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Comment by maxloh | Hacker News Reader

Note that this is fundamentally different from the Astral acquisition. At the end of their announcement, they stated:

> Cirrus CI will shut down effective Monday, June 1, 2026.

And earlier in the article:

> Joining OpenAI allows us to extend the mission we started with Cirrus Labs: building new kinds of tooling and environments that make engineers more effective, for both human engineers and agentic engineers.

It isn't a product-led acquisition, but more a talent one.

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This is kind-of neat too, at least in the near term:

> In the coming weeks, we will relicense all of our source-available tools, including Tart, Vetu and Orchard under a more permissive license. We have also stopped charging licensing fees for them.

This is making my current work 100 times easier. Very welcome timing.

This is awesome because I flippin love tart.

That part is amazing. Back when I first heard of tart I thought it was amazing, with the one downside being the license.

Hopefully development on it continues, or a community maintained version keeps it going.

This is a huge deal! I secretly hoped for this. :)

Just want to note that we will continue maintaining and improving our virtualization solutions actually with even greater attention. SaaS options like Cirrus CI and Cirrus Runners will eventually wind down so we can focus on incorporating pieces internally.

If your scope includes making the Codex web app environments have additional functionality I look forward to it. More enterprise features and yaml backed pipelines.

If you are interested in yaml backed pipelines check out this open source tool I built for exactly this purpose:

https://github.com/smogili1/circuit

What are your plans for tart licensing going forward?

https://github.com/cirruslabs/tart/blob/main/LICENSE

https://tart.run/licensing/

That sounds like a British phrase for pimping.

You’ll be pleasantly surprised. Updates in the coming weeks.

> In the coming weeks, we will relicense all of our source-available tools, including Tart, Vetu and Orchard under a more permissive license. We have also stopped charging licensing fees for them.

MIT or Apache2 or FreeBSD licenses would be preferable in my case, but GPLv2 or even AGPLv3 (if you have to) would work.

If you’re taking requests…

For now.

I mostly clicked the link because I was curious if Cirrus Labs operates Cirrus CI and if so how that would be impacted.

Looks like I’ll need to move the FreeBSD CI jobs for open source projects I maintain to another solution. Anyone have suggestions for alternatives?

I guess qemu over Ubuntu-latest from GitHub Actions running freebsd, but it will be a bit flaky

Same for me. I liked the native BSD runners, qemu on gh is much slower.

It could also be a suite of product acquisition, the CI could be a product OpenAI is interested in having, but not sell.

Yeah. Much like Astral - acquiring both the product (because they need to use it internally, but don't care about trying to resell / market), and they also want the talent to keep maintaining it / add features they want.

>It isn't a product-led acquisition, but more a talent one.

I am pretty sure OAI mostly cares about their virtualization IP for MacOS. They already extensively use WSL2 for sandboxing Codex on Windows, and I imagine they want something similar for Codex on Mac.

Is Sam or family an investor in them anyways?

We were 100% bootstrapped with no outside capital or support/advisory.

Congrats, I am sure you and team made some $$$.

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