Evidently Evan You was an Art History + Studio Art and major and at Parsons School he had to pick up javascript to quickly show his work. During a stint at Creativelab5 at Google, he was so inspired to improve on AngularJS experience that he came up with Vue and the rest is history.
I have no idea what this Cloudflare acquisition will ultimately mean but I know I am so very grateful for the beautiful frameworks/tooling Evan and his team have cranked out over the years.
Evan has done really great work. I haven't used Vue extensively (not my company's stack) but am a huge fan of Vite and it has helped our React pipeline a lot. I've also recently started playing around with CloudFlare pages and workers and it's already such a pain-free process to get basic apps up and running, I imagine this collab will make my life easier.
So is the business model of these projects - 1. build a popular dev tool 2. aquire funding 3. hire great talent 4. pray for an aqui-hire that justifies the initial funding amount
I wonder how the initial investors feel about the aqui-hire path... Must be a pretty nice sum for them to agree to it, or they saw that the path to any revenue was near impossible/non-existant
> So is the business model of these projects - 1. build a popular dev tool 2. aquire funding 3. hire great talent 4. pray for an aqui-hire that justifies the initial funding amount
Indeed, so as a library/framework/engine/runtime user, for the last decade or so, I've basically avoided anything that touched VC-investments, as eventually the tool will either degrade, get too expensive or straight up disappear, and I got so tired of having to refactor and move stuff around just because new owner did something shitty.
Hey there embedding-shape -- my name is Adrian Bridgwater and I'm a technology journalist that has enjoyed the realism of your comment here, can I contact you for a follow up comment? I'm here at LinkedIn to start with https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrianbridgwater/
They've raised over $16 million [0]. For a decent 3-5x return for that, they would need to have been acquired for around ~$50 million. For a team of 19 [1], thats around $2.5 million per employee for Cloudflare. Worth it? no idea
I could see Cloudflare wanting them for 50 Million. Cloudflare recent acquisitions have clearly been "buy tools with heavy lock in" and companies shipping on Void are likely heavily locked in.
Isn't their revenue just sponsorships and donations? This seems like a company destined to scrape by despite their popularity, like Tailwind. You don't get $50 million for that.
They have a cloud they already built on Cloudflare. Cloudflare probably thinks they can quickly launch that and that's locked in, steady revenue source.
But it's also possible they haven't spent much of that money.
The investors don't need to be happy. They just need to be made whole (assuming they have a minority control).
It could literally be that only $2m ever got spent and that's been paid back.
It could also be that when literally nobody said they would pay for Vite+ the investors and team in general lost confidence and were actually very happy just to get their money back and pivot into this acquisition.
Your listing is not exhaustive - startups can also be acquired for politics, for marketing purposes, whatever. There is a lot of meat space things going on in the upper echelons of the US tech industry.
Recent history shows that an idealized view only focusing on fiduciary duty does not capture the whole picture of business in the USA.
Rarely does one acquire dollars for the sake of having dollars. Dollars are power tokens, and the acquisition of them beyond a certain point is almost always accompanied by a motive.
In many cases the acquiring company shares investors or board members with the acqui-hired entity.
To put it neutrally, VC partners are treating these are parts of their same portfolios, so if one team doesn't pan out on its own, it can be merged into another with somewhat similar overall goals or markets.
To put it more pointedly, it's perhaps all about who one knows and making sure that everyone gets to tell a story of successful exits.
Vite isn't a product. It's a tool. It will be succeeded if necessary. It happened to Webpack after Microsoft hired the creator, and the JS community pivoted hard. Bundlers and compilers in the JS world happen once a decade it appears.
I was at the hardware store this morning. I bought a hammer. It sure seemed like a product... with the whole "being displayed on store shelves" and "available for purchase" thing.
There were several different hammers there, bearing different branding and having different manufacturers.
> No. It's all about building a great product that people love. Vite is a foundational tool in the JS ecosystem.
A foundational tool in an open ecosystem doesn't mean a monetisable product. I struggle to think of even a single example of a foundational tool with a business model.
And of course, not everything needs a business model. But if you're getting VC funding, you kind of need one.
This is the kind of problem I think only UBI solves because there is no apparent business model that can sustain ~20 employees working on software like this, they need to make at least a couple million a year to pay those people!
> Must be a pretty nice sum for them to agree to it
Not necessarily: if the investors don't agree to a reasonable amount, the wanna-be acquirer will simply hire the entire team with generous sign-on bonuses, and the investors will be left with a shell of a company.
In this case, the core product is MIT-licensed, the team can quit on a Friday and pick up exactly where they left off under a new org on Monday.
It has happened in the recent past (2-4 years ago?); I can't remember both the acquirer and the hollowed-out startup, and searches are returning chaff, but it got to the HN frontpage.
IANAL, but at-will employment cuts both ways- thr best an employer can do on behalf of investors, are golden handcuffs - and people can be bought out of those.
That’s not quite actually true and it is a bit more nuanced than that. For example, while non-competes and non-solicits are unenforceable in CA for employment agreements, they absolutely are enforceable for mergers and acquisitions.
The laws governing employment are a subset of the laws governing M&A.
The husk of a company would still be bound by whatever contacts were signed by its officers. However, non-compete enforcement against individuals have been declawed in California, where VoidZero is headquartered, and (I assume) where its investors are, and whose courts they've likely agreed to adjudicate disagreements.
This is an extreme measure not usually taken, but it's a nuclear option that sets a ceiling on how much investors may play hardball.
Thanks - I wasn't aware about the M&A carve-out, which makes sense. It reads to me like clause (c) is the most relevant:
(c) all of the ownership interest of any subsidiary, may agree with the buyer to refrain from carrying on a similar business within a specified geographic area in which the business so sold... has been carried on, so long as the buyer... carries on a like business therein.
and it prohibits competition "on a similar business". The Vite team would be blocked from competing against VoidZero, but Cloudfare isn't a similar business IMO, and they would be free to work on a private "Pronto" fork within Cloudflare (which is unlike the real-life Cloudflare/Vite scenario where they will continue public releases)
Maybe. It would require courts and nuance; cloudflare is in a lot of businesses nowadays. It rarely comes into effect regardless because people rarely spend less than a couple years at the acquirer, but regardless.
I mean, the alternative is a whole bunch of BS dealing with funding, global compliance and sales, public markets, etc.
It's more fun to just build the fun bits, get acquired, walk away with a lot of money, and start over again doing the fun bits (if you want to keep working).
These acquisition announcements always leave me uneasy. There’s a lot of hand waving, “nothing will change and our roadmap will stay the same!” but we can all do basic math and understand that’s not how business works.
As an aside, I have to use Cloudlare at work and it’s a pretty awful experience for the medium sized org I’m at. “Hostile UX” is a common complaint. Maybe they should invest money in competing with Vercel on UX/DX instead of acquiring open source projects.
