In a move clearly designed to strengthen its position among developers, OpenAI has acquired Python tool maker Astral. The house of Altman expects the deal to strengthen the ecosystem for its Codex programming agent.
Since its founding in 2022 by Charlie Marsh, Astral has won over a substantial portion of the Python community with Rust-based tools like uv (package and project manager), Ruff (linting and formatting), and ty (type checker) that outperform Python-based tools like pip.
I generally agree with this. Unless OpenAI has a track record of being poor stewards of open source projects, then right now the concern is mostly FUD.
However, this is a bit aggressive. It is appropriate to be skeptical about the intent of a controversial company acquiring another company that made a few popular open source projects or of the future state of those open source projects.
Just because a popular open source project is well liked today doesn’t mean the community will be happy with the project in the future or even that the project will forever remain open source. Some notable recent examples include Redis, Terraform, and CentOS.