Astral to Join OpenAI

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.

What strikes me most about this acquisition isn't the AI angle. It's the question of why so many open source tools get built by startup teams in the first place.

I maintain an open source project funded by the Sovereign Tech Fund. Getting there wasn't easy: the application process is long, the amounts are modest compared to a VC round, and you have to build community trust before any of that becomes possible. But the result is a project that isn't on anyone's exit timeline.

I'm not saying the startup path is without its own difficulties. But structurally, it offloads the costs onto the community that eventually comes to depend on you. By the time those costs come due, the founders have either cashed out or the company is circling the drain, and the users are left holding the bag. What's happening to Astral fits that pattern almost too neatly.

The healthier model, I think, is to build community first and then seek public or nonprofit funding: NLnet, STF, or similar. It's slower and harder, but it doesn't have a built-in betrayal baked into the structure.

Part of what makes this difficult is that public funding for open source infrastructure is still very uneven geographically. I'm based in Korea, and there's essentially nothing here comparable to what European developers can access. I had no choice but to turn to European funds, because there was simply no domestic equivalent. That's a structural problem worth taking seriously. The more countries that leave this entirely to the private sector, the more we end up watching exactly this kind of thing play out.

This is a serious risk for the open source ecosystem and particularly the scientific ecosystem that over the last years has adopted many of these technologies. Having their future depend on a cap-ex heavy company that is currently (based on reporting) spending approx. 2.5 dollars to make a dollar of revenue and must have hypergrowth in the next years or perish is less than ideal. This should discourage anybody doing serious work to adopt more of the upcoming Astral technologies like ty and pyx. Hopefully, ruff and uv are large enough to be forked should (when) the time comes.

Possibly the worst possible news for the Python ecosystem. Absolutely devastating. Congrats to the team

UV_DISABLE_AGENT=1 UV_DISABLE_AI_HINTS=1 uv add

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.

This has me thinking about VS Code and VS Codium. I've used VS Code for a while now, but recently grew annoyed at the increasingly prevalent prompts to subscribe to various Microsoft AI tools. I know you can make them go away, but if you bounce between different systems, and particularly deal with installing VS Code on a regular basis, it becomes annoying.

I started using VS Codium, and it feels like using VS Code before the AI hype era. I wonder if we're going to see a commercial version of uv bloated with the things OpenAI wants us all to use, and a community version that's more like the uv we're using right now.

Not often that I audibly groan at a HN headline :-(

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!

I see a lot of comments that are "somebody should fork this" or "community will fork it" or similar.

I didn't see a single comment of "I will fork it" type.

great for astral, sucks for uv. was nice to have sane tooling at least for a few years, thanks for the gift.

Woah, first Anthropic buys Bun, now OpenAI Astral?

Seems like the big AI players love buying up the good dev tooling companies.

I hope this means the Astral folks can keep doing what they are doing, because I absolutely love uv (ruff is pretty nice too).

It's a good news to me considering their open-source nature. If/when they go downhill there will be still the option to fork, and the previous work will still have been funded.

Now for those wondering who would fork and maintain it for free, that is more of a critic of FOSS in general.

Welp. I used to respect Astral. I hope someone responsible forks their Python tooling and maintains it. Ideally a foundation rather than a company.

I love uv and the other tooling Astral has built. It really helped reinvigorate my love for Python over the last year.

Something like this was always inevitable. I just hope it doesn’t ruin a good thing.

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 :-)

As someone who loves Astral and hates OpenAI, this is making me pretty sad.

Astral was always going to have to find some way to sustain itself financially. They weren’t going to just make the best free tools in the ecosystem forever. uv is sufficiently entrenched as infrastructure that I’m sure it’ll take no time for a community fork to show up if they do anything stupid with it.

I don’t know who I would’ve like to see but them, buy OpenAI is not it. Sad day for uv, ruff and ty users.

Congrats to the Astral team, they've done great work and deserve everything.

As a user of uv who was hoping it would be a long term stable predictable uninteresting part of my toolchain this sucks, right?

Happy for the team, sad for users. I just don’t believe their work will continue under new ownership

> uvex init my_new_slop_project —-describe “make me the bestest saas that will make $1M ARR per day” —-disable_thinking —-disable_slop_scaffolded_feature

> uvex add other_slop_project —-disable_peddled_package_recommendations

> implicitly phoning home your project, all source code, its metadata, and inferring whether your idea/use-case is worth steamrolling with their own version.

This is the future of “development”. Congrats to the team.

Reading this news only leaves me worried about long-term future of these open source tools.

And so, more core functionality developers depend on becomes dependent on a continuing stream of billions in VC funding. What could go wrong?

I am very unhappy about this. Astral tools like uv are key to my work/experimenting process. I think OpenAI sucks as a company.

That said, I hope the excellent Astral team got a good payday.

What happens when OpenAI’s burn dries up their cash?

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.