Yes. We’re beginning the process of moving away because of how they’ve become a single point failure that’s unreliable. AWS is more reliable and it’s a bad spot to be in when your CDN / router is down but your actual application is fine
sorry to hear that's been your experience. i actually joined through an acquisition about a year ago and one of the main things we've been focused on is the dashboard and overall dx.
sadly "hostile ux" is a phrase i've heard more than once and we're working hard to improve. if you're open to it, would love to hear more about the issues you've be running into
The dashboard UX has improved a lot lately but one thing that drives me absolutely nuts is that I get rate limited all the time using it.
For example, I had to recently change an env var we had on a handful of apps and opened them all into new tabs and made the changes and about half way through I started getting rate limited. This has happened to me many times and I've reported it to support and in Discord but it still happens.
One other big complaint is support is non-existent. We sent many support emails (on business plans) and I'm pretty sure we've never gotten a reply. Same for posting in Discord. It's pretty disheartening to build your business on Cloudflare and have no confidence support will help you when you need it.
yeah you should definitely not be getting rate limited, sorry this is annoying you're not the first to report i will dig in.
as far as support, i know there is a huge effort going on right now to improve response time and support in general, also I'm not as active in discord as I ought to be there's just so much noise, feel free to ping me on there directly if I can help brandon/@ygwyg. can't promise it'll be an instant response but I will respond
You really think an individual employee trying to help a customer when they likely have little impact on org wide issues like how customer support is run is tarpitting? Seems a bit uncharitable
Thank you for saying this and being willing to listen.
The worst one I saw is the load balancer config UX/DX. I use CF's load balancer product for clients and so have to do a lot of setup and teardown back-and-forth. Everything related to setting up load balancers is split across multiple screens and/or "wizards" that are extremely confusing.
A lot of the error messages you get are generic at best and so you waste a ton of time clicking between pages and tabs just to set up some pools and attach them to a load balancer.
There's also some inconsistency between how things are labeled, so one thing can have two names and you have to hold that in your head while you move around the UI.
I managed a large enterprise CF account from 2018-2023. Hundreds of load balancers. The UI changed out from under us 3 times, with some big problems being fixed, but introducing new ones. I gave bold feedback directly to the leaders responsible for this, with helpful suggestions on how to make it better.
I was really glad when they fixed the old one that had a big "X" that would delete your load balancer without a warning dialog. But I was not happy that the load balancers got increasingly complex, with settings hidden at multiple layers that you had to independently configure.
Load balancing IS complex, but this is their core business, and in many other places such as DNS, Cloudflare put a lot more thought into making it simple and intuitive to use.
Getting this stuff right takes lots of strong leadership and long-term decision making with determination and wisdom to provide the best experience for customers. Unfortunately I am not confident that is how the business is operating, especially with strong talent being let go or leaving due to lack of fostering of a healthy working environment.
The one I saw most recently was working with an SRE coworker. Data in what looks like a table, in this case a subdomain/IP address, that overflows the cell gets cut off with no ability to actually view it. I almost had him just edit the CSS in Chrome, but he figured out a different workaround.
I don't even know where to start. I want to host a static site and it's a closed beta so password protection would be nice.
Let's see, first menu item Compute. Hrm, HTML isn't compute, oh it's there ok. Add Application, HTML isn't an application but ok. 95% of the page and on top are fields for adding a worker. The static page option is a little link at the bottom. Linked it to my repo. Oops wrong repo can I change it, oh, no. Ok delete and set it up all over again. Zero trust. Asked for some field, couldn't determine if it was a root domain, subdomain, URL. Ask the built in AI. It says hrm it's not in the docs, idk. Figure out how to add Cloudflare as an auth provider, link it to the static page. Team member says they can't login even though they're a Super Admin. Ah, I have to add their email manually or say all users of the account, otherwise by default Super Admins are locked out of authenticating via Zero Trust CF.
At one point I asked the AI for a copy of my email related DNS records it froze for 15 min while it output in a single textarea line char by char an extremely long key. Maybe that one's on me, but since the AI was frozen and couldn't be interrupted maybe not.
These are just the parts I remember off the top of my head. Most of us work in this field and should be sympathetic to the fact that designing a dashboard for this much data density isn't trivial. But that's tempered by CF deciding it's the gatekeeper for a web that’s supposed to be decentralized and spending a zillion dollars on engineering.
You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become Akamai.
The reason everyone came running when Cloudflare first started was obviously the "burn VC money to gain marketshare" but it was also the sheer simplicity. They had one product and a handful of features.
Until someone on the business side takes a step back and says "when I mouse over 'Products' on the homepage, why the fuck is there a 'See All Products' link" it will be impossible to have a usable customer experience. Start killing things and making them features.
Good meeting, appreciate the engagement, added new action items "add yet another way to do AI in Workers, say something about long schedule agentic driven" and "go to market with new unrelated Web Application Firewall product".
Vite is great and vite 8 was a huge speed-up so definitely a nice win for them. Remaining independent is always great but at the same time there are other "new homes" that could be worse so let's keep our fingers crossed and hope it works out.
Sometimes it does work out. For example, Zulip was acquired by Dropbox, spun out as an open source project, and now has its own foundation backing it, along with a board, etc.
Well, Voidzero already attempted to rugpull the Vite project into a commercial paid licensing for "Vite+" that they then had to back out of and release under MIT because it just didn't work out.
I think Voidzero was already adrift without a plan and this acquihire is literally just that, new employment for the people behind it.
Maybe Cloudflare will allow them to maintain oxc, but expect them to writing features for Cloudflare Workers from now on.
I love Vite, when I don’t forget it exists in my projects. It took things that made you feel mentally deficient and made them almost zero-config.
This news does not make me happy.
Same with the news about Astro earlier this year.
I know it must be good for the people how have made the projects (why else would they chose to do it?) but there is something in those acquisitions that makes me uneasy.
> I know it must be good for the people how have made the projects (why else would they chose to do it?) but there is something in those acquisitions that makes me uneasy.
Same, kind of conflicting. Happy for the individuals involved, they've probably more than earned it. Slightly sad about what comes next, as I'm guessing both you and me seen this happen so many times before, and we've learned to read past the always-reiterated "Nothing will change, everything keeps on being great forever".
Migrate off vite to what exactly? I just migrated a personal project to vite and it simplified the existing webpack thing drastically, I was very impressed.
IDK, I've been purposely limiting the scope of work I can provide by only working with js, html, css. It's extremely limiting but when it comes to basically making one-off splash pages it's nice to not worry about tooling and just deploy what I made instantly. Modern CSS is amazing, there's no need to use sass or postcss. The modern web APIs are amazing as well. You can get a lot done with new base standard across browsers. The only libraries I really pull in nowadays are anime.js + umami for analytics.
I don't even need TS and can get away with js doc annotations + a functional LSP allows me to be slightly more dangerous (think running with scissors in chain mail).
