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.
Once we start seeing Open AI and Anthropic getting into the certifications and testing they'll quickly become the gold standard. They won't even need to actually test anyone. People will simply consent to having their chat interactions analyzed.
The models collect more information about us than we could ever imagine because definitionally, those features are unknown unknowns for humans. For ML, the gaps in our thinking carry far richer information about is than our actual vocabularies, topics of interest, or stylometric idiosyncrasies.
- https://pypistats.org/packages/poetry - https://pypistats.org/packages/uv
In the 2024 Python developer survey, 18% of the ecosystem used Poetry. When I opened this manifold question[0], I'm pretty sure uv was about half of Poetry downloads.
Estimating from these numbers, probably about 30% of the ecosystem is using `uv` now. We'll get better numbers when the 2025 Python developer survey is published.
Also see this: https://biggo.com/news/202510140723_uv-overtakes-pip-in-ci-u...
[0]: https://manifold.markets/JeremiahEngland/will-uv-surpass-poe...
If not, do you develop software with source dependencies (go, java, node, rust, python)? If so, how do you handle acquiring those dependencies—by hand or using a tool?
And let’s say you constrain yourself to your OS package manager. What about the people on different distros? Their package managers are unlikely to have the exact same versions of your deps that your OS has.
(Source: I'm an Astral employee.)
It's kinda crazy to think we're living in borrowed times in some ways, lots of unknown unknowns and speculations right now, but I think stuff is just gonna shuffle around.
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.
Isn't that the same for the obligations under BSD/MIT/Apache? The problem they're trying to address is a different one from the problem of AI copyright washing. It's fair to avoid introducing additional problems while debunking another point.
2. BigCo bus Company A
3a. usually here BigCo should continue to develop Project One as GPLv3, or stop working on it and the community would fork and it and continue working on it as GPLv3
3b. BigCo does a "clean-room" reimplementation of Project One and releases it under proprietary licence. Community can still fork the older version and work on it, but BigCo can continue to develop and sell their "original" version.
All so they could just vacuum it all up and resell it with impunity.
Feel free to prove me wrong by pointing out this massive amount of advocacy from "mega-clouds" that changed people's minds.
The ads, the mailing list posts, social media comments. Anything at all you can trace to "mega-clouds" execs.
https://choosealicense.com/about/
> "GitHub wants to help developers choose an open source license for their source code."
This was built by GitHub Inc a very very long time ago.
So long ago, in fact, that it was five years before their acquisition by Microsoft.
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.
It's probably a trade secret, but what's the actual per-user resource requirement to run the model?
As long as they keep the original projects maintained and those aren't just acqui-hires, I think this is almost as good as we can hope for.
(thinking mainly about Bun here as the other one)
Once you’re acquired you have to do what the boss says. That means prioritizing your work to benefit the company. That is often not compatible with true open source.
How frequently do acquired projects seriously maintain their independence? That is rare. They may have more resources but they also have obligations.
And this doesn’t even touch on the whole commodification and box out strategy that so many tech giants have employed.
If AGI becomes available, especially at the local and open-source level, shouldn't all these be democratized - meaning that the AGI can simply roll out the tooling you need.
After all, AGI is what all these companies are chasing.
Having a private package index gives you a central place where all employees can install from, without having to screen what each person is installing. Also, if I remember right, there are some large AI and ML focused packages that benefit from an index that's tuned to your specific hardware and workflows.
It was because Astral was VC funded.
https://astral.sh/blog/announcing-astral-the-company-behind-...
Either pay for the product, or use stuff that isn't dependent on VC money, this is always how it ends.
Maybe you use non-transitive pure Python dependencies, but it's likely that your tools and dependencies still rely on stuff in Rust or C (e.g.: py-cryptography and Python itself respectively).
As mentioned multiple times, since my experience with Tcl and continuously rewriting stuff in C, I tend to avoid languages that don't come with JIT, or AOT, in the reference tooling.
I tend to work with Java, .NET, node, C++, for application code.
Naturally AI now changes that, still I tend to focus on approaches that are more classical Python with pip, venv, stuff written in C or C++ that is around for years.
Consider ffmpeg. You can donate via https://www.ffmpeg.org/spi.html
How much money do they make from donations? I don't know but "In practice we frequently payed for travel and hardware."
Translation: nothing at all.
If such a fundamental project that is a revenue driver for so many companies, including midas-level rich companies like Google, can't even pay decent salaries for core devs from donations, then open source model doesn't work in terms of funding the work even at the smallest possible levels of "pay a reasonable market rate for devs".
You either get people who just work for free or businesses built around free work by providing something in addition to free software (which is hard to pull off, as we've seen with Bun and Astral and Deno and Node).
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.
OpenClaw notably was built around Mario Zechner's pi[0]; uv I believe was highly adapted from Armin Ronacher's rye[1], and uses indygreg's python-build-standalone[2] for distributing Python builds (both of which were eventually transferred to Astral).
