- uv is a cool tool, but Astral has signaled their intention to have it tie in nicely to paid services.
- that's a nice moat!
- Andre & friends saw that in the Python community (and uv's success) and decided they could do the same for Ruby
- Their collective announces rv and now wants to make us dependent on them & friends for Ruby Gems.
- After Hashicorp and others, I'm extremely wary of orgs luring me in with free shit. Hashicorp is maybe the lightest example of this but they're very intentional about enterprise-walling business-essential features.
- I don't want the Ruby ecosystem dependent on one party or even a tiny collective of people. This is just as bad to me as the Ruby Central situation right now.
The Ruby ecosystem is already decentralised in that there is no single source of truth for published gems. You can pull the source from any software forge that uses git, you can point to any self hosted gem server or use something like Artifactory or GitHub package registry. You can vendor the code if you want.
This entire post is practically the case in point, except I’m not clear on how they got real time sync with RubyGems and if any other competitor would have the same capability.
To use Astral and uv as an example, they would have to fork PyPI and maintain all the infra for that and not just the tool that manages the dependencies.
By "Astral" do you mean "Spinel"? Also, what paid services? So far the only paid services they've mentioned is retainer services that essentially amount to priority customer support. The tools themselves are only ever described as free
EDIT: Misread the comment and thought it was only about `rv`, not both `uv` and `rv`
What is Spinel? Astral is the developer of uv, and they have announced their hosted platform service, pyx [0]. It appears it will be FOSS as well, but they'll have a hosted version of it.
