Hacker News Reader

Comment by whyho | Hacker News Reader

Astral tooling is great and brings new energy into python land but what is the long game of all astral projects? Integrate them into python natively? Be gone in 5 years and leave unmaintained tooling behind? Rug pull all of us with a subscription?

View on HN

They'll most likely pursue some sort of business source licensing, where you will not be allowed to deploy apps in production using their tooling without the business paying some kind of subscription. I understand that none of their existing products fit this use case, but it will probably be a similar approach. VCs are not charities.

As a Redditor said:

> The standard VC business model is to invest in stuff that FAANG will buy from them one day. The standard approach is to invest in stuff that's enough of a threat to FAANG that they'll buy it to kill it, but this seems more like they're gambling on an acqui-hire in the future.

I have never seen a FAANG company buy a pure programming-language based tooling startup.

Facebook acquired Monoidics in 2013; they were the startup that created Infer[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infer_Static_Analyzer

Why would they do that when they can just fork for free?

They also get a shot at the engineers who wrote the product.

I don’t think any of these questions are specific to Astral and can be applied to pretty much any project. ‘Be gone in 5 years and leave unmaintained tooling’ seems particularly plausible with regard to Facebook’s tooling.

Use any of them at your own risk I suppose.

The announcement talked about selling services built on top of the tools: https://astral.sh/blog/announcing-astral-the-company-behind-...

I think I heard somewhere that they are working on other tools that only big enterprises need like a hosted private package registry.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com