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Comment by fnands | Hacker News Reader

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).

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> 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!

Being in this industry for over 20 years probably jaded me a lot, I understand that's the plan but it's almost always the plan (or publicly stated as).

Only time will tell if it will not affect the ecosystem negatively, best of luck though, I really hope this time is different™.

I've been in the industry for similarly long, and I understand and sympathize with this view. All I can say is that _right now_, we're committed to maintaining our open-source tools with the same level of effort, care, and attention to detail as before. That does not change with this acquisition. No one can guarantee how motives, incentives, and decisions might change years down the line. But that's why we bake optionality into it with the tools being permissively licensed. That makes the worst-case scenarios have the shape of "fork and move on", and not "software disappears forever".

I personally get a lot of confidence in the permissive licensing (both in the current code quality, and the "backup plan" that I can keep using it in the event of an Astralnomical emergency); thank you for being open source!

Literally there is no public comment you are allowed to make that we haven't heard 100 times before.

Congratulations though!

> No one can guarantee how motives, incentives, and decisions might change years down the line. But that's why we bake optionality into it with the tools being permissively licensed. That makes the worst-case scenarios have the shape of "fork and move on", and not "software disappears forever".

Okay, so better prepare already, folks!

> All I can say is that _right now_

I've also been in the industry for similarly long and I believe you 100% that's "all you can say" ;)

JS vs Python wars, redux?

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

Would be a good mustache-twirling cartoon villain tactics, you know, try to prevent advances in developer experience to make vibecoding more attractive =)

You know it's absolutely going that way. That's the lifecycle of corporate strategy.

It also hints even The Big Guys can’t LLM their tooling fully, and that current bleeding edge “AI” companies are doing that IT thing of making IT for IT (ie dev components, tooling, etc), instead of conquering some entire market on one continent or the other…

Makes you really think about the true productivity. If these companies have the beyond cutting-edge unreleased models so best possible tools shouldn't they be able to poach just a few most important people for cheaper? And then those people could use AI to build new superior product in very fast time. There is also buying an userbase. But I wonder how the key talent purchase strategy would work in comparison...

Yes just like "Whatsapp is joining Facebook but it'll always be free and independent"!!

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