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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
by Nextgrid 10mo 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.
- eru 10mo ago> 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.
- Nextgrid 10mo agoOffice 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.
- xvector 10mo agoHard 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.
- optionalsquid 10mo agoOffice politics happen when the number of people at an office exceeds 2
- calenti 10mo agoExceeds 1. Politics is the craft of influence. And, debatably, there's a politic even when population size=1, between your subconscious instinctive mind (eat the entire box of donuts) versus your conscious mind (don't spike your blood sugar).
- MikePlacid 10mo agoIf left alone I can argue with myself indefinitely.
- Nextgrid 10mo agoI think too many people happens because a company would rather hire 10 "market rate" people than 3 well-compensated ones. Headcount inflation dilutes responsibility and rewards, so even if one of the "market rate" guys does the best work possible they won't get rewarded proportionally... so if hard work isn't going to get them adequate comp, maybe politics will.
- zahlman 10mo ago> a company would rather hire 10 "market rate" people than 3 well-compensated ones The former is probably easier. They don't have to justify or determine the salaries, and don't have to figure out who's worth the money, and don't have to figure out how to figure that out.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- another-account 10mo agoSounds 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.
- Nextgrid 10mo agoFOSS 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").
- insane_dreamer 10mo agonumpy would like a word
- zahlman 10mo agoI think I understand what you're getting at, but I really think "Explicit is better than implicit" here.
- insane_dreamer 10mo ago> 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"
- WD-42 10mo agoI 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.
- Defletter 10mo agoIt 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.
- WD-42 10mo agoThat'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.
- Defletter 10mo agoI think OP is directing their ire towards projects with multiple maintainers, thus is more likely to be hamstrung by consensus building and is thus less productive. It does seem like we've been swamped with drama posts about large open-source projects and their governance, notably with Rust itself, linux incorporating Rust, Pebble, etc. It's not hard to imagine this firehose of dev-drama (that's not even about actual code) overshadowing the fact that the overwhelming majority of code ever written has a benevolent dictator model.
- fragmede 10mo agoThe argument isn't about proprietary vs open, but that design by committee, whether that committee be a bunch of open source heads that we like, or by some group that we've been told to other and hate, has limitations that have been exhibited here.
- SequoiaHope 10mo agoMaybe for a project of a given size and popularity? But BDFL projects might be more likely to be smaller. Projects with a lot of contributors might be more likely to need consensus building, but if they are productive at doing so they can be very productive due to their larger size. This is to say, project structure is not the only indicator of productivity.
- baby 10mo agoThat 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?
- Nextgrid 10mo ago> 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.
- Someone 10mo agoIt doesn’t hav eto make money ever on us for it to be worth it to them. If you’re a Python shop, compare - writing uv and keeping it private makes package management easier for your own packages - writing uv and opening it up, and getting all/most third party libs to use it makes package management easier for your own packages and third party packages you use
- raincole 10mo agoIs 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.
- Nextgrid 10mo agoThey 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)
- swores 10mo agoKeep 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 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. »»
- woile 10mo agonah, 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`.
- Ar-Curunir 10mo agoIIRC correctly uv was started before Astral (the company working on uv)
- raverbashing 10mo agoI 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
- tor825gl 10mo agoWhy doesn't anaconda disprove this?
- twelvedogs 10mo agoit wouldn't work in a foss world because there's like 5 guys doing that shit it in their spare time. that said... github...
- panzi 10mo agoSince uv and systemd are both FOSS how are they not part of the FOSS world?
- PartiallyTyped 10mo agoYou often pay them for their opinions too!
- brap 10mo agoIt basically boils down to: capitalism works.
- WiSaGaN 10mo agoThis argument falls apart when you look at Rust and Cargo. uv is literally trying to be "Python's Cargo." The entire blueprint came from a flagship FOSS project. Rust's development used a structured, community RFC process—endless planning by your definition. The result was a famously well-designed toolchain that the entire community praises. FOSS didn't hold it back; it made it good. So no, commercial backing isn't the only way to ship something good. FOSS is more than capable to ship great software when done right.