Josh Thomas

I'm not sure of the origin of the phrase, but a quick search suggests this post from 2011 by François Zaninotto as one possible origin.

When people say "open source is a gift," they usually mean the final product: a library or application given freely to society, with no expectation of reciprocity.

I agree with this take on the phrase. One of the downsides of releasing software under an open source license is the expectations it can set up for some subset of end users: since they got it for free, they assume that support, bug fixes, and feature requests are also owed to them for free. So I like the phrase as a way to reset and recenter the conversation and those expectations.

However, I want to talk about a slightly different interpretation of the phrase.

The Gift of Development in the Open

Astral is a venture-capital backed company that has written a handful of tools for the Python ecosystem: ruff for extremely fast formatting and linting, uv for packaging and dependency management, ty for type checking, and most recently a package manager, pyx.

All of these (except pyx) are MIT licensed and developed completely in the open.

Astral's tools have generally been well received. In my experience, this is because the developers behind them have impeccable API design taste — their tools are a delight to use. Still, concerns have been raised (understandably) about the Python ecosystem coalescing around tooling written by a VC-backed company, given the general likelihood of enshittification that VC money tends to lead to.

I'm not here to talk about that entirely valid concern. Instead, I want to talk about what a gift it is that the development of these well-designed, well-engineered tools is happening entirely in public. Seriously: go look at the pull requests in any of their repos and you will see extremely smart programmers tackling thorny issues in real time. The fact that anyone can learn from that is itself a gift.

The Gift of Learning in Public

For about a year now, I’ve been working on a language server for Django as a side project. I chose to write it in Rust, despite never having used a low-level, statically typed systems language before.

From one perspective, this was a mistake. If I were being paid to deliver it for a company, I would certainly agree. The cross-language barrier adds real friction (even with tools like maturin and PyO3 smoothing the way). A well-supported language server library already exists in Python, and there’s even a Django language server written in Python that is far more full-featured than mine. Had I chosen Python, I’d no doubt be further along and closer to matching those features.

But I’m not getting paid for this. This is a personal project.

So I chose Rust for entirely personal reasons: I wanted to learn it in a meaningful, non-toy context. Rust offers performance essentially for free, and its type system and borrow checker — while painful at first — force you to think differently about correctness and memory safety. After years of wrestling with type checking in Python projects using mypy and pyright, working in a language with actual types has been refreshing.

And honestly: it was fun.

This is where the “gift” of open source really hit me. Astral’s codebases and PRs have become my textbook. Their discussions around error handling, incremental parsing, cross-platform quirks, or performance trade-offs — all of it has become incredibly useful as part of my own education and journey learning Rust.

And more than that: I wasn’t just inspired — I borrowed ideas and techniques directly. The architecture of my Django language server is heavily influenced by techniques I first saw in their repos: using salsa for incremental cached computations, structuring a Rust project into multiple crates within a workspace, and even approaches for integrating cleanly with Python. Astral, in turn, built on ideas from other open projects like rust-analyzer and Cargo itself.

That chain of influence, the gift being passed along, is what makes open source so remarkable.

The Gift Passed Along

So while the original intention of the phrase "open source is a gift" is valid, I'm trying to look at it through a different lens. I don’t just mean the code you uv add or pip install or cargo add. I mean the act of doing the work in the open. Every bug triaged in public, every design debate captured in a GitHub thread, every pull request left for anyone to study—it’s all an ongoing seminar in how good software is made.

Astral, of course, isn’t the only one building in the open — they’re just the most relevant to my journey this past year. Countless others, from CPython to Django and many other projects maintained entirely by volunteers, are out there too. All ready for anyone to study and learn from.

Open source is not just a gift of software. It’s a gift of process. A gift of learning. A gift of permission: to watch, to copy, to try, to fail — and eventually, to give back in your own way.

And that, to me, is just as valuable as the software itself.