Chris Siebenmann

It's a bit contrarian, I know, but I look at the Python formatter ruff and now the uv package management tool the same people have announced, and I feel partly sad. Because they're both created by a company that appears to be VC backed, and we have seen this show play out before. Someday there will be a demand to make (a lot of) money, and how do you do that with free tools?

If we're lucky, they'll become community projects after the explosions.

Aug 21, 2024 at 3:56amWeb
Show threadbenAug 21, 2024
@cks this is exactly what happened to the JavaScript formatter Rome, too, as far as I know — which thankfully did get continued as a community project, though it had to be renamed (to biome) due to, as far as I know, nobody having access rights to the original GitHub org.
Show threadJuan LuisAug 21, 2024
@cks What does "community project" mean to you?
Show threadChris SiebenmannAug 21, 2024
@astrojuanlu To me, a community project would be one where no single company does the work, sets the priorities, and owns the copyrights. A single company is a single point of failure, as we've seen before in various ways. Ideally you'd have community governance too, but that depends on how many contributors you wind up with.
Show threadJuan Nunez-IglesiasAug 29, 2024

@cks @pjacock personally I feel like FOSS protects you somewhat from the worst case scenarios — sure, it could get enshittified, but it can be forked. Both ruff and uv already have a ton of contributors, so while some institutional knowledge would of course be lost with a fork, this is not one of those “lone dev” projects where there is literally no other person that has even looked at the code.

Anyway, 🤞!