Note that this is fundamentally different from the Astral acquisition. At the end of their announcement, they stated:
> Cirrus CI will shut down effective Monday, June 1, 2026.
And earlier in the article:
> Joining OpenAI allows us to extend the mission we started with Cirrus Labs: building new kinds of tooling and environments that make engineers more effective, for both human engineers and agentic engineers.
It isn't a product-led acquisition, but more a talent one.
This is kind-of neat too, at least in the near term:
> In the coming weeks, we will relicense all of our source-available tools, including Tart, Vetu and Orchard under a more permissive license. We have also stopped charging licensing fees for them.
Just want to note that we will continue maintaining and improving our virtualization solutions actually with even greater attention. SaaS options like Cirrus CI and Cirrus Runners will eventually wind down so we can focus on incorporating pieces internally.
You’ll be pleasantly surprised. Updates in the coming weeks.
> In the coming weeks, we will relicense all of our source-available tools, including Tart, Vetu and Orchard under a more permissive license. We have also stopped charging licensing fees for them.
If your scope includes making the Codex web app environments have additional functionality I look forward to it. More enterprise features and yaml backed pipelines.
Yeah. Much like Astral - acquiring both the product (because they need to use it internally, but don't care about trying to resell / market), and they also want the talent to keep maintaining it / add features they want.
>It isn't a product-led acquisition, but more a talent one.
I am pretty sure OAI mostly cares about their virtualization IP for MacOS. They already extensively use WSL2 for sandboxing Codex on Windows, and I imagine they want something similar for Codex on Mac.
I’m happy for the founders, they’re great folks. I contributed to CirrusCI a bit in the past and it was a great experience. I even advocated for Cirrus in a couple of my last $DAYJOBs (with varied success). Congrats Fedor!
I’m very sad they’re shutting down, though. IMHO CirrusCI was very close to a perfect CI system (I wrote a blogpost about it [0]). I’ll now have to find something to replace it with in my personal projects. I guess I’ll run their cirrus-cli in GitHub Actions for a while. But GitHub Actions is really poor. I heard some good things about Buildkite.
Having tried many other CI systems, all of which ultimately turned out to be subpar, it makes me incredibly sad to discover only now that Cirrus CI is (was?) quite a bit better than them. :( Thanks for the blog post, though!
Well, check out RWX! We don't do exactly everything like CirrusCI did -- most notably, we aren't open source and we are still managing all of our own infrastructure for running CI right now -- but we have a great "local" story and a validation CLI (rwx lint), and a lot of fundamental changes that make us better than other CI systems too :)
Same; the reason everyone ran out to buy Mac Minis last month is it gave their Claw access to iMessage, their browser cookies, and a residential IP. Cirrus provides a way to provision and orchestrate MacOS VMs, which is exactly what I did for running Openclaw (for a minute …).
Not to sell Tart short (it is quite good), but it's "just" a wrapper around Virtualization.framework with a few extra pieces. This is the kind of thing that Codex driven by experts _should_ be able to build very easily.
Note that apples terms do not allow someone to sell something like an agent running on macOS. They have explicit cut outs for 24-hour minimum leases of full hardware, but they prohibit this with vms
The level of aqui-hires is getting interesting - at this point, it appears that if one wants one's career to progress, you need to start some kind of tiny startup like Astral or Bun and hope to be notable enough you can get acquired by someone like OpenAI or Anthropic.
It certainly makes the idea of a career progression / promotion more challenging than it used to be, but perhaps it also opens up some new opportunities. It becomes far more "high stakes" since you have to take the risk of starting and running a startup that ultimately fails if it does not get acqui-hired.
Cirrus gave a ton of support for years to open source projects. I congratulate them on cashing out. Running a business like Cirrus did is always a hard road and I will never fault folks who gave time and resources on their platform away for taking the money.
I wish Fedor and everyone at Cirrus the best of luck and OpenAI and thank them immensely for the years of free CI they gave to us in the Pony programming language despite it not having any marketing value to them.
