Pydantic's Open Source theft
Recently Pydantic introduced httpx2; a fork of the widely used httpx package. They've quickly pushed for the industry to update a large swath of infrastructure to depend on their version, introducing a huge amount of churn.
Big time players OpenAI and Anthropic have blindly followed suit, updating large parts of of their tooling.
Problematically their approach here both completely unneccessary, and damaging to trust in the open source community.
The responsible route here would have been to start by discussing what would be needed to ensure that the existing httpx was in active maintenance. Which issues were actually blocking a 1.0 release? Which project changes would be needed to get onto a decent release cadence?
As it happens Samuel Colvin had offered to purchase httpx in March 2026... "we'd be open to giving you significant financial compensation in return for transferring HTTPX to Pydantic, should you ever be interested". I'd suggested that they might instead consider sponsorship. "Certainly we could have a chat & a catch up sometime? [...] The interplay with team diversity is a priority, unsurprisingly. Perhaps there's avenues around sponsored developers on the project that'd be worth exploring?"
Since then they've evidently concluded that they can instead just unilaterally claim ownership of the project.
The community seems to have quietly acquiesced to what is, essentially, a corporate takeover attempt.
Beyond this, the Starlette and Uvicorn projects have also been part of the part of the same corporate manovering.
During 2025 I'd been in good faith discussions with primary maintainer Marcello Tyrelesinski, around how we could best help promote their work on the projects. The intent was to help support sponsorship of an independent open source developer, and create an oppourtunity for a fresh community approach.
These projects were decent little pieces of work. They played a background role in helping enable a wide range of async servers and application frameworks for Python. It made sense to ensure that we work together towards ensuring they would be well supported and maintained within a decentralised and co-operative ecosystem.
In September 2025, Marcello removed my admin access to the PyPI projects, in an attempt to pro-actively force the transfer. This was frustrating, since we'd anyways been working towards promoting their maintainership and sponsored work. They followed this by attempting to misrepresent themselves as author of the projects on multiple occasions. Shortly afterwards Marcello became employed by Pydantic. At this point in time both the Starlette docs and HTTPX2 README have become plastered with ads for Pydantic's logfire product.
Meanwhile pull requests on all three projects - httpx2, starlette, and uvicorn, are being filled with momunetal amounts of utter junk and meaningless content from AI bots.
In other areas I'm supportive of Pydantic's work, of their open source pydantic project, and of both the developers mentioned here. That they've felt the need to attempt to further take control of previously independant parts of the open source ecosystem reflects poorly on their position within the open source landscape.
Regardless of the finer points of the licensing Pydantic's approach here is essentially theft. Allowing those sorts of behaviors to stand will be hugely damaging to trust in the Open Source community. We could and should be doing so much better.
In praise of the SE
The Porsche 911 of the Apple era.
The iPhone SE, original edition. It's a absolute joy.
Released 2016, this is the last of the Steve Job's lineage. It's grown a little taller since the iPhone 4, though it's still just as svelte.
There's less to choose from in the App Store, support for iOS 15 being a little thin on the ground. For me, Signal and IA Writer make the cut.
Internet Voice
Taps mic.
Right... back to internet-land. What's going on?
Personally, I've been quitely working away on a little httpx redesign. It's under wraps at the moment, but feels like the start of a neat little gig we've got going on. If you'd like to connect my prefered channel is Signal. (lovelydinosaur.99)