So what's the plan for monetization? NPM getting acquired by GitHub was an anomaly, and I'm wary of letting VC-backed companies becoming ecosystem lynchpins.
I hope they answer this ASAP. People in the Python community are already concerned that Astral is following the Embrace, extend, and extinguish playbook.
If they stop development on Ruff today, Ruff won't be useful anymore after a few new Python releases. If the maintainers of the tools that Ruff is replacing stop maintaining them, the whole Python community will be in a really bad place. So, there is reason to be cautious. Astral being transparent on how they plan to make money would be very helpful.
People could just fork it if that happens. Since the foundation of the tooling is solid, I 'm sure the community would rally around a fork that keeps it going.
It's MIT and Apache dual licensed. If the company fails, you fork and move on. If the company never makes a dime, that's OK for me: some folks got paid to make open source tooling.
What they are doing is already discouraging people from contributing to the projects their tools are replacing[0]. If they go out of business and stop supporting their tools, it might leave the Python community in a bad place.
That video is.. weird. It claims that astral isn't contributing back despite the entirety of their code being permissively licensed. It's also sort of baffling that making tooling more accessible doesn't seem to be considered contributing back.
I'm not sure what the maker of that video wants, does he want money to be poured back into the community, or for no one else to make money?
I'm not sure this is a reasonable framing: LLVM stole much of GCC's thunder by being significantly easier to contribute to (and extend externally), but I don't think it would be accurate to say that LLVM is "discouraging" people from contributing to GCC.
I'm not sure if you can compare a project that came out of a university and got adopted by Apple with a project developed by a VC backed company with no revenue. I'm sure Charlie has the best intentions with both ruff and uv, but we have no idea how this is going to play out.
My understanding of Ruff's history is that it predates Astral, and was originally a side project by Charlie. I have similar reservations about VC funding and sustainability, but I don't think Ruff was created as a trojan horse or with a secret takeover plan in mind.
I agree that we have no idea how it'll play out. But I've seen nothing but good faith from Charlie and others, and I see no reason to preemptively condemn their attempt to build a business.
By this token, we should be concerned that CPython is not written in Python. But that historically has not posed a significant risk to CPython's longevity, nor to the ability of motivated contributors to learn the C necessary to contribute to it.
(Or another framing: only the tiniest fraction of the Python community was contributing to CQA tooling in the first place. It's not clear that prioritizing the interests of the 99.9% of Python programmers who -- rightfully! -- will never modify these tools makes sense.)
