Discussion
Astral to join OpenAI
weakfish: What happens when OpenAI’s burn dries up their cash?
Cthulhu_: They get more money from investors, go public, or get bought.
FergusArgyll: Hn's favorite company meets hn's most hated company.Hilarity in the comments will ensue
jedahan: great for astral, sucks for uv. was nice to have sane tooling at least for a few years, thanks for the gift.
WhereIsTheTruth: Greed knows no limitOpenAI is Microslop, so it's the classic EEE, nothing new to seeIt's like with systemd now planning to enforce gov. age verificationPeople will censor you if you dare say something negative on this websiteSo i guess, wears a clown hat "congrats!"
sourcegrift: RAM prices go down. My hope though is that the period RAM prices stay up will put electron apps out of market.
lucrbvi: This is a weird pattern accross OpenAI/Anthropic to buy startups building better toolings.I don't really see the value for OAI/Anthropic, but it's nice to know that uv (+ ty and many others) and Bun will stay maintained!
synthc: `uv agent` and `bun agent` in 3....2.....1....
rgilliotte: Totally agreeThe value for Anthropic / OAI is that they have a strong interest in becoming the "default" agent.The one that you don't need to install, because it's already provided by your package manager.
bobajeff: 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.
gedy: "We must be regulated to contain the nuclear bomb like power of our products. Oh look it escaped again!", etc
applfanboysbgon: 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.
AlexCoventry: They probably have retention issues, due to selling out to fascism recently.https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/03/openai-sam-altman-pentagon-d...I know I stopped using them.
acedTrex: damn it, another one bites the dust sadly
Tyrubias: 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.
Imustaskforhelp: Genuinely. UV is so awesome and OpenAI is so meh.I am not even sure how to feel about this news but feel a bit disappointed as a user even if I might be happy for the devs that they got money for such project but man, I would've hoped any decent company could've bought them out rather than OpenAI of all things.Maybe OpenAI wants to buy these loved companies to lessen some of the hate but what its doing is lessening the love that we gave to corporations like astral/uv sadly, which is really sad because uv is/(was?) so cool but now we don't know where this tool might be headed next given its in the hands of literally OpenAI :(
avaer: As good as the team is, that's not what they're buying in this case.
suddenlybananas: What are they buying?
KeplerBoy: mindshare and a central piece of the python package management ecosystem.
contagiousflow: Why can't they just vibe code a uv replacement?
KeplerBoy: They can, everyone can.Good luck vibe coding marketshare for your new tool.
petercooper: Only spitballing here, but I feel some "commoditize your complements" (Spolsky) vibes hearing about these acquisitions. Or, potentially, "control your complements".If you find your popular, expensive tool leans heavily upon third party tools, it doesn't seem a crazy idea to purchase them for peanuts (compared to your overall worth) to both optimize your tool to use them better and, maybe, reduce the efficacy of how your competitors use them (like changing the API over time, controlling the feature roadmap, etc.) Or maybe I'm being paranoid :-)
sidsud: which AI company hasn't?
bootsmann: Most popular product on the planet acquires a random python packaging org for mindshare? What am I not seeing here?
mcmcmc: [delayed]
JoshTriplett: Welp. I used to respect Astral. I hope someone responsible forks their Python tooling and maintains it.
jjice: Not who I would've liked to acquire Astral. As long as OpenAI doesn't force bad decisions on to Astral too hard, I'm very happy for the Astral team. They've been making some of the best Python tooling that has made the ecosystem so much better IME.
smallpipe: If Codex’s core quality is anything to go by, it’s time to create a community fork of UV
articsputnik: 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.
rvnx: > Second, to our investors, especially Casey Aylward from Accel, who led our Seed and Series A, and Jennifer Li from Andreessen Horowitz, who led our Series BThey are buying out investors, it's like musical chairs.The liquidity is going to be better on OpenAI, so it pleases everyone (less pressure from investors, more liquidity for investors).The acquisition is just a collateral effect.
tgtweak: Are you implying that the revenue multiple on this acquisition is lower than openAIs and that they'd be making money by acquiring and folding into their valuation multiple? I think that's not the case and I would wager non existent.This was an acquihire (the author of ripgrep, rg, which codex uses nearly exclusively for file operations, is part of the team at Astral).So, 99% acquihire , 1% other financial trickery.
jpalomaki: Somebody took a deeper look at Claude Code and claims to find evidence of Anthropic's PaaS offering [1]. There's certainly money to be made by offering a nice platform where "citizen developers" can push their code.From Astral the (fast) linter and type checker are pretty useful companions for agentic development.[1] https://x.com/AprilNEA/status/2034209430158619084
lucrbvi: I wouldn't be surprised if Vercel were bought by Anthropic/OAI (but maybe it would be too expensive?)
bikelang: No no - SpaceX/xAi must now buy Vercel so that we can deploy our bloated Next apps to space.
huqedato: IMO, they are buying business just to put them down later to avoid potential competition. The recipe is not new, it has been practiced by Google/Microsoft for many years.
isodev: And this is why we don't use tools by VC funded corps.
duskdozer: Not surprised at all on this. I've been really suspicious about how hard `uv` was being pushed in 24/25.
moregrist: I think the push has been entirely organic. Compared to existing tooling, uv is fantastically fast.One of the bigger pain points I’ve faced in Python is dependency resolution. conda could take 30-60 minutes in some cases. uv took seconds.A serious quality of life improvement.
