Something like this was always going to happen and people were right to be wary of #astral:
Does Astral's suite of tools have excellent engineering behind them? Yes. But Astral was a startup company and the primary mode of operation for most startups is to "exit" by buying acquired by a larger company. This is explicitly a style of work that means the rich get richer, with a few select people get rich along the way.
These are not tools of democratization.
I want to highlight this blog post:
https://nesbitt.io/2025/12/26/how-uv-got-so-fast.html
Astral's success wouldn't be possible without years of exploration, innovation, and standardization by people all across the #python ecosystem. Companies like Astral, and its products like uv and ruff, are good because they stand on the shoulders of giants.
I want to support people making good tools like this. But now Astral is part of OpenAI and suddenly so many people are reliant on a fascist technology company.
Let's contrast Astral with #ruby's newest environment manager, rv.
https://github.com/spinel-coop/rv/
rv is a bundler replacement that takes a similar approach to uv by building a tooling for Ruby using Rust. But rv is developed by a co-op, not a private company. This decision is closely related to another co-op, https://gem.coop/, which is an alternative to RubyGems.
For those who aren't aware, the Ruby ecosystem is in a schism right now because RubyGems was the target of a hostile takeover. Here are a few links for more info:
- https://pup-e.com/goodbye-rubygems.pdf
- https://jaredwhite.com/articles/ruby-central-is-not-operating-in-good-faith
- https://joel.drapper.me/p/rubygems-takeover/
- https://www.404media.co/how-ruby-went-off-the-rails/
The co-op structure was very explicitly chosen by these extremely capable people because of conflicts that arose from multi-billion dollar private companies and explicitly fascist members of the Ruby community.
These choices at the intersection of engineering and community influence the design and stability of the tools and who has power over them. Ultimately, these choices dictate whether tools are liberating or not.
Given OpenAI's behaviour since its inception, I have zero faith that they will make decisions that are good for anyone but themselves. You may like the management and people at Astral, but they only have so much power up against a company with hundreds of billions in funding.
The same can be said about Bun, the #javascript runtime and environment manager. They were acquired by Anthropic in 2025:
https://bun.com/blog/bun-joins-anthropic
Or NVIDIA acquiring #HPC engine SchedMD:
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-acquires-schedmd/
These giant AI companies are buying up the entire ecosystems that they *and every other person who interacts with software* needs to do their work. They are carving out their own feudalistic technology stacks to separate worker from their tools.
Going back to Astral, they had Series B funding led by someone from Andreesen Horowitz, the venture capital firm run by fascist reactionary and author of the anti-human Techno-Optimist Manifesto, Marc Andreesen.
These people and companies all run in the same circles and they very explicitly do not care about you.
@brainwane Not that I'm aware of, no.
They have a few people sponsoring them using GitHub sponsors, but they don't have any stuff on their site about support licenses or any kind of financing. All I'm really aware of in terms of their revenue model is the couple of VC rounds they've gone through.
Julian Bender
James Hawley, PhD
Sumana Harihareswara