Maybe if you need a specific web app you can reach for the complex tooling but even then I still wonder if it's necessary? The most popular political tool I've shared was a simple HTML page that just fetched the census API for specific codes in a tabular format. Sure I could have used react which would have enabled me to unlock some future value I couldn't foresee at the time but the working alternative is that I have a single html page with minimal JS (around ~2k LOC) that a surprising amount of nontypical devs (think carpenter that is interested in cybersecurity or union negotiators) are able to extend by themselves for their own needs (think adding census codes about snap or public transit).
There is a tremendous amount of value in telling my users how they can modify the source code and see the immediate impact of doing as much.
If this was a project that would have necessitated vite the first thing I would tell them is to install nodeJS and that's where I would lose 99.9999999999% of my users being able.
These projects will never go beyond 500,000 visitors and a CDN is more than sufficient for 90% of the work I do. So that obviously plays a major role but if this is a solo project there are much better choices to make if you want it to be sustainable + low upkeep. Those two qualities are something we as an industry should always value as it makes all our jobs collectively easier.
I'm not the one you replied to, but a typical config & plugins stack for (webpack + eslint + prettier) is nearly impossible to reason about. VoidZero's tools (Vite + oxcfmt + oxclint) are radically simpler and more performant.
> a typical config & plugins stack for (webpack + eslint + prettier) is nearly impossible to reason about.
I think people just don't want to bother. They don't want to read the docs, or maybe watch a video or two (back when webpack was popular, Sean Larkin, webpack evangelist, made a number of popular courses about setting it up). Also, webpack config became easier compared to 2014/2015; I think they got to practically a zero-config by default.
I can understand that people don't want to care; but "impossible to reason about" is not it. It isn't rust, for crying out loud; nor lisp; nor haskell.
That’s not a dig at webpack: Those tools are super complex, and hiding complexity from the user is not easy. But it seems that with Vite we finally got there.
I've loved Vite from the moment it was public. I also tried Snowpack back in the day. (fun story that Fred "fks" went on to create Astro after Snowpack didn't gain traction). The fact that we can "just forget it exists" is a major win in my case. Webpack - while maybe a win over Grunt/Gulp, was MASSIVELY complex.
I too am a bit uneasy. It's not always the case but, corporate ingestion is often where cool projects go to die. The good news about open source is that we have enough Terraform->OpenTofu & Redis->Valkey stories out there.
What alternative ending do you prefer? Personally I think acquisition is preferable to dev burnout due to lack of funding and/or extractive practices from other companies.
Having used Webpack since 2016... Vite was amazing. Few years ago I migrated a rather complex project (monorepo with a Rust wasm binding) from Webpack to Vite (before the LLM days!) and dev builds and real builds went from minutes to seconds. I never looked twice at Webpack ever again.
I don't know what to feel about this news, especially since migrating to from vite 7 to vite 8 broke my project in ways that were not documented, but I'm remaining cautiously optimistic.
The reason this is worth it to CloudFlare is it will cause AI to recommend them more.
The agents already reach for Vite. When they reach for Vite it's very logical they will default to CloudFlare after. (Much like they will guide users to setup Vercel for NextJS).
This could be a $20m acquisition which will generate $billions from the increase in the agent equivalent of SEO.
Also Lovable just switched to TanStack as a default project framework which uses Vite under the hood. Lovable uses Cloudflare so they’re probably deploying it via Cloudflare Workers.
This isn’t going to generate billions in additional revenue. That is a huge exaggeration.
I do agree with your underlying argument, though. It will likely help them gain market share for hosting web applications, which is increasing with LLM usage.
Perhaps "potentially billions" is justifiable? In that it's a "change the scenario entirely" level of change.
Certainly if you compare it to another likely scenario where Vercel buys them and fast forward 2 years, it's plausible that a huge number of projects went one way or the other because of what the AIs defaulted to.
I think, just from a purely build-step point of view, it's been evident that tools like Vite, Bun, etc. have achieved all they meaningfully can. If I was the creator of these tools, I've move on too. Good luck and thanks for everything.
If Vite, Bun and uv were just "make builds faster" projects, then maybe the returns are diminishing. But the acquisitions by Cloudflare, Anthropic and OpenAI suggest this layer is becoming more strategic, not less.
These tools sit in the software supply chain: dependency resolution, project structure, tests, builds, runtimes, deployment paths and increasingly AI-agent execution loops. They define the default path for building software, and they are where AI-generated code gets tested against real dependencies, builds, tests and deployment constraints.
So I don’t think they’ve achieved all they meaningfully can. The value is shifting from raw build speed to control over the workflow layer where software is assembled.
lol. any of them - literally just ONE - could have a full blown UI so that you wouldn't have to build projects using a command line like it's 1985. or maybe one of them could just invest in packaging custom html elements, instead of assuming I'm going to use one of a handful of unnecessary "component" libraries, or assuming that I won't be using components at all.
there's plenty of places for these tools to go, but none of them have any appetite to go there. likely because people already have something that's so "good enough" that they don't even bother looking for what "could be better". obviously exacerbated by the management class of development outfits deciding that developers shouldn't actually touch the codebase anymore, in lieu of LLMs doing the actual lifting, so they're building out all kinds of chicanerous nonsense to satisfy "agents". and that doesn't necessarily make things more difficult for devs, but that seems to be the trend. forcing your LLM to comply with tortured and arcane concatenations of character-perfect strings is so much easier than having it navigate anything like a filthy human. so the practical result is less accommodating stuff for humans and more accommodating stuff for robots.
all of which is to say: I disagree. I think there's things they could meaningfully achieve for humans. And I think they are deeply uninterested in doing those things.
> or maybe one of them could just invest in packaging custom html elements, instead of assuming I'm going to use one of a handful of unnecessary "component" libraries
... are these not the same thing? I suppose from a technical standpoint they'd differ, but they achieve the same result: reusable, modular building blocks for creating interfaces.
A lot of these very popular FOSS products/frameworks simply are the worst ways to make money. You are selling to a demographic that doesn't want to pay for the tools and value they get. You end up competing against your own free version that can now be modified with a bit of AI agent session to get feature parity.
> Before saying anything else, we want to make the most important thing clear: Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, Oxc, and Vite+ will stay open source, vendor-agnostic, and community-driven. Nothing about that changes.
Appreciate them putting that so clearly. I am highly skeptical of acquisitions now because we've been burned so many times in the past. Time will tell if this stays true, but at least it's clearly on the record. Would love to know if this is in contract/writing somewhere as part of the acquisition.
It entirely depends on how much the seller cared to ensure continuity. It’s not like VoidZero didn’t have plenty of leverage; they weren’t a dying open source project.
First Astro, now this? Cloudflare is getting all the good JS talent.
The monetization story never really made sense to me. It seems really hard to carve out a space in the managed hosting world. Are the Vercel and Laravel teams the only ones to make Private Equity work?
IMHO Cloudflare ensures decentralization of the Internet: It provides an alternative to AWS, Azure, and GCE which gives your little personal selfhosting box or small VPS the same level of protection the big providers have. And generally, anything you have either hosted on or proxied by Cloudflare, can be pretty trivially moved to another provider. Whereas things built on top of AWS, Azure, and GCE services tend to be pretty stuck there.
