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.

I maintain an open source project funded by the Sovereign Tech Fund. Getting there wasn't easy: the application process is long, the amounts are modest compared to a VC round, and you have to build community trust before any of that becomes possible. But the result is a project that isn't on anyone's exit timeline.

I'm not saying the startup path is without its own difficulties. But structurally, it offloads the costs onto the community that eventually comes to depend on you. By the time those costs come due, the founders have either cashed out or the company is circling the drain, and the users are left holding the bag. What's happening to Astral fits that pattern almost too neatly.

The healthier model, I think, is to build community first and then seek public or nonprofit funding: NLnet, STF, or similar. It's slower and harder, but it doesn't have a built-in betrayal baked into the structure.

Part of what makes this difficult is that public funding for open source infrastructure is still very uneven geographically. I'm based in Korea, and there's essentially nothing here comparable to what European developers can access. I had no choice but to turn to European funds, because there was simply no domestic equivalent. That's a structural problem worth taking seriously. The more countries that leave this entirely to the private sector, the more we end up watching exactly this kind of thing play out.

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.

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!

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).

I love(d) `uv`. I think it's one of the best tools around for Python ecosystem... Therefore the pit in my tummy when I read this.

Yes, congrats to the team and all that.

I'm more worried about the long term impact on the ecosystem, as are almost everybody who dropped a comment here.

My own thoughts echo somewhat what @SimonW wrote here [1]

[1] https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/19/openai-acquiring-astra...

However, a forking strategy is may (or may not) be the best for `uv`.

Could we count on the Astral team to keep uv in a separate foundation?

Now for those wondering who would fork and maintain it for free, that is more of a critic of FOSS in general.

I didn't see a single comment of "I will fork it" type.

Something like this was always inevitable. I just hope it doesn’t ruin a good thing.

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 :-)

Earlier Python-based attempts faced this constraint plus the political difficulty of getting maintainers to agree on what correct dependency resolution even meant. uv sidestepped both by being built outside the ecosystem it manages.

That said, I hope the excellent Astral team got a good payday.

Been running uv in every AI/ML project for the past year -- the speed difference when resolving large dependency trees (PyTorch + transformers + a dozen extras) is genuinely significant. It's one of those tools where you forget how bad pip was until you have to go back.

Coming from a Rust background I have a lot of respect for the implementation decisions that made that speed possible. My main concern isn't feature direction -- it's that the team culture IS the product right now, and that's harder to preserve than a codebase. Cautiously watching.

> uvex add other_slop_project —-disable_peddled_package_recommendations

> implicitly phoning home your project, all source code, its metadata, and inferring whether your idea/use-case is worth steamrolling with their own version.

This is the future of “development”. Congrats to the team.

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.

As a user of uv who was hoping it would be a long term stable predictable uninteresting part of my toolchain this sucks, right?

https://github.com/jazzband/pip-tools

For anyone thinking through what this means for their data: OpenAI's API terms give them broad rights to use inputs for model improvement. Once uv is part of that stack, it's worth asking what "telemetry" looks like under their ownership.

This is exactly why I've moved my AI usage to platforms built around data sovereignty—ones where your conversations don't feed back into the mothership. The tooling acquisition makes it more urgent, not less.

[Disclosure: I work with pugchat.ai, a privacy-first AI platform—mentioning because it's relevant to the data sovereignty point, not to shill]

Jokes aside, these tools are currently absolutely free to use, but imagine a future when your employers demand you use Claude Code because that's the only license agreement they have, and they stop their AI agents from using uv. Sure, we all know how to use uv, but there will also come a time and place when they will ask us to not write a single line of code manually, especially if you have your agents running in "feared the most by clueless middle managers" "production".

Are you ready for factionalism and sandbox wars? Because I'm not. I just want to write my code, push to "production" as I see fit and be happy as pixels start shifting around.

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.

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.

I suspect some OpenClaw "secure" sandbox is coming (Nvidia jealousy) with Astral delivering the packages for Docker within Docker within Qemu within Qubes. A self respecting AI stack must be convoluted.

I can't wait until all this implodes after the IPOs.

I do not want OpenAI putting their fingers in my Python binaries, nor do I want their telemetry.

