Astral to Join OpenAI

https://astral.sh/blog/openai

Astral to join OpenAI

Astral has entered into an agreement to join OpenAI as part of the Codex team.

A concern:

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.

It's not any different from the launch of the FSF. There's a simple solution. If you don't want your lunch eaten by a private equity firm, make sure whatever tool you use is GPL licensed.

> If you don't want your lunch eaten by a private equity firm, make sure whatever tool you use is GPL licensed.

1. For the record: the GPL is entirely dependent on copyright.

2. If AI "clean-room" re-implementations are allow to bypass copyright/licenses, the GPL won't protect you.

Maybe I'm reading wrong here, but what's the implication of the clean room re-implementations? Someone else is cloning with a changed license, but if I'm still on the GPL licensed tool, how am I "not protected"?
There's basically no different between GPL and BSD in that case.

1. Company A develops Project One as GPLv3

2. BigCo bus Company A

3a. usually here BigCo should continue to develop Project One as GPLv3, or stop working on it and the community would fork and it and continue working on it as GPLv3

3b. BigCo does a "clean-room" reimplementation of Project One and releases it under proprietary licence. Community can still fork the older version and work on it, but BigCo can continue to develop and sell their "original" version.