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Is there a big enough commercial market for private Python package registries to support an entire company and its staff? Looks like they're hiring for $250k en

by rob 1y ago

Is there a big enough commercial market for private Python package registries to support an entire company and its staff? Looks like they're hiring for $250k engineers, starting a $26k/year OSS fund, etc. Expenses seem a bit high if this is their first project unless they plan on being acquired?

eldenring 1y ago
Its interesting because the value is definitely there. Every single python developer you meet (many of who are highly paid) has a story about wasting a bunch of time on these things. The question is how much of this value can Astral capture. I think based on the quality of their work, there's also an important component which is trust. I'd trust and pay for a product from them much more readily than an open source solution with flaky maintainers.
- est31 1y ago
  Yeah they certainly generate a lot of value by providing excellent productivity tooling. The question is how they capture some of that value, which is notoriously hard with an OSS license. A non-OSS license creates the adobe trap on the other hand, where companies deploy more and more aggressive moetization strategies, making life worse and worse for users of the software.
dimatura 1y ago
Just one data point, but if it's as nice to use as their open source tools and not outrageously expensive, I'd be a customer. Current offerings for private python package registries are kind of meh. Always wondered why github doesn't offer this.
int_19h 1y ago
Continuum has been doing something very similar with Anaconda, and they've been around for over a decade now.
- hobofan 1y ago
  From what I can tell they (had to?) ramp up their aggressiveness regarding getting paid though. They had contacted a company I had worked for asking them to purchase a license, because apparently somewhere in the company some dev workflow had contacted the conda servers regularly. We never ended up tracing it down as it stopped some weeks before them contacting us, according to our network logs. In general, you don't resort to such sales tactics unless there is good cause (significant usage, where you as unpaid vendor also have leverage) or you just end up burning potential future customers (as was the case here, as they chose a bad contact point inside the company).
- physicsguy 1y ago
  And Enthought before them...
thrown-0825 1y ago
Ask Docker how that worked out.
graynk 1y ago
I would love to have something that replaces JFrog's Artifactory or Sonatype Nexus. Having _just_ a python registry IMO limits the enterprise audience by quite a bit (even if it is much better for Python-specific issues)
zvr 1y ago
There definitely is a large market for it. Especially if they provide accurate (curated) metadata for security and compliance purposes.

by rob 1y ago

eldenring 1y ago

Its interesting because the value is definitely there. Every single python developer you meet (many of who are highly paid) has a story about wasting a bunch of time on these things. The question is how much of this value can Astral capture. I think based on the quality of their work, there's also an important component which is trust. I'd trust and pay for a product from them much more readily than an open source solution with flaky maintainers.

est31 1y ago
Yeah they certainly generate a lot of value by providing excellent productivity tooling. The question is how they capture some of that value, which is notoriously hard with an OSS license. A non-OSS license creates the adobe trap on the other hand, where companies deploy more and more aggressive moetization strategies, making life worse and worse for users of the software.

dimatura 1y ago

Just one data point, but if it's as nice to use as their open source tools and not outrageously expensive, I'd be a customer. Current offerings for private python package registries are kind of meh. Always wondered why github doesn't offer this.

int_19h 1y ago

Continuum has been doing something very similar with Anaconda, and they've been around for over a decade now.

hobofan 1y ago
From what I can tell they (had to?) ramp up their aggressiveness regarding getting paid though. They had contacted a company I had worked for asking them to purchase a license, because apparently somewhere in the company some dev workflow had contacted the conda servers regularly. We never ended up tracing it down as it stopped some weeks before them contacting us, according to our network logs. In general, you don't resort to such sales tactics unless there is good cause (significant usage, where you as unpaid vendor also have leverage) or you just end up burning potential future customers (as was the case here, as they chose a bad contact point inside the company).
physicsguy 1y ago
And Enthought before them...

thrown-0825 1y ago

Ask Docker how that worked out.

graynk 1y ago

I would love to have something that replaces JFrog's Artifactory or Sonatype Nexus. Having _just_ a python registry IMO limits the enterprise audience by quite a bit (even if it is much better for Python-specific issues)

zvr 1y ago

There definitely is a large market for it. Especially if they provide accurate (curated) metadata for security and compliance purposes.