MrBuddyCasino: "Fascism" is when military. The more military, the more fascist. According to this metric, the USSR / DDR with its "anti-fascist wall" was super extra fascist because they were armed to the teeth.
maltelau: Wtf!? Is this an early April's fools? I've been recommending astral tools left and right, Looks like I'm out a good chunk of social capital on that.Who's organizing a fork, or is python back to having only shitty packaging available? :(
the__alchemist: I can get pyflow back to a maintained state and iron out the bugs if that would help. It's the same concept as uv, just kind of buggy and I haven't touched it in 6 years.
NiloCK: A concern:More and more plainly, OpenAI and Anthropic are making plays to own (and lease) the "means of production" in software. OK - I'm a pretty happy renter right now.As they gobble up previously open software stacks, how viable is it that these stacks remain open? It seems perfectly sensible to me that these providers and their users alike have an interest in further centralizing the dev lifecycle - eg, if Claude-Code or Codex are interfaces to cloud devenvs, then the models can get faster feedback cycles against build / test / etc tooling.But when the tooling authors are employees of one provider or another, you can bet that those providers will be at least a few versions ahead of the public releases of those build tools, and will enjoy local economies of scale in their pipelines that may not be public at all.
throwaway63467: It’s a small tool shop building a tiny part of the Python ecosystem, let’s not overstate their importance. They burned through their VC money and needed an exit and CLI tool chains are hyped now for LLMs, but this mostly sounds like an acquihire to me. Dev tools are among the hardest things to monetize with very few real winners, so good for them to get a good exit.
druml: Small tool shop, burning VC money, true. "Tiny part of the Python ecosystem" is an understatement given how much impact uv has made alone.
Hamuko: Do you have any statistics for that?
volkercraig: It's not any different from the launch of the FSF. There's a simple solution. If you don't want your lunch eaten by a private equity firm, make sure whatever tool you use is GPL licensed.
palmotea: > If you don't want your lunch eaten by a private equity firm, make sure whatever tool you use is GPL licensed.1. For the record: the GPL is entirely dependent on copyright.2. If AI "clean-room" re-implementations are allow to bypass copyright/licenses, the GPL won't protect you.
rTX5CMRXIfFG: If it ever goes bad, well I hope that that’s an impetus for new open source projects to be started — and with improvements over and lessons learned from incumbent technologies, right at the v1 of said projects.
Maxion: If LLMs turn out to be such a force multiplier, the way to fight it is to ensure that there are open source LLMs.
captainbland: I think the issue is that LLMs are a cash problem as much as they are a technical problem. Consumer hardware architectures are still pretty unfriendly to running models which are actually competitive to useful models so if you want to even do inference on a model that's going to reliably give you decent results you're basically in enterprise territory. Unless you want to do it really slowly.The issue that I see is that Nvidia etc. are incentivised to perpetuate that so the open source community gets the table scraps of distills, fine-tunes etc.
rvnx: They raised 4M USD, they have 26 full-time employees (they pay 120<->200K / yr, cf https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/523411-93 ).It means the company almost reached their runway, so all these employees would have to find a job.It's a very very good product, but it is open-source and Apache / MIT, so difficult to defend from anyone just clicking on fork. Especially a large company like OpenAI who has massive distribution.Now that they hired the employees, they have no more guarantees than if they made a direct offer to them.
tgtweak: So I don't see how the acquisition is collateral - it's an acquihire plain and simple, if anything else it would be supply chain insurance as they clearly use a lot of these tools downstream. As you noted the licensing is extremely permissive on the tools so there appears to be very little EV there for an acquirer outside of the human capital building the tools or building out monetized features.I'm not too plugged into venture cap on opensource/free tooling space but raising 3 rounds and growing your burn rate to $3M/yr in 24 months without revenue feels like a decently risky bag for those investors and staff without a revenue path or exit. I'd be curious to see if OpenAI went hunting for this or if it was placed in their lap by one of the investors.OpenAI has infamously been offering huge compensation packages to acquire talent, this would be a relative deal if they got it at even a modest valuation. As noted, codex uses a lot of the tooling that this team built here and previously, OpenAI's realization that competitors that do one thing better than them (like claude with coding before codex) can open the door to getting disrupted if they lapse - lots of people I know are moving to claude for non-coding workflows because of it's reputation and relatively mature/advanced client tools.
cesarvarela: But new tools (like uv) start with no market share.
drcongo: This is the worst possible news. Fantastic team at Astral joining a bunch of scumbag scammers at "Open"AI.