The "commitment to open source" line in these press releases usually has a half-life of about 18 months before the telemetry starts getting invasive.

Will this be the beginning of the Great Rust vs Zig battle ?

So many negative comments but not a single:

- I'm willing to pay for Astral ecosystem so it stays independent/open source

- I'm willing to fork the project

uv has been very useful but I also looking at pixi. Anyone have any experience with that? I hear good things about it.

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.

[0] https://translate.kagi.com/?from=linkedin&to=en

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47408703

This will solve the problem of when the package you want to install doesn't exist yet.

Mixed feelings, happy for the guy, he deserves it. Unhappy about whom he went with, though not sure if he had other buyers / offers in the mix?

I like uv, but not sure this is a good path forward for the python ecosystem.

uv and ruff are one of the best things that happened in the python ecosystem the last years. I hope this acquisition does not put them on a path to doom.

This leaves me a bit scared for uv and ruff to be honest.

What excites me about the OpenAI + Astral acquisition: Codex CLI, uv, and ruff are all written in Rust. Fast by design, and fully open source.

This is your friendly PSA that pip-tools still exist.

https://github.com/jazzband/pip-tools

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 into this.

Anthropic acquiring Bun, now OpenAI acquiring Astral. Both show the big labs recognize that great AI coding tools require great developer tooling, and they are willing to pay for it rather than build inferior alternatives. Good outcome for the teams.

Not exactly a great look for the "AGI is right around the corner" crowd — if the labs had it, they would not need to buy software from humans.

While I -- like most other commenters -- am dubious of both OpenAI and this acquisition, I think it's pretty reasonable to wait to see how this turns out before rushing to final judgment.

Everything I've seen from Astral and Charlie indicates they're brilliant, caring, and overall reasonable folks. I think it's unfair to jump to call them sell-outs and cast uv and the rest as doomed projects.

Personally, I'd expect a few good years of stewardship, and then a decline in investment. I can only hope there are enough community members to keep things going by then.

And this is why we don't use tools by VC funded corps.

This is why I still like to setup projects and environments with my own `make` `venv` and `pip`.

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.)

As a non python dev I really thought UV and TY are great tools and liked their approaches but I don't know how good it is that they are privately held... no a fan

Related (OpenAI announcement): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47438716

Astral threads here have been surprisingly flag resistant and plentiful. This takeover explains a lot.

I suspect some OpenClaw "secure" sandbox is coming (Nvidia jealousy) with Astral delivering the packages for Docker within Docker within Qemu within Qubes. A self respecting AI stack must be convoluted.

I can't wait until all this implodes after the IPOs.

UV, Ruff, and Ty are all very good things, hopefully that doesn't change and gets better.

Happy for the devs, they deserve the presumably massive payout for the amount of value they’ve brought to the Python community.

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 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.

F*CK. take everything from me why dontcha?

I hope OpenAI realizes they cannot buy developer goodwill.

> It is increasingly clear to me that Codex is that frontier.

I'm not really sure about this.

Any move that strengthens future oligopolies is a net loss for all consumers.

I don't care how good/bad a company is, because I lived long enough to know that most of them started off like that. Good luck to the uv team.

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.

Haha just migrated everything off openai and on ruff/uv/ty last week. Sorry guys, it's clearly my fault.

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'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?

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.

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.

Time for https://zubanls.com/

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.

I’ve been thinking about purchasing zsh myself

these (uv and bun) are not acquihires, they're acqui-rootaccess

Fantastic for the team, huge fan for Ruff and Uv. Hope OpenAI continues with the OSS tooling and not introduce restrictive licensing.

Wonder if they can still use claude code in their repos now

The Bun acquisition made a little sense, Boris wanted Daddy Jarred to come clean up his mess, and Jarred is 100% able to deliver.

This doesn't make as much sense. OpenAI has a better low level engineering team and they don't have a hot mess with traction like Anthropic did. This seems more about acquiring people with dev ergonomics vision to push product direction, which I don't see being a huge win.

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.

Not surprised at all on this. I've been really suspicious about how hard `uv` was being pushed in 24/25.

Terrible news for Python ecosystem. I guess the money was too much to reject this ridiculous offer.

That didn't take long: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46648627

Wow - this is potentially the most cynical hacker news thread I've ever read. When did this place trade it's curiosity and excitement about technology for constant doomerism?

Congrats Astral and co!

nooooooooooooooo god why. I loved uv. just why

I'd expect OpenAi to make some type of Github clone next, perhaps with Astral, or maybe with jujutsu.

Maybe it's time to get out my Cowlishaw Rexx book again…

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.

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.

won't increase your subscriptions, people are dropping out in the millions and no one wants jewPT

Don't love it. But, I'm glad the Astral folks are getting the bag.

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.

I wonder who's going to pick up VoidZero

Who advises on these acquisitions?

Or are they just using a dartboard?

