uv: An extremely fast Python package and project manager, written in Rust

So how does Astral plan to make money?

Here's a loose answer to that question from uv founder Charlie Marsh last September: 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 are hijacking the entire python's ecosystem in a very smart way, that's all. At some point we, probably, will find us vendor locked-in, just because the initial offer was so appealing. Take a closer look at it: package manager, formatter/linter, types, lsp. What's left before it will poke cpython one way or another? Maybe cloud-based IDE, some interesting WASM relationship (but RustPython is not there yet, they just don't have enough money). Otherwise, Astral is on a pretty straightforward way to `touchdown` in a few years. It's both, the blessing, and the curse.

Let's be honest, all tries to bring a cpython alternative failed (niche boosters like PyPy is a separate story, but it's not up-to-date, and not entirely exact). For some reason, people think that 1:1 compatibility is not critical and too costly to pursue (hello, all LLVM-based compilers). I think, it's doable and there's a solid way to solve it. What if Astral thinks so too?