Comment by Nextgrid
16 hours ago
It's not just greenfield-ness but the fact it's a commercial endeavor (even if the code is open-source).
Building a commercial product means you pay money (or something they equally value) to people to do your bidding. You don't have to worry about politics, licensing, and all the usual FOSS-related drama. You pay them to set their opinions aside and build what you want, not what they want (and if that doesn't work, it just means you need to offer more money).
In this case it's a company that believes they can make a "good" package manager they can sell/monetize somehow and so built that "good" package manager. Turns out it's at least good enough that other people now like it too.
This would never work in a FOSS world because the project will be stuck in endless planning as everyone will have an opinion on how it should be done and nothing will actually get done.
Similar story with systemd - all the bitching you hear about it (to this day!) is the stuff that would've happened during its development phase had it been developed as a typical FOSS project and ultimately made it go nowhere - but instead it's one guy that just did what he wanted and shared it with the world, and enough other people liked it and started building upon it.
I don't know what you think "typical Foss projects" are but in my experience they are exactly like your systemd example: one person that does what they want and share it with the world. The rest of your argument doesn't really make any sense with that in mind.
That's no longer as true as it once was. I get the feeling that quite a few people would consider "benevolent dictator for life" an outdated model for open source communities. For better or worse, there's a lot of push to transition popular projects towards being led by committee. Results are mixed (literally: I see both successes and failures), but that doesn't seem to have any effect on the trend.
Only a very, very small fraction of open source projects get to the point where they legitimately need committees and working groups and maintainer politics/drama.
> quite a few people would consider "benevolent dictator for life" an outdated model for open source communities.
I think what most people dislike are rugpulls and when commercial interests override what contributors/users/maintainers are trying to get out of a project.
For example, we use forgejo at my company because it was not clear to us to what extent gitea would play nicely with us if we externalized a hosted version/deployment their open source software (which they somewhat recently formed a company around, and led to forgejo forking it under the GPL). I'm also not a fan of what minio did recently to that effect, and am skeptical but hopeful that seaweedfs is not going to do something similar.
We ourselves are building out a community around our static site generator https://github.com/accretional/statue as FOSS with commercial backing. The difference is that we're open and transparent about it from the beginning, and static site generators/component libraries are probably some of the least painful to fork or take issue with their direction, vs critical infrastructure like distributed systems' storage layer.
Bottom line is, BDFL works when 1. you aren't asking people to bet their business on you staying benevolent 2. you remain benevolent.
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It depends on governance, for want of a better word: if a project has a benevolent dictator then that project will likely be more productive than one that requires consensus building.
That's what I'm saying. Benevolent dictator is the rule, not the exception, in FOSS. Which is why GP's argument that private companies good, FOSS bad, makes no sense.
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> You don't have to worry about politics, licensing, and all the usual FOSS-related drama. You pay them to set their opinions aside and build what you want, not what they want (and if that doesn't work, it just means you need to offer more money).
Money is indeed a great lubricator.
However, it's not black-and-white: office politics is a long standing term for a reason.
Office politics happen when people determine they can get more money by engaging in politics instead of working. This is just an indicator people aren't being paid enough money (since people politicking around is detrimental to the company, it is better off paying them whatever it takes for them not to engage in such behavior). "You get what you pay for" applies yet again.
Politicking is just group dynamics. In large companies people engage in politics because it becomes necessary to accomplish large things.
Of course a group can also have bad actors but that’s not really an issue with politics specifically. Politics are neither good nor bad.
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Hard disagree, most of my coworkers make well north of $1M and office politics is at an all time high.
I believe office politics happens when there are simply too many people at a company or org.
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Sounds like you’re really down on FOSS and think FOSS projects don’t get stuff done and have no success? You might want to think about that a bit more.
FOSS can sometimes get stuff done but I'd argue it gets stuff done in spite of all the bickering, not because of it. If all the energy spent on arguments or "design by committee" was spent productively FOSS would go much farther (hell maybe we'd finally get that "year of the Linux desktop").
That doesn't make any sense. You can do open source by yourself and not accept any input.
How's the company behind uv making money?
> How's the company behind uv making money?
It doesn't have to make money now. But it's clearly pouring commercial-project-level of resources into uv, on the belief they will somehow recoup that investment later on.
nah, a lot of people working on `uv` have a massive amount of experience working on the rust ecosystem, including `cargo` the rust package manager. `uv` is even advertised as `cargo` for python. And what is `cargo`? a FLOSS project.
Lots of lessons from other FLOSS package managers helped `cargo` become great, and then this knowledge helped shape `uv`.
Is there any sign telling Astral is actually making money via uv? How sustainable is it?
I suggest everyone save this comment and review it five years later.
Keep in mind that "making money" doesn't have to be from people paying to use uv.
It could be that they calculate the existence of uv saves their team more time (and therefore expense) in their other work than it used to create. It could be that recognition for making the tool is worth the cost as a marketing expense. It could be that other companies donate money to them either ahead of time in order to get uv made, or after it was made to encourage more useful tools to be made. etc
Edit: 6 months ago, user simonw wrote a HN comment "Here's a loose answer to that question from uv founder Charlie Marsh last September [2024] : https://hachyderm.io/@charliermarsh/113103564055291456
«« I don't want to charge people money to use our tools, and I don't want to create an incentive structure whereby our open source offerings are competing with any commercial offerings (which is what you see with a lost of hosted-open-source-SaaS business models).
What I want to do is build software that vertically integrates with our open source tools, and sell that software to companies that are already using Ruff, uv, etc. Alternatives to things that companies already pay for today.
An example of what this might look like (we may not do this, but it's helpful to have a concrete example of the strategy) would be something like an enterprise-focused private package registry. A lot of big companies use uv. We spend time talking to them. They all spend money on private package registries, and have issues with them. We could build a private registry that integrates well with uv, and sell it to those companies. [...]
But the core of what I want to do is this: build great tools, hopefully people like them, hopefully they grow, hopefully companies adopt them; then sell software to those companies that represents the natural next thing they need when building with Python. Hopefully we can build something better than the alternatives by playing well with our OSS, and hopefully we are the natural choice if they're already using our OSS. »»
They believe they do or that they will in the future and act accordingly.
(whether it will pan out or not is another matter, but in the meantime we got a decent open-source package manager out of it)
"Is there any sign telling Astral is actually making money via uv? How sustainable is it?"
maybe they would get acquihire like Bun ???? idk, somebody defo needs this
Since uv and systemd are both FOSS how are they not part of the FOSS world?
You often pay them for their opinions too!
it wouldn't work in a foss world because there's like 5 guys doing that shit it in their spare time. that said... github...
Why doesn't anaconda disprove this?
I 100% agree with this
And it's true, while I disagree with a lot of systemd decisions focus has a leveraging effect that's disproportional
IIRC correctly uv was started before Astral (the company working on uv)
numpy would like a word
I think I understand what you're getting at, but I really think "Explicit is better than implicit" here.
> This would never work in a FOSS world because the project will be stuck in endless planning as everyone will have an opinion on how it should be done and nothing will actually get done.
numpy is the the de-facto foundation for data science in python, which is one of the main reasons, if not the main reason, why people use python
it's FOSS
and it "actually got done"