Great someone cashed out, time for the next startup idea.

> I am so excited to keep building with you.

Fixed: I am so excited to take these millions of dollars.

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? :(

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.

Should I freeze my plans to migrate from `poetry` to `uv` at "${WORK}"?

It would seem to me that purchasing a piece of software as an AI company is just an outright admission that they could not generate an equivalent piece of software for a better price?

If it was cheaper to use their internal AI to create these tools, they would.

I was hoping that uv and ruff were the ones. I guess Python has a curse.

Damnit I was really rooting for uv :(

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.

Whoa, So Sam and Drio are just gonna buy out every popular open source projects now?

rip uv

Just when I moved from poetry to uv.

will private packages hosted on pyx be available for openai to use as training data?

This was pretty obvious to just about anyone tbh. FastAPI is probably next

How are they acquiring it without "open" in their name?

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.

[1] https://github.com/astral-sh/uv

So instead of finally building an enterprise-grade package manager where you could pay for validated, verified and secure packages, we're going to vibe project management and let a slop-spiggot fill the trough. Brilliant. Incredibly pleased that the last sane tools in the entire python ecosystem are getting gutted to discourage the last few non-braindead devs from bothering.

Amusing that the best python tools are written entirely in rust.

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.

Booooooooooooooooooo

I am actually quite saddened by this. It's very unlikely that' I'll keep using uv, now. I don't trust this kind of shit.

Can Astral's stuff be forked?

It should have been FastAPI instead.

Another HN darling falls from grace. But hey, the next one will not follow the same steps!

Why do I feel uneasy about this?

So begins the uv-Bun war.

what happen when openai goes brankrupt?

Pyright and ty are under the same roof now.

Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47438716

Well shit, I feel betrayed. This is exactly the opposite of what I thought Charlie's goals were. I thought he was focused on making the Python ecosystem better.

Ugh, this isn't good.

I hate relying on anything that is controlled by a single company. Considering that Astral is basically brand new in the python timeline, it is concerning that they are already being acquired.

On the other hand, UV is so fast that it makes up for anything I find annoying about it.

If I were to engage in Python development, what's the alternative to uv?

How does this make sense

So vite.dev is next.

I (along with many others) always thought that Astral being VC backed is going to lead to a future disappointment for the community.

should I be glad I never got off pip?

Oh no! This is actually terrible. Get ready for "premium tooling only available in Codex(TM)".

Btw astral repo has Claude as one of its top contributors

This is where POTUS should step in and stop this sale. Not cool.

So no problem in joining OpenAI after the whole DoD/DoW mess?

> I started Astral to make programming more productive.

And now they help make killing more productive

Undisclosed amount?

Welp, back to pip

This acquisition doesn't make too much sense for the longevity of Astral's software because Astral's software is orthogonal to Codex. It seems more like a acqui-hire. If tomorrow OpenAI were to stop funding Astral's software due to a cash crunch, it would be game over for uv et al. Codex doesn't need uv.

Goddamnit

what a shame

Astral to Join OpenAI (astral.sh) OpenAI to Acquire Astral(https://openai.com/index/openai-to-acquire-astral/)

what can I say?

congrats team !

I really loved uv, I am happy for the developers at astral but I am sad as a user seeing this :(

Any good alternatives to uv/plans for community fork of uv?

I really love uv.

Its always hard to really trust these corporate funded open source products, but they've honestly been great.

…but I find it difficult to believe openai owning the corner stone of the python tooling ecosystem is good thing for the python ecosystem.

There is no question openai will start selling/bundling codex (and codex subscriptions) with uv.

I dont think I want my package manger doing that.

Hn's favorite company meets hn's most hated company.

Hilarity in the comments will ensue

"Sir, you now have twice as many private jets as Dario"

"But he owns a tooling company. WHY can't I have that? :( :("

Ah shit, back to poetry

nooo

Codex team now has the legends who created Pyright and UV/Ruff/Ty.

WAT? uv now belongs to Trump mega-donors? That is not good for the Python ecosystem.

Associated OpenAI post: https://openai.com/index/openai-to-acquire-astral/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47438716)

So, any good alternatives to uv?

Don’t you dare enshittify my uv.

This is the worst possible news. Fantastic team at Astral joining a bunch of scumbag scammers at "Open"AI.

damn it, another one bites the dust sadly

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the comments here are better than the article lol

[flagged]

Greed knows no limit

OpenAI is Microslop, so it's the classic EEE, nothing new to see

It's like with systemd now planning to enforce gov. age verification

People will censor you if you dare say something negative on this website

So i guess, wears a clown hat "congrats!"

Congrats!

This of course means more VC funding for FOSS tools since a successful exit is a positive signal.

Solid move by Altman - good signal they’re serious about capturing the Claude Code market from Anthropic.

What I don’t understand is why hasn’t anyone bought Jetbrains yet.

Atlassian? AWS? Google?