Its interesting because the value is definitely there. Every single python developer you meet (many of who are highly paid) has a story about wasting a bunch of time on these things. The question is how much of this value can Astral capture.
I think based on the quality of their work, there's also an important component which is trust. I'd trust and pay for a product from them much more readily than an open source solution with flaky maintainers.
Yeah they certainly generate a lot of value by providing excellent productivity tooling. The question is how they capture some of that value, which is notoriously hard with an OSS license. A non-OSS license creates the adobe trap on the other hand, where companies deploy more and more aggressive moetization strategies, making life worse and worse for users of the software.
I think based on the quality of their work, there's also an important component which is trust. I'd trust and pay for a product from them much more readily than an open source solution with flaky maintainers.