Cloudflare has some big misses in it's history, like deciding to takedown a social media site for sex workers while defending a decision to provide services to Nazis at length, but in comparison to the alternatives it makes more decentralization practical than might be otherwise.
Have you ever seen a us-east-1 outage? Or when Exchange Online fails... weekly or so? There's a lot of huge clouds that are load-bearing for the Internet. Cloudflare is the one you can at least circumvent easily.
That's not true. Read about all the drama happening in Spain when an entity (the soccer league) decides to block all the Cloudfare IPs. You are stuck with no access to most websites behind Cloudfare, and that's a lot of them
Cloudflare does a lot more these days. You can run a JS app in Workers and any Linux app in a container. You can have them host your database and object storage.
I like how I can slap up a free Turnstile on my projects in two minutes and not have to worry about endless comment spam and user registration spam. Yes, I understand there's problems with Cloudflare, but there's also a lot of problems out there in the wild west of an open internet.
Ah! The same turnstile that was supposed to provide users with a more private reCaptcha alternative and ended up fingerprinting users via WebGL to prevent spam.
Yes? It's unclear how they'd do their job without extensive fingerprinting. I don't like it either, but pretending like it's not better positioned from a privacy standpoint is odd. At very least, turnstile isn't ran by the world's largest ads company that directly profits from accurately tracking users across the web.
I don't think you get it. They block Cloudfare IPs so services using Cloudfare become unreachable. I don't live in Spain anymore, but I have friends that can't access their university website while a soccer match is ongoing.
This shows the risks of centralizing internet access
To be clear people are mad about that because large portions of the legitimate internet go dark when football is on because they're running on a virtual server that happens to share an IP with another virtual server which is hosting pirated football.
You and I have no idea how often perfectly legal things we rely enjoy or rely on would go offline during football matches because it doesn't happen to us.
Fundamental flaws/oversights in the internet's design led to centralization, notably zero protections against malicious actors, bots, and botnets.
Cloudflare and co offer some of the only real solutions to that.
If you snap your fingers and Cloudflare disappears, you aren't left with a decentralized wonderland but rather the status quo where $5 of booter time can take most websites offline for the lulz, and all of your human users have to compete with infinite automated AI traffic (basically an amplification attack every time someone prompts an agent and it does a web search).
So, there's a third option where you like Cloudflare's services as a solution to flaws in the internet that led to the need for these services.
Then I move my stuff somewhere else? I've been writing HTML since 1993. I think I've used literally hundreds of hosts at this point.
I had access to an Enterprise license in my last job, which was my introduction to Cloudflare — something like 7 years ago — and I just kind of fell in love with the DX and their offerings. It's only improved since then. Like, Cloudflare Workers is actually fucking insane. It's insane how good it is for free. It has a secret vault, dude, for free — with API and CLI. It has cron jobs. You can just assign domains to sites from your DNS zones. It's got blue/green deployments built in. I don't have to SSH into anything. It's just there and it works.
Now everything I do there is free, even for my contract projects, and I can't believe it's free. I actually keep expecting an enshittification phase to begin but it just doesn't ever begin. When it does, I'll bail — same as it ever was. It would take a lot, though.
the dx is wonderful if you give claude code your global api key. and the price is amazing. you can deploy complex web apps for free. i love vite and astro which is built on vite. i ran both on cloudflare before they were bought by them. i'm happy. at least they weren't bough by adobe.
My issue with Cloudflare is how they enshittify all the open-source & closed-soure utilities they maintain. They vibe code it all now. It's crap. I'm sad Vite/Vue/whatever will go the way of that. Oh well, there's always Svelte. For now.
- The workers platform is quite pleasant to work with compared to competitors.
- Globally deploying edge workers which have access to their many services (D1, R2, DO, etc)
- Having the ability to assemble globally distributed workers using bindings is dead simple
- Their CI pipeline, while limited, is easy to setup and run and keeps improving
- Their pricing is extremely competitive
For your second:
- That's my biggest conflict with using any service (Cloudflare, AWS, Azure, etc). Don't have a good answer with what to do about it considering for many projects I don't have the time/energy to fully self host everything.
One thing is hosting, which obviously comes with centralizing risks but a different one is just deciding to add a layer of "protection" in front of every website so that as much traffic as possible goes through one single company.
200 people out of how many hundreds of thousands of users? Are they giving an average $5 a month, for a grand total of $12000 a year? Maybe a little bit more?
There you go. I said this as well and no-one here can explain how these open source dev tools companies are making any money with their open source products.
Now they are surprised to see that acquisitions like this are happening and "open source" has given this entitlement on developers to believe that it is "free" when someone always ends up paying.
> I personally think the owners should get to decide, but it's an interesting duality.
The owners of a business get to decide what to do with their business.
> (assuming it's not like everyone has a share or something, in which case they would've all had to agree I guess)
Unanimous agreement among shareholders is not necessary to sell a company.
The employees might have had some shares in the company, but not all share classes have equal voting rights. It’s also unlikely that employees in aggregate would have had enough shares to override everyone else anyway. Once shares are split among investors, founders, and employees the individual ownership of any one person or group becomes small.
I wouldn’t assume that the employees wanted to avoid acquisition. They likely benefited significantly from their shares being acquired and their new compensation packages. Imagining that the employees resisted this is projecting some other story on to them
If you join an company with next to no monetizable business model like this, you already have made your choice that you are fine with acquisition when you joined, or have deferred your choice to make a stay/leave decision until the acquisition.
Yes. Pay for software from independent developers and small businesses. The entire reason big tech is where it is is because nobody wants to pay for software, and big tech is the way to make money off of "free" software. Software developers need money to eat, so this is the inevitable result of demanding everything for free. Actions meet consequences.
While this is the idealist point of view, if you earn 100K a year from open source work - and that's already the top 0.1% if not less of open source developers - and a company comes around to buy you out for $10 million plus a 300K / year job (for example)... open source etc just can't compete.
Well that is why it is open source. It doesn't matter how big the company is behind it, you can use it without the company that owns the name, and even use a different, small tech company for support.
“Be the change you want to see in the world” and other stories powerless people tell themselves to sleep.
I pay for independent software, point is, only big money can afford to hire employees to work on free software, because they don’t make money from selling software but from being a monopoly. Free software will always win, which is not a bad thing of itself, but it also means that Big Tech control over the software world is inevitable.
The entire free software ethos indirectly opened the door to the Big Tech monopoly. There is no FAANG without open source, there is no open source without FAANG.
Vue has always handled things well when dealing with cross framework stuff due to their back and forth with Angular for being the go-to number 2.
I’m confident that things will be well maintained for an open ecosystem. Evan is smart enough to know that tying the core technology too much to one platform will create more problems than it solves in the long term.
That said, I’m excited to see if Evan can delivery another massive win for web developers everywhere now that he has access to more funding.
