? Why not just hire the company to do whatever work you want to get out of the team as part of the merger?
Why buy, when they can rent?
(Not to mention, multiple companies could hire and fund them.)
Interesting acquihire. I would have assumed MS would have snagged them (until their __layoffs__ last year). My gut is that this is more for Python expertise, and ruff/ty knowledge of linting code than uv...
I'm a heavy user and instructor of uv. I'm teaching a course next week that features uv and rough (as does my recent Effective Testing book).
Interesting to read the comments about looking for a change. Honestly, uv is so much better than anything else in the Python community right now. We've used projects sponsored by Meta (and other questionable companies) in the past. I'm going to continue enjoying uv while I can.
I’ve been thinking about purchasing zsh myself
This is like, the worst outcome for Astral. This is severely disappointing. I say this as someone that uses Astral and OpenAI products practically every day. This is such a terrible fit.
I just hope that Charlie doesn’t trot around the dev circuit (like he has in years past) trying to sell everyone on this “being a good thing, actually”. I hope that he isn’t given the space to sell any story other than “we took the AI money despite it being a terrible fit”, because that story would just be a lie. The fact that this blog post is already trying to preemptively justify it—“well in my launch post what I said is…”—is extremely, extremely telling.
This is so hugely disappointing. And again, I am at this point quite bullish on AI. This isn’t a philosophical or anti-AI take at all, because those are easier to dismiss.
I’m not going to pretend to “congratulate the team” or whatever. As far as I’m concerned, that’s HN culture brain rot. Some of y’all in ‘startup culture’ may see getting acquired by OpenAI as some sort of big prize or worth celebrating or whatever, but I certainly don’t.
Welp. Guess we just wait for the next package management tool to come around. Really thought uv was gonna be the one.
Good for Astral though I guess, they do great work. Just not optimistic this is gonna be good for python devs long term.
I do hope every at Astral got a a nice pay-out for this.
It does look like this is going to be the norm for popular open source projects related to AI ecosystem, but I guess open source developers need to get paid somehow if that project is their only livelihood.
Shame for the end-user though. As you will always be second guessing how they will ruin the tool, i.e. via data collection or AI-sloppifying it. It is likely OpenAI won't, but it is not a great feeling knowing a convenient tool you use is at the whim of a heartless mega-corp.
I'm confused as to what will happen to their platform product which was in closed beta - pyx. Since they no longer need to worry about money (I assume) they no longer need to chase after enterprise customers?
Tested the "Kagi LinkedIn Speak" translator[0] from a couple of days ago[1] on this. Works pretty great! If you translate it back and forth a number of times, it pretty much distills it to the essence.
This might not be bad as long as Astral is allowed to continue to work on improving ty, uv and ruff. I do worry about they'll get distracted by their Codex job duties though.
Would there be any interest in me fixing the bugs in Pyflow and getting it updated to install newer python versions? It's almost identical to uv in concept, but I haven't touched it in 6 years.
Astral has demonstrated that there is desire for this sort of "just works" thing, which I struggled with, and led me to abandoning it. (I.e.: "pip/venv/conda are fine, why do I want this?", despite my personal experience with those as high-friction)
After investing a bunch in converting my projects to, and evangelizing uv, I feel betrayed. I smell stability troubles ahead. Should've stuck to Conda.
They should be allowed to make money from their work. Their work is MIT licensed, if it goes south it is rescuable by the community.
Things come and go, let’s not beat up some dudes who made some cool stuff, made everyone’s lives easier and then sold up. There is a timeline where this makes UV / python better.
Given their statements, influencers and indeed their raison d'être I don't understand why this and bun was acquired? Why did they not just Ralph loop it? Claude is famously not made by humans anymore.
One prompt and call it a weekend. Surely they have the compute.
Oooooh, right.
Same reason we don't have windows 41 either.
Fantastic for the team, huge fan for Ruff and Uv. Hope OpenAI continues with the OSS tooling and not introduce restrictive licensing.
OpenAI continue to send mixed messaging.
"Our AI can do anything a human can do, better, faster, cheaper" -> Buys a product instead of asking their AI to just make it.
Really doesn't give me confidence in your product!!!!
to be expected at some point, but for the independence and best interest of the Python ecosystem, I don't think it's a plus.
Great that I keep using traditional Python tools.
It is interesting to see this after yesterday’s announcement of Unsloth Studio:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47414032
Uv did solve a distribution problem for them.
There is still a lot of room to grow in the space of software packaging and distribution.
I'd expect OpenAi to make some type of Github clone next, perhaps with Astral, or maybe with jujutsu.
I think it’s impossible to predict what will happen with this new trend of “large AI company acquires company making popular open source project”. The pessimist in me says that these products will either be enshittified over time, killed when the bubble bursts, or both. The pragmatist in me hopes that no matter what happens, uv and ruff will survive just like how many OSS projects have been forked or spun out of big companies. The optimist in me hopes that the extra money will push them to even greater heights, but the pessimist and the pragmatist beat the optimist to death a long time ago.
> It is increasingly clear to me that Codex is that frontier.
I'm not really sure about this.
Company that repeatedly tells you software developers are obsoleted by their product buys more software developers instead of using said product to create software. Hmm.
nooooooooooooooo god why. I loved uv. just why
I was hoping that uv and ruff were the ones. I guess Python has a curse.
This feels like a natural move given how important developer tooling has become to the AI ecosystem. If OpenAI can integrate Astral’s tooling into workflows more deeply (linting, packaging, etc.), it could significantly reduce friction for building AI-powered apps.
The interesting question is whether Astral stays relatively independent (like GitHub under Microsoft) or becomes tightly coupled to OpenAI’s platform.
Will this be the beginning of the Great Rust vs Zig battle ?
It was pretty obvious that some sort of acquisition was imminent. Astral is vc-funded and has to somehow generate returns for investors. An IPO is extremely unlikley in this market.
I will start migrating from uv, ty and ruff first thing this weekend. It will be painful but not being dependent on OpenAI will be more than worth it.
That didn't take long: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46648627
It’s meant to be bought so at least no more guessing.
Ant is building their app distribution platform, so no wonder OpenAI thinking the same, it will only surprise me if they move so slow.
That's unfortunate for the python community. I can understand the move by Astral team, but it's still difficult to accept it.
I see people in this thread complain about the acquisition but the source code of uv is right there [1]. Fork it and move on. If ClosedAI enshittifies uv, gather with a bunch of other people and prop up a new version.
Great someone cashed out, time for the next startup idea.
All other devtools now will follow suit - to get acquihired by openai or anthropic.
uv has been very useful but I also looking at pixi. Anyone have any experience with that? I hear good things about it.
Who advises on these acquisitions?
Or are they just using a dartboard?
If you don't pay for your tools and support OSS financially, this is what happens.
Although Astral being VC funded was already headed this way anyway.
Deno, Pydantic (Both Sequoia) will go the same way as with many other VC backed "open source" dev tools.
It will go towards AI companies buying up the very same tools, putting it in their next model update and used against you.
Rented back to you for $20/mo.
If they just give Astral money to keep going, great, but I have difficulty believing they would be so altruistic. This is quite an upsetting acquisition.
ok so the buying frenzy has started. We will end up with a new google basically monopolizing the internet. Only in this case it is much worse. M&As are evil.
Haha just migrated everything off openai and on ruff/uv/ty last week. Sorry guys, it's clearly my fault.