Maturity and Licensing

00:00 Tools like uv and pip are rarely used in isolation. You’ll have your IDE, your CI/CD provider, your code versioning system. All of the other tools you use, you need to check how well they integrate with the package installer you choose. uv is a fairly new tool, but its ecosystem is growing because uv is being rapidly adopted.

00:22 So while it isn’t supported everywhere yet, every day you see more and more adoption and better integration between uv and the other existing tools.

00:31 On the other hand, pip has been the default package installer for many, many years. So if a tool doesn’t integrate well with pip, then it’s because the tool has been there for decades.

00:42 And I did not verify this, I’m just making a joke. So it’s important to take these things into consideration. And on top of that, remember that uv and pip have substantially different backing organizations.

00:53 So even if pip becomes much less popular, it’s unlikely that it will go away. Whereas uv, even though it’s growing in popularity and adoption, you can’t be 100% sure of whether it will be continuously developed by Astral, the backing organization.

01:11 Now, when you think about that, it’s useful to note that both uv and pip have an MIT license, which is a very permissive license, and that ultimately means that the community can support whatever tools they want because everyone is free to work on uv and pip.

01:27 But it’s also important to note that uv is written in Rust, whereas pip is written in Python. So that’s likely to mean that for the Python community, it will be easier to maintain pip than to maintain uv.

01:40 That leads us to your final criteria for a decision. If your project uses modern toolchains and workflows, or rather, if it doesn’t, then you’ll likely want to go with pip because pip is widely supported and integrates well with pretty much everything.

01:56 But if you do use modern toolchains and workflows, or if you’re up for trying something more modern, then it’s about time you make your decision because in the next lesson, we’re going to do an overview of all of the things you learned about uv and pip, their differences and similarities, and then it will come down to you making your choice.