This is just my own impression but I feel that Evan might have distanced himself from Vue to focus on Vite and Void. IIRC Vapor mode was spearheaded by someone else. Same with Alien signals.
To be clear, I don't think this is bad. Vue 3 seems feature complete at this point and nobody needs another Vue 2 situation.
The dream has always been a first-class framework for Cloudflare Workers.
- In the earliest days (literally go read their blog posts and GitHub repos), they only ever really did dinky little demo's.
- After and for the longest time, they tried to claim they went "Full Stack" with SSR-able abilities, but they were so terrible back then and not even well integrated into their Worker platform tools.
- This was oddly gray mixed (sometimes?) with Pages messaging which definitely was not full-stack in the sense developers wanted.
- Then getting any of this to work in a dev environment was super difficult as "wrangler dev" was very limited (wrangler is so good now FYI).
- Vercel just kind of ate Cloudflare's lunch here. No shame in it. They just couldn't get it right for developers period.
- Then very quietly "Adapters" came around and basically changed the game. Your code base finally felt portable to Workers with essentially full CF platform support.
- Now we live in AI-age and they bought Astro (?), tried to launch WP clone (?), and vibe-coded Next (?)
Big and long time coming for all of this. It is a super breath of fresh air to see even more improvements will likely come to Workers. Icing on cake is Evan is a legend who has a proven track record of delivering tools people love.
Everything Cloudflare is announcing could have been done without acquiring VoidZero. The part they aren’t saying is the greater influence they will have on the roadmap and protecting themselves from someone else acquiring vite and making it closed source and/or monetizing it. We’ve seen it so many times - a project promises to stay free and open source, but things change. Are there any licenses or contracts that a project could use and would hold up in court that they need to stay FOSS forever?
This is why we need to start advocating more public investment into open source technology. Imagine how much better the state of our industry would be if we gave 100,000 open source developers a $100,000 grant. This modest $10,000,000,000 fund would be extremely tiny compared to the bloated private research we see annually at corporations.
Such a wasted amount of capital doing fuck all when there can be real value and economic gain if we supported open source without the influence of VC + big tech that seem to want a return to feudalism, exacerbate the climate crisis, and hoard as much wealth as possible.
>Are there any licenses or contracts that a project could use and would hold up in court that they need to stay FOSS forever?
I don't understand, the existing licenses say that, and courts uphold them to say that. If a company has given code to you under an OSS license, that code is yours under that license forever. There'd be no point in trying to bind a person to give you all their future creative output for free just because they had given some of it to you for free. That'd be awful! And anyway we don't need courts to fix this because people can fix it just by helping each other maintain open software
What I meant was the project would stay FOSS forever, so that would mean all future updates including features, bug fixes, and patches. My understanding is the license can be changed at any time so then you would only have FOSS access for the code up until the point in time the license changed.
That said, I completely agree that there’s a better solution.
Unless you literally own me, how would you possibly prevent me from doing new work without giving it to you? Even if I were under an employment contract that assigns all my intellectual property to you, as a free person I would be free to quit that job and cease giving you any further IP.
For the record that my suspicion is that bug fixes to open code are very likely not copyrightable due to the principle of convergence, though I am not a lawyer and to my knowledge this issue has never been tested in court. New features would very much be copyrightable.
> Are there any licenses or contracts that a project could use and would hold up in court that they need to stay FOSS forever?
The Linux kernel is GPL with likely at least hundreds of copyright holders and no CLA, that means there is no way for someone to say "I am the legal owner and the new development will be under a proprietary license".
Very happy for them, they made excellent tools and I hope they can continue their work!
I do believe though that these tools (formatting, linting etc.) should be built into the language like Go, and I really hope the Node team can just absorb the best ideas and make solid primitives that can be built on top of as the ecosystem evolves (think golang's http interfaces, or test interfaces)
It took the JS community many iterations to get to vite. Building it into the language just means you get stuck with a "good enough" solution that survives by inertia. We'd still be using webpack.
I'm all for building things into the language when there's only one way to do it though.
for sure! but there are lots of incremental shareable primitives that could help. I think about go's built in testing tools that can get extended as an example
Had no idea Vite and OXC were made by the same company. Makes so much sense.
I don’t get the complaining about OS developers behind these incredible pieces of software like uv, bun, etc is a bad thing. If anything, it’ll continue to incentivize great developers to fill in the blanks and continue to push things forward. It’s a win for everyone.
OXC predates VoidZero and is made by Boshen. Evan had to try for a while until he was able to convince Boshen to join them. OXC is the best of the JS toolchains implemented in Rust, so it was definitely a scoop.
Sponsorships are obviously not enough, and not every open source tool has some obvious hosting product to sell. A lot of this stuff is basically public infrastructure now, but we still fund it like a side project.
I remember thinking that they were making great software, but finding revenue to make the investment payoff could be quite challenging. Looks like that's been solved.
Unpleasantly close to when Cloudflare bought BastionZero... the promises quickly fell away, the tool decayed (I found three serious bugs in one single week...and they had stopped even bothering to publish changelogs), and Cloudflare eventually gave us a "hey, we're actually shutting this down in a month, good luck" email prompting a scramble to rewire all of our infrastructure.
(Fwiw SDM ended up being a better alternative anyways... not looking forward to their eventual acquisition and shutdown :/ )
Thanks for the example. I'm skeptical of the claims that "nothing will change" but want to believe them, and examples are the only real data to go on (feels/vibes aren't data), so thank you.
What promises? The announcement for BastionZero was quite clear as to what would happen:
> The BastionZero team will be focused on integrating their infrastructure access controls directly into Cloudflare One. During the third and fourth quarters of this year, we will be announcing a number of new features to facilitate Zero Trust infrastructure access via Cloudflare One. All functionality delivered this year will be included in the Cloudflare One free tier for organizations with less than 50 users. We believe that everyone should have access to world-class security controls.
Did you expect them to continue running their own service when it was pretty evident their work would be integrated into CF's zero trust suite?
> Cloudflare's mission is to help build a better Internet. And a better Internet is an open Internet. Developers need choice, frameworks need a neutral foundation, and applications need to be portable. It is not reasonable to expect the entire web ecosystem to build around a single vendor.
Already at this point, I start thinking that they're turning Vite into a foundation, or donating it to the Linux Foundation, or something like that. "foundation" is mentioned 10 times in total in various ways, but then some actual foundation creation/handover never came up. Even when they themselves state how important it is developers have choice and everything shouldn't centralized around a single vendor. Deeply ironic.
Bummer. The Vite ecosystem is fantastic, and VoidZero's tools are all world-class (vite, vitest, oxcfmt, oxclint,...), but I wish they'd remain(ed) independent.
First Bun went to Anthropic. Then Astro and now VoidZero to Cloudflare. Feels like all my favorite open-source projects are getting adopted by the giants.
The question I have is: Is Vite becoming the all-in-one nodejs tool that is replacing all the other full featured js tooling favorites like Bun, Deno and pnpm?
