Community will fork it and move on. See the following examples:

* Redis -> redict, valkey

* elastic search -> opensearch

* terraform -> opentofu

(Probably a few more but those are the ones that come to mind when they "go rogue")

Does the current license allow it?

Yes, uv has a standard permissive open source license (Apache-2.0 OR MIT): https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/?tab=readme-ov-file#license

Apache & MIT - Yes

I brought this up when leaders at my place were discussing implementing uv. I am verging on paranoid about this kind of thing.

The answer is that we replaced all our of 'pip' with 'uv pip'. Shit goes south and we simply change it back at the cost of speed.

Why wouldn't you be able to switch back to using pip ?

It seems like that'd work as long as you restrict yourself entirely to the pip interface. Stray outside of that, and you start accumulating a real dependency on uv itself.

It's trivial to switch from uv to other projects like pdm or poetry. uv follows the standard PEPs really closely, so most things are interoperable.

If uv disappeared tomorrow, five projects would spring up to make compatible implementations of its functionality.

Because after a few years of using a non-awful tool you lose your tolerance for awfulness?