Comment by simonw
5 hours ago
It means they're a whole lot less likely to run out of money, which makes them a safer bet as a dependency.
5 hours ago
It means they're a whole lot less likely to run out of money, which makes them a safer bet as a dependency.
Running out of money is never the issue with a big company buying an open source project. There are countless examples of projects dying or changing significantly for the worse after acquisition.
Also “no human wrote any of this code” is not my personal benchmark for a reliable dependency.
> Running out of money is never the issue with a big company buying an open source project.
I'm going to dare to say that running out of money was often an issue before a big company bought an open source project.
Afaik there is no proof Anthropic is profitable. This, and uv buyout by OpenAI only adds a risk to supply chains. In few years these companies can be overrun by open source models or startups delivering new hardware/software breakthrough in LLM. It is not like uv and bun are acquired by IBMs or Alphabets of today.
Wasn't it announced that Anthropic is having their first profitable quarter right now in Q2? From what I've personally seen it's all driven by enterprise adoption.
Open source/foreign models are already way cheaper and will work just fine for most use cases but a lot of businesses are already pretty locked in to Claude, and with enterprise costing $240 a year at a 20 seat minimum it's a pretty big investment to make and won't be worth migrating unless the gains are significant.
What happens if Anthropic and OpenAI shut down?
Is it different from the status quo prior?
> safer bet as a dependency.
The recent 1 million line vibe coded PR suggests it is not so reliable as a dependency.
That was Bun at Anthropic, not uv at OpenAI. (UPDATE: My mistake, this thread is about Bun, not uv.)
Is this a joke I'm not getting or are your wires crossed? Bun is the topic of this subthread.
1 reply →
> It means they're a whole lot less likely to run out of money, which makes them a safer bet as a dependency.
I don't think this logically follows. That is, yes being acquired makes one less likely to run out of money, but doesn't necessarily make something safer as a dependency.
Plenty of open source projects have little to no funding and continue on for years with no problems. But being acquired suddenly creates a requirement of return-on-investment. A corporation will happily shut the whole thing down if and when it's decided that they're just not gaining enough value from it.
(There's also the general fact that, a corporate-acquired project is going to first and forement serve the needs of the corporation vs. the community at large - if your use case or edge case doesn't align with the needs of Anthropic then you should probably not hold your breath waiting for the Bun project to address it.)
Yes, famously, acquisitions only make services more reliable, as in the case of Microsoft and Github, or Apple and DarkSky.
There are so many it's a meme: https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com
running out of money, for an open source project of almost any kind, is safer than "running into money" with the wrong strings attached
(still reserving judgement on Bun, though — I mean, we'll soon see, one way or the other!)
> which makes them a safer bet as a dependency
Wouldn't node be the safest bet as a dependency?
For those who care about their dependencies being "safe bets", Bun should already be out of the question after the recent "vibe code the entire thing into a different language in a week with zero human intervention" fiasco.
Exactly.
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/16766