Vite is not a package manager and is not a JS runtime. That's what Node/Bun/Deno do. Vite is the remaining glue for any web project's build and testing needs.
Not for the aquire-ee(?), I'm not going to be a hypocrite and claim I wouldn't take the payout if I were in that position. But that companies can build massive moats by just buying up as many other companies as possible.
I don't even feel like I can make a "good" argument for it either. Massive companies becoming more massive through acquisitions just feels wrong, like the end game won't work out well for the commons.
I assume the point here is that now Cloudflare can try and push more Vite users into their ecosystem? Nudge the development to integrate better with their products? They say they are moving towards Vite, not Vite moving towards Cloudflare, but ultimately <tool> moves in the direction <owner> decides - even if it's "developed openly."
I appreciate Cloudflare's loud positive proclamation here wrt the OS future; I know scepticism is warranted with some takeovers but although there might be a trend towards Cloudflare fit over the long term that's very different from closing down or abandonment so this generally seems positive to me - best wishes to all parties.
All of them are getting acquired nothing bad in that but I feel like the path to revenue with open source just isn't viable anymore. You have to build your own platform like vercel, or build great dev tools like mintlify
Really love Cloudflare and I think they've been doing a great job with these acquisitions. Love how they've handled integrating PartyKit with Durable Objects
> Before saying anything else, we want to make the most important thing clear: Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, Oxc, and Vite+ will stay open source, vendor-agnostic, and community-driven. Nothing about that changes.
Given how every single acquisition like this has gone, especially lately, I look forward to seeing how quickly these products get left behind and unmaintained as their entire team move onto things at CF.
Hot take (maybe), but I don't think any javascript tool that's reached a critical mass of users is really safe from acquisition at this point. Reason being is that these modern projects are often being spun up as businesses and raising capital, and eventually all businesses in this industry seek an exit, especially those focused on growth and establishing themselves in the ecosystem.
The class of open source developers that thanklessly maintained the underlying packages driving this industry are heading for the exits, and they're being replaced by people who want to build businesses from the get-go. Who's to say this is right or wrong, but I think this is where it's all headed.
For anyone pissing on this, you have to remember one thing... time equals money and, as someone who spent 7 years building an open source project, you make almost ZERO from doing it. At the end, if you want to continue the project, you have to sell your soul somehow, either by doing a paid tier, consulting or getting corporate sponsorship. Unless you are one of the VERY lucky ones that does the coding on the side while having a full time job (which I was in the VERY fortunate position to be in at the time).
It's going to come down to "can I afford to keep doing this for nothing"?
So for all you high and mighty people calling them sell outs and what not, I would love to see how much you've been contributing to the project in order for it to keep going.
I think what CloudFlare is doing is a good thing. They get a tremendous team that they can have help work on their infrastructure while keeping the open source projects alive.
This is what happens when developers do not pay for their tools. Companies instead take full control over it and the team then loses their independence.
Just like Bun, Astral and Astro, did VoidZero ever make any money?
If not then this is why open source alone is unsustainable, especially in the age of AI.
It’s scary how cf has become this giant tech corporation. If cf has issues, we see a cascading effect across the many services we depend on. With the age of AI slop, it’s only going to get worse.
I for one love this. Cloudflare is doing really excellent job last few years and of all the companies, this acquisition will not hurt developers like those other might or already do.
Huh? Vite is already powered by a huge Rust codebase now that the release of v8.0 is live. They spent years developing their own parser and tooling to make it all possible.
just wondering... do you think bun's rewrite with ai was vibe coded or engineered with ai? i know it wasn't perfect in the beginning but i think it was good engineering and what was built will make it faster and better.
"Vue.js: JavaScript MVVM made simple (vuejs.org)" February 3, 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7169288
Evidently Evan You was an Art History + Studio Art and major and at Parsons School he had to pick up javascript to quickly show his work. During a stint at Creativelab5 at Google, he was so inspired to improve on AngularJS experience that he came up with Vue and the rest is history.
I have no idea what this Cloudflare acquisition will ultimately mean but I know I am so very grateful for the beautiful frameworks/tooling Evan and his team have cranked out over the years.
Evan has done really great work. I haven't used Vue extensively (not my company's stack) but am a huge fan of Vite and it has helped our React pipeline a lot. I've also recently started playing around with CloudFlare pages and workers and it's already such a pain-free process to get basic apps up and running, I imagine this collab will make my life easier.
Perhaps one learning here is that people should train on recognizing elegance and aesthetics first before building frameworks
Really good talk that goes over this: https://corecursive.com/vue-with-evan-you/
Totally worth the listen.
Similar story with Rich Harris of Svelte. He had no tech background but learned js to power data visualizations for his work in journalism.
This is the story with most frontend developers, they are not usually from a typical computer science background.
So is the business model of these projects - 1. build a popular dev tool 2. aquire funding 3. hire great talent 4. pray for an aqui-hire that justifies the initial funding amount
I wonder how the initial investors feel about the aqui-hire path... Must be a pretty nice sum for them to agree to it, or they saw that the path to any revenue was near impossible/non-existant
> So is the business model of these projects - 1. build a popular dev tool 2. aquire funding 3. hire great talent 4. pray for an aqui-hire that justifies the initial funding amount
Indeed, so as a library/framework/engine/runtime user, for the last decade or so, I've basically avoided anything that touched VC-investments, as eventually the tool will either degrade, get too expensive or straight up disappear, and I got so tired of having to refactor and move stuff around just because new owner did something shitty.
Hey there embedding-shape -- my name is Adrian Bridgwater and I'm a technology journalist that has enjoyed the realism of your comment here, can I contact you for a follow up comment? I'm here at LinkedIn to start with https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrianbridgwater/
Sure, reach out via my email that's in my profile, I don't have LinkedIn :)
My guess is investors are getting a good return on investment so they are probably pretty happy.
They've raised over $16 million [0]. For a decent 3-5x return for that, they would need to have been acquired for around ~$50 million. For a team of 19 [1], thats around $2.5 million per employee for Cloudflare. Worth it? no idea
[0] https://voidzero.dev/posts/announcing-series-a [1] https://voidzero.dev/about
I could see Cloudflare wanting them for 50 Million. Cloudflare recent acquisitions have clearly been "buy tools with heavy lock in" and companies shipping on Void are likely heavily locked in.
Isn't their revenue just sponsorships and donations? This seems like a company destined to scrape by despite their popularity, like Tailwind. You don't get $50 million for that.
void.cloud was their revenue plan, but it was still in private beta at this point.
They have a cloud they already built on Cloudflare. Cloudflare probably thinks they can quickly launch that and that's locked in, steady revenue source.
Presumably that $12M A was around $50M Val so they need to sell for substantially more to give investors a multiple return.
Unless the investors have liquidation preference where they see their multiple before anyone else sees a dime.
Prefs are so bogus.
Presumably being able to influence their roadmap is worth it
They will easily have exceeded $50m.
Your linked post shows they raised 12.5 million?
But it's also possible they haven't spent much of that money.
