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.

@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, 🤞!