Uv Under Discussion on Mastodon

Metadata

• Author: Simon Willison’s Weblog
• Full Title: Uv Under Discussion on Mastodon
• URL: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/8/uv-under-discussion-on-mastodon/#atom-everything

Highlights

• . Jacob Kaplan-Moss kicked off this fascinating conversation about uv on Mastodon recently. It’s worth reading the whole thing, which includes input from a whole range of influential Python community members such as Jeff Triplett, Glyph Lefkowitz, Russell Keith-Magee, Seth Michael Larson, Hynek Schlawack, James Bennett and others. (Mastodon is a pretty great place for keeping up with the Python community these days.) (View Highlight)
• The key theme of the conversation is that, while uv represents a huge set of potential improvements to the Python ecosystem, it comes with additional risks due its attachment to a VC-backed company - and its reliance on Rust rather than Python. (View Highlight)
• As enthusiastic as I am about the direction uv is going, I haven’t adopted them anywhere - because I want very much to understand Astral’s intended business model before I hook my wagon to their tools. It’s definitely not clear to me how they’re going to stay liquid once the VC money runs out. They could get me onboard in a hot second if they published a “This is what we’re planning to charge for” blog post. (View Highlight)
• As much as I hate VC, […] FOSS projects flame out all the time too. If Frost loses interest, there’s no PDM anymore. Same for Ofek and Hatch(ling). I fully expect Astral to flame out and us having to fork/take over—it’s the circle of FOSS. To me uv looks like a genius sting to trick VCs into paying to fix packaging. We’ll be better off either way. (View Highlight)
• Even in the best case, Rust is more expensive and difficult to maintain, not to mention “non-native” to the average customer here. […] And the difficulty with VC money here is that it can burn out all the other projects in the ecosystem simultaneously, creating a risk of monoculture, where previously, I think we can say that “monoculture” was the least of Python’s packaging concerns. (View Highlight)
• Just dropping in here to say that corporate capture of the Python ecosystem is the #1 keeps-me-up-at-night subject in my community work, so I watch Astral with interest, even if I’m not yet too worried. (View Highlight)
• I’m reminded of this note from Armin Ronacher, who created Rye and later donated it to uv maintainers Astral:

  However having seen the code and what uv is doing, even in the worst possible future this is a very forkable and maintainable thing. I believe that even in case Astral shuts down or were to do something incredibly dodgy licensing wise, the community would be better off than before uv existed. (View Highlight)

• I’m currently inclined to agree with Armin and Hynek: while the risk of corporate capture for a crucial aspect of the Python packaging and onboarding ecosystem is a legitimate concern, the amount of progress that has been made here in a relatively short time combined with the open license and quality of the underlying code keeps me optimistic that uv will be a net positive for Python overall. (View Highlight)