The investors don't need to be happy. They just need to be made whole (assuming they have a minority control).
It could literally be that only $2m ever got spent and that's been paid back.
It could also be that when literally nobody said they would pay for Vite+ the investors and team in general lost confidence and were actually very happy just to get their money back and pivot into this acquisition.
Series A was 12.5. Linked in that post was a Seed announcement which was another 4.5 million
Thanks for clarifying
if it helps Cloudflare make it so that 20% of applications are built on their platform then that is definitely worth it
Liquidity at some multiplier is easy to measure.
The value to the investors also includes the outcome of dealflow resulting from the relationships and network built up along the way.
Acquisition happen for 3 reasons.
1. Product 2. Talent 3. Business/growth
In the AI era, some of acquisition happening in the space is for talent and product.
In this case, it looks like it was that. Vite is a great product they were able to build a great team.
You would be surprised how much of a premium companies can pay for talent.
Your listing is not exhaustive - startups can also be acquired for politics, for marketing purposes, whatever. There is a lot of meat space things going on in the upper echelons of the US tech industry.
Recent history shows that an idealized view only focusing on fiduciary duty does not capture the whole picture of business in the USA.
Rarely does one acquire dollars for the sake of having dollars. Dollars are power tokens, and the acquisition of them beyond a certain point is almost always accompanied by a motive.
In many cases the acquiring company shares investors or board members with the acqui-hired entity.
To put it neutrally, VC partners are treating these are parts of their same portfolios, so if one team doesn't pan out on its own, it can be merged into another with somewhat similar overall goals or markets.
To put it more pointedly, it's perhaps all about who one knows and making sure that everyone gets to tell a story of successful exits.
> it's perhaps all about who one knows and making sure that everyone gets to tell a story of successful exits.
No. It's all about building a great product that people love. Vite is a foundational tool in the JS ecosystem.
Acquihiring the tool/team is entirely downstream from creating a foundational product.
Vite isn't a product. It's a tool. It will be succeeded if necessary. It happened to Webpack after Microsoft hired the creator, and the JS community pivoted hard. Bundlers and compilers in the JS world happen once a decade it appears.
I was at the hardware store this morning. I bought a hammer. It sure seemed like a product... with the whole "being displayed on store shelves" and "available for purchase" thing.
There were several different hammers there, bearing different branding and having different manufacturers.
I don't quite get the distinction...
You paid for the hammer. Did you pay for Vite?
they will soon
Did you pay for the hammer with a pull request?
> No. It's all about building a great product that people love. Vite is a foundational tool in the JS ecosystem.
A foundational tool in an open ecosystem doesn't mean a monetisable product. I struggle to think of even a single example of a foundational tool with a business model.
And of course, not everything needs a business model. But if you're getting VC funding, you kind of need one.
This is the kind of problem I think only UBI solves because there is no apparent business model that can sustain ~20 employees working on software like this, they need to make at least a couple million a year to pay those people!
> In many cases the acquiring company shares investors or board members with the acqui-hired entity
I’m seeing zero significant investor overlap between VoidZero and Cloudflare.
> VC partners are treating these are parts of their same portfolios
Very few VCs do this. Andreessen stands out as the exception.
> Must be a pretty nice sum for them to agree to it
Not necessarily: if the investors don't agree to a reasonable amount, the wanna-be acquirer will simply hire the entire team with generous sign-on bonuses, and the investors will be left with a shell of a company.
In this case, the core product is MIT-licensed, the team can quit on a Friday and pick up exactly where they left off under a new org on Monday.
Not necessarily. There are likely key person clauses in the prior round docs.
It has happened in the recent past (2-4 years ago?); I can't remember both the acquirer and the hollowed-out startup, and searches are returning chaff, but it got to the HN frontpage.
IANAL, but at-will employment cuts both ways- thr best an employer can do on behalf of investors, are golden handcuffs - and people can be bought out of those.
That’s not quite actually true and it is a bit more nuanced than that. For example, while non-competes and non-solicits are unenforceable in CA for employment agreements, they absolutely are enforceable for mergers and acquisitions.
The laws governing employment are a subset of the laws governing M&A.
VC funding rounds don't quality as an acquisition, AFAIK.
I agree, but I'm not sure how that's relevant?
The context at the root of the discussion, where potential acquirer's plan b is to hire the team instead.
In M&A's you usually sign non-competes.
The husk of a company would still be bound by whatever contacts were signed by its officers. However, non-compete enforcement against individuals have been declawed in California, where VoidZero is headquartered, and (I assume) where its investors are, and whose courts they've likely agreed to adjudicate disagreements.
This is an extreme measure not usually taken, but it's a nuclear option that sets a ceiling on how much investors may play hardball.
> However, non-compete enforcement against individuals have been declawed in California, where VoidZero is headquartered
Not in M&A.
https://www.freshfields.com/en/our-thinking/blogs/a-fresh-ta...
Thanks - I wasn't aware about the M&A carve-out, which makes sense. It reads to me like clause (c) is the most relevant:
(c) all of the ownership interest of any subsidiary, may agree with the buyer to refrain from carrying on a similar business within a specified geographic area in which the business so sold... has been carried on, so long as the buyer... carries on a like business therein.
and it prohibits competition "on a similar business". The Vite team would be blocked from competing against VoidZero, but Cloudfare isn't a similar business IMO, and they would be free to work on a private "Pronto" fork within Cloudflare (which is unlike the real-life Cloudflare/Vite scenario where they will continue public releases)
Maybe. It would require courts and nuance; cloudflare is in a lot of businesses nowadays. It rarely comes into effect regardless because people rarely spend less than a couple years at the acquirer, but regardless.
There's also the issue of participating in a funding round is neither a merger nor an acquisition. VC investors are not covereed
I mean, the alternative is a whole bunch of BS dealing with funding, global compliance and sales, public markets, etc.
It's more fun to just build the fun bits, get acquired, walk away with a lot of money, and start over again doing the fun bits (if you want to keep working).
If you get acquihired, you don't get to walk away.
These acquisition announcements always leave me uneasy. There’s a lot of hand waving, “nothing will change and our roadmap will stay the same!” but we can all do basic math and understand that’s not how business works.
As an aside, I have to use Cloudlare at work and it’s a pretty awful experience for the medium sized org I’m at. “Hostile UX” is a common complaint. Maybe they should invest money in competing with Vercel on UX/DX instead of acquiring open source projects.
their reliability is also way way down lately. too many mishaps and i've long lost trust in CF.
Yes. We’re beginning the process of moving away because of how they’ve become a single point failure that’s unreliable. AWS is more reliable and it’s a bad spot to be in when your CDN / router is down but your actual application is fine
100%. Most of our outages were because of CF which we had no control over
sorry to hear that's been your experience. i actually joined through an acquisition about a year ago and one of the main things we've been focused on is the dashboard and overall dx.
sadly "hostile ux" is a phrase i've heard more than once and we're working hard to improve. if you're open to it, would love to hear more about the issues you've be running into
The dashboard UX has improved a lot lately but one thing that drives me absolutely nuts is that I get rate limited all the time using it.