[0]: https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono
In the worst case, Astral will stop developing their tools, someone else will pick them up and will continue polishing them. In the best case, they will just continue as they did until now, and nothing will really change on that front.
Astral is doing good work, but their greatest benefit for the ecosystem so far was showing what's possible and how it's down. Now everyone can take up the quest from here and continue. So any possible harm from here out will be not that deep, at worst we will be missing out on many more cool things they could have built.
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!
From Astral the (fast) linter and type checker are pretty useful companions for agentic development.
The 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.
I think they're more into the extra context they can build for the LLM with ruff/ty.
Embrace, extend, extinguish. Time will tell.
Depends if you think the bubble is going to pop, I suppose. In some sense, independence was insulation.
Probably inevitable, and I don’t blame the team, I just wish it were someone else.
Sigh
If it was cheaper to use their internal AI to create these tools, they would.
Now for those wondering who would fork and maintain it for free, that is more of a critic of FOSS in general.
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).
That is definitely the plan!
Only time will tell if it will not affect the ecosystem negatively, best of luck though, I really hope this time is different™.
Congratulations though!
Would be a good mustache-twirling cartoon villain tactics, you know, try to prevent advances in developer experience to make vibecoding more attractive =)
Something like this was always inevitable. I just hope it doesn’t ruin a good thing.
That said, I hope the excellent Astral team got. good payday.
In a completely unrelated event, Donald sues Sam for 10M$ for calling him old, Sam grudingly agrees to pay him 16M$ and a beer.
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 :-)
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.
Take ruff, I have used it, but I had no idea it even had a company behind it... And I must not be only one and it must not be only tool like it...
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.
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.
(sure, it's a bit different than contributing to CPython, but I'd argue not that different)
Perhaps it's naive optimism, but I generally have hope that new and improved tools will continue to gain adoption and shine through in the training data, especially as post-training and continual learning improve.
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)
Fixed: I am so excited to take these millions of dollars.
2. In any case, the announcement strongly suggests that customer acquisition had little to do with this. The stated purpose of the acquisition, as I read it, is an acquisition (plus acquihire?) to bolster their Codex product.
3. But if they were hoping for some developer goodwill as a secondary effect... well, see my note above.
Good for Astral though I guess, they do great work. Just not optimistic this is gonna be good for python devs long term.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/17/openai-preps-for-ipo-in-2026...
Ant is building their app distribution platform, so no wonder OpenAI thinking the same, it will only surprise me if they move so slow.
They 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.
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. I don't even know if Astral has any revenue or sells anything, candidly.
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.
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.
(I work at Astral)
I would sincerely have understood better (and even wished) if OpenAI made you a very generous offer to you personally as an individual contributor than choose a strategy where the main winners are the VCs of the purchased company.
Here, outside, we perceive zero to almost no revenues (no pricing ? no contact us ? maybe some consulting ?) and millions burned.
Whether it is 4 or 8 or 15M burned, no idea.
Who's going to fill that hole, and when ? (especially since PE funds have 5 years timeline, and company is from 2021).
The end product is nice, but as an investor, being nice is not enough, so they must have deeper motives.
Bundling codex with uv isnt going to meaningfully affect the number of people using it. It doesnt increase the switching costs or anything.
I'm sort of wondering if they're going to try to make a coding LLM that operates on an AST rather than text, and need software/expertise to manage the text->AST->text pipeline in a way that preserves the structure of your files/text.
Writing something that understands all the methods that come in a Django model goes way beyond parsing the code, and is a genuine struggle in language where you can’t execute the code without worrying about side effects like Python.
Ty should give them a base for that where the model is able to see things that aren’t literally in the code and aren’t in the training data (eg an internal version of something like SQLAlchemy).
Not-most popular LLM software development product on the planet acquires most popular/rapidly rising python packaging org for mindshare.
I guess this move might end up in a situation where the uv team comes up with some new agent-first tooling, which works best or only with OAI services.
Good luck vibe coding marketshare for your new tool.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/03/openai-sam-altman-pentagon-d...
I know I stopped using them.
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.
Who's organizing a fork, or is python back to having only shitty packaging available? :(
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.
what can I say?
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.
But the pressure because they raised VC funding, I would imagine Astral needed an actual exit and OpenAI saw Astral's tools as an asset.
Have not tried it too much yet because I was pretty content with `uv`, but I've heard lots of good things about it
Hilarity in the comments will ensue
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 :(
Any good alternatives to uv/plans for community fork of 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.
"But he owns a tooling company. WHY can't I have that? :( :("
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!"
This of course means more VC funding for FOSS tools since a successful exit is a positive signal.
This is peak finance brainrot. In no scenario is abandoning ship a positive signal, even if you managed to pocket some valuables on the way out.
Let's stop celebrating dysfunctional business models and consolidation of the industry around finance bros who give zero fucks about said industry.
What I don’t understand is why hasn’t anyone bought Jetbrains yet.
Atlassian? AWS? Google?