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Comment by hexbin010 | Hacker News Reader

I predict it'll be the best and then the 'worst' thing: they'll go hard on monetisation.

Just look at this post: 1839 points and 1048 comments! That is insane. It's captured the hearts and minds of Python devs and I'm sure they know it.

I'm not against projects making money, just remember you'll likely pay a price later on once you invest in more of Astral's ecosystem. It's just temporarily free.

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The Python Software Foundation includes highly competent contributors. One reason I adopted uv is confidence in the Python community’s engineering decision to prevent the take over of the platform.

Progress is already underway. PEP 751 proposes a standardized format for lock files: https://peps.python.org/pep-0751/ This helps to reduce tool-specific lock-in.

uv is open source, so forking remains viable. Build metadata is committed, and conversion to other tools is feasible if needed.

However, we must all remain vigilant against the risk of lock-in.

Many competent contributors have left or were silenced by the politicians. PyPI had multiple severe vulnerabilities. pip has no adequate story for the scientific ecosystem. Building from source via pip usually fails, unlike around 2010 when it usually worked.

The only thing that prevents lock-in is the religious zeal of most Python users to use anything presented by the PSF high priests, not technical merit.

The reason uv exists is the utter incompetence of PyPA.

They’ve been very transparent about their monetization strategy and it does not impact uv’s foss model

That's just marketing. Only time will tell. I'll be very happy to be wrong

The time has come. They’re in closed beta with pyx, their first product they’re charging for.

That assumes that pyx (or whatever else they come up with) will be enough to sustain the company.

Yes, as with every single OSS project in existence.

If I write some OSS tool that becomes popular, and lose my job, I might just start monetizing it.

Until they change their minds. If they were serious about it, it would be part of PyCQA

The same PyCQA that they worked hard to do a significantly better job than?

It has always been like this. The only way to get glory and money in the Python space [1] is to set up a new package manager or package repository or both.

Active State, Enthought, Anaconda, now Astral.

[1] Discounting pure SaaS companies that just use Python but offer no tools.

Active state, that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time. A long time.

So you know him then?

Heh, Sonatype - Maven - Nexus, Gradle Inc - Gradle (both Java).

It is open source. If they enshitify UV with monetization, it will be forked.

Yes, but only after fracturing the ecosystem even further unfortunately.

Anaconda is a good example of this.

Yes, but how far apart will the fracture be? For instance, Mac and Windows are further apart than Ubuntu and Fedora, despite both being fractures in the OS 'ecosystem' - it's far easier to be cross-platform between Ubuntu/Fedora than between Mac/Windows.

Most forks eventually die.

I'm not sure immortality is a good standard to hold forks to. the original project won't last forever either.

There is yet one to exist that dies before its forks.

Hudson died well before its fork (Jenkins)

Bad example, because the fork is from Hudson authors leaving Oracle, not from a bunch of people angry at the authors.

Ah yes, of course, no true fork has outlived its upstream project, how silly of me.

Most !== All

Then why did you say, "There is yet one to exist that dies before its forks."

Sure sounds to me like you meant "all".

Firefox vs Netscape?

Most !== All

Just take the L lol

LibreOffice has overtaken OpenOffice.

Blink has overtaken WebKit.

KHTML is dead.

Netscape is dead.

SBCL is way more popular than CMUCL

The EGCS fork killed GCC

Most !== All

Stupid fucking comment.

OpenOffice?

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