"What's the matter, just fork it when it goes bad?"

The problem is that uv in and of itself, whilst a great technical achievement isn't sufficient. Astral run a massive DevOps pipeline that, just to give one example, packages the python distributions.

Those who are saying that forking is an option are clearly not arguing it in good faith.

Why buy, when they can rent?

(Not to mention, multiple companies could hire and fund them.)

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.

I just hope that Charlie doesn’t trot around the dev circuit (like he has in years past) trying to sell everyone on this “being a good thing, actually”. I hope that he isn’t given the space to sell any story other than “we took the AI money despite it being a terrible fit”, because that story would just be a lie. The fact that this blog post is already trying to preemptively justify it—“well in my launch post what I said is…”—is extremely, extremely telling.

This is so hugely disappointing. And again, I am at this point quite bullish on AI. This isn’t a philosophical or anti-AI take at all, because those are easier to dismiss.

I’m not going to pretend to “congratulate the team” or whatever. As far as I’m concerned, that’s HN culture brain rot. Some of y’all in ‘startup culture’ may see getting acquired by OpenAI as some sort of big prize or worth celebrating or whatever, but I certainly don’t.

Good for Astral though I guess, they do great work. Just not optimistic this is gonna be good for python devs long term.

It does look like this is going to be the norm for popular open source projects related to AI ecosystem, but I guess open source developers need to get paid somehow if that project is their only livelihood.

Shame for the end-user though. As you will always be second guessing how they will ruin the tool, i.e. via data collection or AI-sloppifying it. It is likely OpenAI won't, but it is not a great feeling knowing a convenient tool you use is at the whim of a heartless mega-corp.

[0] https://translate.kagi.com/?from=linkedin&to=en

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47408703

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)

Things come and go, let’s not beat up some dudes who made some cool stuff, made everyone’s lives easier and then sold up. There is a timeline where this makes UV / python better.

One prompt and call it a weekend. Surely they have the compute.

Oooooh, right.

Same reason we don't have windows 41 either.

"Our AI can do anything a human can do, better, faster, cheaper" -> Buys a product instead of asking their AI to just make it.

Really doesn't give me confidence in your product!!!!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47414032

Uv did solve a distribution problem for them.

There is still a lot of room to grow in the space of software packaging and distribution.

I'm not really sure about this.

The interesting question is whether Astral stays relatively independent (like GitHub under Microsoft) or becomes tightly coupled to OpenAI’s platform.

Ant is building their app distribution platform, so no wonder OpenAI thinking the same, it will only surprise me if they move so slow.

[1] https://github.com/astral-sh/uv

Or are they just using a dartboard?

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.

I don't care how good/bad a company is, because I lived long enough to know that most of them started off like that. Good luck to the uv team.

Who's organizing a fork, or is python back to having only shitty packaging available? :(

Fixed: I am so excited to take these millions of dollars.

If it was cheaper to use their internal AI to create these tools, they would.

I didn’t see a way they ever dethroned Claude until now.

Happy as a Codex user, gloomy as a Python one.

Congrats Astral and co!

- I'm willing to pay for Astral ecosystem so it stays independent/open source

- I'm willing to fork the project

Regardless of how likely/inevitable this scenario is, the public should make offline backups and forks immediately.

> I started Astral to make programming more productive.

And now they help make killing more productive

I was always wary of uv being written in Rust. Even if we can make a community fork, how big is the intersection between great Rust developers and people really into Python packaging and infrastructure? Not big, I would assume.

I do wonder if we should just rewrite something in Python, but make sure it runs with pypy. Pypy should give at least similar performance as Rust but being still regular Python means there is a far bigger pool of devs able to maintain it.

Astral has shown us the way, but I think it's time to take control of our own destiny as Python devs.

I hate relying on anything that is controlled by a single company. Considering that Astral is basically brand new in the python timeline, it is concerning that they are already being acquired.

On the other hand, UV is so fast that it makes up for anything I find annoying about it.

what can I say?

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.

Hilarity in the comments will ensue

"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.

What I don’t understand is why hasn’t anyone bought Jetbrains yet.

Atlassian? AWS? Google?