Astral to Join OpenAI

Re:Astral to Join OpenAI by zem on Thursday March 19, 2026 @02:39PM (#47443893)

that makes zero sense to me. developing something like ruff from scratch takes a lot of things happening - someone having the idea, the time to develop it from scratch in their free time, or the money to do it as a job, and perhaps the need to find collaborators if it's too large a project for one person. but now ruff is there, there's no need to build it from scratch. if I wanted to build a python linter or formatter I would simply fork ruff and build on top of it. as others have said in this subthread, that's the whole point of open source!

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Re:Astral to Join OpenAI by eviks on Friday March 20, 2026 @06:18AM (#47452648)

> the time to develop it [not] from scratch in their free time, or the money...

How do you think the magic of open source resolves this issue? Think about this for it to make some sense

> I would simply fork

The only simple part here is pressing the "fork" button, which only gives you exactly the same code that already exists, without user awareness or distribution

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Re:Astral to Join OpenAI by zem on Friday March 20, 2026 @12:11PM (#47456669)

you're moving the goalposts now. I never said it would be easy to get used awareness or adoption, just that it would be a lot easier to write a new linter by forking and continuing ruff development than it would doing so from scratch.

as to how the magic of open source resolves the time and money issue, it literally gives you the building blocks you need to not have to invent everything from scratch. how is that not significant?

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Re:Astral to Join OpenAI by eviks on Friday March 20, 2026 @12:20PM (#47456818)

> just that it would be a lot easier to write a new linter by forking

And I never said about the relative ease, you've moved the goalpost there yourself. $1m required to maintain is much less than $10m required to create, yet when you don't have $1m it doesn't matter - you'll still fail, and reasons are the same as the reasons you couldn't build the original.

Blocks lying around does not a building make, so you haven't addressed that magic either.

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Re:Astral to Join OpenAI by zem on Friday March 20, 2026 @01:29PM (#47457797)

it does not take $1M to maintain a linter, these tools can and have been built and maintained by people in their spare time. astral built a better one, for which I am genuinely grateful to them, but it's not like they invented linting or that the open source community was just waiting around for some business to supply their tooling. indeed developer tools are notoriously hard to make money off simply because so many good ones have been developed as either solo or community open source projects, largely by people in their free time.

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