Wow Cirrus was like the one cool CI thing with first-class Podman support. RIP. Guess I'm looking elsewhere (and not at Dagger which refuses to support rootless Podman).
A pity. Cirrus has been providing quite decent CI facilities, for free. One of the advantages (among many) compared to GitHub Actions is the large variety of runner images, e.g., Debian, Fedora, Alpine, FreeBSD, ...
144 comments
> Cirrus CI will shut down effective Monday, June 1, 2026.
And earlier in the article:
> Joining OpenAI allows us to extend the mission we started with Cirrus Labs: building new kinds of tooling and environments that make engineers more effective, for both human engineers and agentic engineers.
It isn't a product-led acquisition, but more a talent one.
> In the coming weeks, we will relicense all of our source-available tools, including Tart, Vetu and Orchard under a more permissive license. We have also stopped charging licensing fees for them.
Hopefully development on it continues, or a community maintained version keeps it going.
https://github.com/cirruslabs/tart/blob/main/LICENSE
https://tart.run/licensing/
> In the coming weeks, we will relicense all of our source-available tools, including Tart, Vetu and Orchard under a more permissive license. We have also stopped charging licensing fees for them.
If you’re taking requests…
https://github.com/smogili1/circuit
Looks like I’ll need to move the FreeBSD CI jobs for open source projects I maintain to another solution. Anyone have suggestions for alternatives?
>It isn't a product-led acquisition, but more a talent one.
I am pretty sure OAI mostly cares about their virtualization IP for MacOS. They already extensively use WSL2 for sandboxing Codex on Windows, and I imagine they want something similar for Codex on Mac.
https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/24990
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/3ydjipcr7kbss57nvi67no...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirrus_Logic
Edit: TIL “Apple makes up 89% of the company's revenue in 2025”
I’m happy for the founders, they’re great folks. I contributed to CirrusCI a bit in the past and it was a great experience. I even advocated for Cirrus in a couple of my last $DAYJOBs (with varied success). Congrats Fedor!
I’m very sad they’re shutting down, though. IMHO CirrusCI was very close to a perfect CI system (I wrote a blogpost about it [0]). I’ll now have to find something to replace it with in my personal projects. I guess I’ll run their cirrus-cli in GitHub Actions for a while. But GitHub Actions is really poor. I heard some good things about Buildkite.
[0]: https://garden.pacia.tech/cirrus_ci_is_the_best.html
> I wrote a blogpost about it [0]
Having tried many other CI systems, all of which ultimately turned out to be subpar, it makes me incredibly sad to discover only now that Cirrus CI is (was?) quite a bit better than them. :( Thanks for the blog post, though!
rwx lint), and a lot of fundamental changes that make us better than other CI systems too :)> In 2022, we built Tart, which became the most popular virtualization solution for Apple Silicon, along with several other tools along the way.
from Tart's github:
> [Tart is for] macOS and Linux VMs on Apple Silicon to use in CI and other automations
My (naive?) hypothesis is this kind of expertise is why OpenAI chose to acquihire.
It certainly makes the idea of a career progression / promotion more challenging than it used to be, but perhaps it also opens up some new opportunities. It becomes far more "high stakes" since you have to take the risk of starting and running a startup that ultimately fails if it does not get acqui-hired.
Today we use Hertzner and OVH and roll out our own solution whenever possible.
Running lean and mean.
Depending on such third party services is a trap.
I wish Fedor and everyone at Cirrus the best of luck and OpenAI and thank them immensely for the years of free CI they gave to us in the Pony programming language despite it not having any marketing value to them.
So they want an integrated solution with CI, Python packaging and vibe coding.
That is a $100 million valuation at best, not a $1 trillion one.
> I wanted to work on fun and challenging engineering problems, in the hope of bootstrapping a business as a byproduct.
> We never raised outside capital
I guess it worked out though
https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/tools-computer...
https://github.com/cirruslabs/mtell
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47704497
Can you talk a bit more about your journey without raising funds?
Also what does HN think of that path today when trying to launch a new AI startup?