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Comment by ctoth | Hacker News Reader

As I said a couple weeks ago, they're gonna have to cash out at some point. The move won't be around Uv -- it'll be a protected private PyPi or something.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44712558

Now what do we have here?

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Not sure what you're trying to get at here. Charlie Marsh has literally said this himself; see e.g. this post he made last September:

> "An example of what this might look like (we may not do this, but it's helpful to have a concrete example of the strategy) would be something like an enterprise-focused private package registry."

https://hachyderm.io/@charliermarsh/113103605702842937

Astral has been very transparent about their business model.

Astral doesn't really have a business model yet, it has potential business models.

The issue is that there isn't a clean business model that will produce the kind of profits that will satisfy their VCs - not that there isn't any business model that will help support a business like theirs.

Private package management would probably work fine if they hadn't taken VC money.

I would have agreed with you until I learned that Conda somehow makes $150m in revenue a year. They have fewer users than Astral too (or if not they will do very soon).

Cash out is a bit of a negative word here. They've shown the ability to build categorically better tooling, so I'm sure a lot of companies would be happy to pay them to fix even more of their problems.

It’s not negative, it’s accurate. The playbook is well known and users should be informed.

I haven't adopted uv yet watching to see what will be their move. We recently had to review our use of Anaconda tools due to their changes, then review Qt changes in license. Not looking forward to another license ordeal.

We're hoping that building a commercial service makes it clear that we have a sustainable business model and that our tools (like uv) will remain free and permissively licensed.

(I work at Astral)

I think having a credible, proven business model is a feature of an open source project - without one there are unanswered questions about ongoing maintenance.

I'm glad to see Astral taking steps towards that.

I've been wondering where the commercial service would come in and this sounds like just the right product that aligns with what you're already doing and serves a real need. Setting up scalable private registries for python is awful.

You know what they say: The best time to adopt uv was last year...

I'm all seriousness, I'm all in on uv. Better than any competition by a mile. Also makes my training and clients much happier.

Fortunately for a lot of what uv does, one can simply switch to something else like Poetry. Not exactly a zero-code lift but if you use pyproject.toml, there are other tools.

Of course if you are on one of the edge cases of something only uv does, well... that's more of an issue.

Given how widely popular uv is, I'm pretty sure that in the event of any impactful license change it would immediately get forked.

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