I had several times wondered what Astral’s business plan was as it seemed like they were accumulating a great team but I couldn’t see what their revenue stream was to profit from that. It all makes more sense with this news.
I have no idea how Astral employees feel about this but I know some of them (in the online like here sense) and I think they are great people and I wish them all the best and I hope this works out for them.
This does make me question though the wisdom of allowing the Python ecosystem to become dependent on tools that are produced by companies that can just be bought. I don’t think of only Astral/OpenAI here but also things like GitHub which are established monopolies that provide much benefit but are also run by companies with their own corporate interests.