- cross-posted to:
- techtakes@awful.systems
- cross-posted to:
- techtakes@awful.systems
Today we’re announcing that OpenAI will acquire Astral, bringing powerful open source developer tools into our Codex ecosystem.
Astral has built some of the most widely used open source Python tools, helping developers move faster with modern tooling like uv, Ruff, and ty. These tools power millions of developer workflows and have become part of the foundation of modern Python development. As part of our developer-first philosophy, after closing OpenAI plans to support Astral’s open source products. By bringing Astral’s tooling and engineering expertise to OpenAI, we will accelerate our work on Codex and expand what AI can do across the software development lifecycle.


uv is under an MIT license, so every fork is free to relicense themselves as GPL and prevent openai’s gobblies.
Do you have more on that?
I’m not sure you can relicense the MIT code under GPL if you are not the author or it doesn’t say so in the MIT license, that relicensing is permitted.
The MIT is what’s called a permissive license.
That’s the entirety of the text. You can do pretty much anything as long as you make sure the first line is still visible somewhere (and if you’re not incorporating/relicensing it into GPL, you have to include the MIT license text as well; I’m less sure about how this parenthetical works but I do know an MIT project relicensed to GPL needs not include the MIT text), which in GPL it is.
https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit/
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#%3A~%3Atext=Expat)-,This%20is%20a%20lax%2C%20permissive%20non%2Dcopyleft%20free%20software%20license%2C%20compatible%20with%20the%20GNU%20GPL.,-Some
Thanks for the info.
So you can relicense MIT to GPL without the MiT parts staying MIT?
yes, you’re creating a derivative work that is entirely GPL. note that this doesn’t stop anyone from consulting the original since FOSS licenses do not have revocation. if they use none of the GPL derivative work they can still only abide by MIT. however, your changes would only exist in the GPL work, and they must be used with GPL.
Thanks for the clarification. I always thought that the GPL parts are also MIT then.