For example, I had to recently change an env var we had on a handful of apps and opened them all into new tabs and made the changes and about half way through I started getting rate limited. This has happened to me many times and I've reported it to support and in Discord but it still happens.
One other big complaint is support is non-existent. We sent many support emails (on business plans) and I'm pretty sure we've never gotten a reply. Same for posting in Discord. It's pretty disheartening to build your business on Cloudflare and have no confidence support will help you when you need it.
yeah you should definitely not be getting rate limited, sorry this is annoying you're not the first to report i will dig in.
as far as support, i know there is a huge effort going on right now to improve response time and support in general, also I'm not as active in discord as I ought to be there's just so much noise, feel free to ping me on there directly if I can help brandon/@ygwyg. can't promise it'll be an instant response but I will respond
You'd be forever my hero if you solve the rate limiting thing! One time I couldn't fix a production issue because I opened too many tabs.
Thanks Brandon!
It's hysterical that CloudFlare is tarpitting their actual customers just the same as the rest of the public internet.
You really think an individual employee trying to help a customer when they likely have little impact on org wide issues like how customer support is run is tarpitting? Seems a bit uncharitable
Thank you for saying this and being willing to listen.
The worst one I saw is the load balancer config UX/DX. I use CF's load balancer product for clients and so have to do a lot of setup and teardown back-and-forth. Everything related to setting up load balancers is split across multiple screens and/or "wizards" that are extremely confusing.
A lot of the error messages you get are generic at best and so you waste a ton of time clicking between pages and tabs just to set up some pools and attach them to a load balancer.
There's also some inconsistency between how things are labeled, so one thing can have two names and you have to hold that in your head while you move around the UI.
Email in profile if you'd like to chat further.
I managed a large enterprise CF account from 2018-2023. Hundreds of load balancers. The UI changed out from under us 3 times, with some big problems being fixed, but introducing new ones. I gave bold feedback directly to the leaders responsible for this, with helpful suggestions on how to make it better.
I was really glad when they fixed the old one that had a big "X" that would delete your load balancer without a warning dialog. But I was not happy that the load balancers got increasingly complex, with settings hidden at multiple layers that you had to independently configure.
Load balancing IS complex, but this is their core business, and in many other places such as DNS, Cloudflare put a lot more thought into making it simple and intuitive to use.
Getting this stuff right takes lots of strong leadership and long-term decision making with determination and wisdom to provide the best experience for customers. Unfortunately I am not confident that is how the business is operating, especially with strong talent being let go or leaving due to lack of fostering of a healthy working environment.
But who will take their place?
The one I saw most recently was working with an SRE coworker. Data in what looks like a table, in this case a subdomain/IP address, that overflows the cell gets cut off with no ability to actually view it. I almost had him just edit the CSS in Chrome, but he figured out a different workaround.
I don't even know where to start. I want to host a static site and it's a closed beta so password protection would be nice.
Let's see, first menu item Compute. Hrm, HTML isn't compute, oh it's there ok. Add Application, HTML isn't an application but ok. 95% of the page and on top are fields for adding a worker. The static page option is a little link at the bottom. Linked it to my repo. Oops wrong repo can I change it, oh, no. Ok delete and set it up all over again. Zero trust. Asked for some field, couldn't determine if it was a root domain, subdomain, URL. Ask the built in AI. It says hrm it's not in the docs, idk. Figure out how to add Cloudflare as an auth provider, link it to the static page. Team member says they can't login even though they're a Super Admin. Ah, I have to add their email manually or say all users of the account, otherwise by default Super Admins are locked out of authenticating via Zero Trust CF.
At one point I asked the AI for a copy of my email related DNS records it froze for 15 min while it output in a single textarea line char by char an extremely long key. Maybe that one's on me, but since the AI was frozen and couldn't be interrupted maybe not.
These are just the parts I remember off the top of my head. Most of us work in this field and should be sympathetic to the fact that designing a dashboard for this much data density isn't trivial. But that's tempered by CF deciding it's the gatekeeper for a web that’s supposed to be decentralized and spending a zillion dollars on engineering.
Never, ever put a form into a popup. Ever.
You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become Akamai.
The reason everyone came running when Cloudflare first started was obviously the "burn VC money to gain marketshare" but it was also the sheer simplicity. They had one product and a handful of features.
Until someone on the business side takes a step back and says "when I mouse over 'Products' on the homepage, why the fuck is there a 'See All Products' link" it will be impossible to have a usable customer experience. Start killing things and making them features.
Good meeting, appreciate the engagement, added new action items "add yet another way to do AI in Workers, say something about long schedule agentic driven" and "go to market with new unrelated Web Application Firewall product".
> Maybe they should invest money in competing with Vercel on UX/DX
That's exactly what they are doing.
Vite is great and vite 8 was a huge speed-up so definitely a nice win for them. Remaining independent is always great but at the same time there are other "new homes" that could be worse so let's keep our fingers crossed and hope it works out.
Sometimes it does work out. For example, Zulip was acquired by Dropbox, spun out as an open source project, and now has its own foundation backing it, along with a board, etc.
Most of the time, it doesn’t. But it can.
Well, Voidzero already attempted to rugpull the Vite project into a commercial paid licensing for "Vite+" that they then had to back out of and release under MIT because it just didn't work out.
I think Voidzero was already adrift without a plan and this acquihire is literally just that, new employment for the people behind it.
Maybe Cloudflare will allow them to maintain oxc, but expect them to writing features for Cloudflare Workers from now on.
I love Vite, when I don’t forget it exists in my projects. It took things that made you feel mentally deficient and made them almost zero-config.
This news does not make me happy.
Same with the news about Astro earlier this year.
I know it must be good for the people how have made the projects (why else would they chose to do it?) but there is something in those acquisitions that makes me uneasy.
> I know it must be good for the people how have made the projects (why else would they chose to do it?) but there is something in those acquisitions that makes me uneasy.
Same, kind of conflicting. Happy for the individuals involved, they've probably more than earned it. Slightly sad about what comes next, as I'm guessing both you and me seen this happen so many times before, and we've learned to read past the always-reiterated "Nothing will change, everything keeps on being great forever".
Yeah. I don't want to sound selfish, but now I need to make plans to eventually migrate off of vite.
Migrate off vite to what exactly? I just migrated a personal project to vite and it simplified the existing webpack thing drastically, I was very impressed.
IDK, I've been purposely limiting the scope of work I can provide by only working with js, html, css. It's extremely limiting but when it comes to basically making one-off splash pages it's nice to not worry about tooling and just deploy what I made instantly. Modern CSS is amazing, there's no need to use sass or postcss. The modern web APIs are amazing as well. You can get a lot done with new base standard across browsers. The only libraries I really pull in nowadays are anime.js + umami for analytics.
I don't even need TS and can get away with js doc annotations + a functional LSP allows me to be slightly more dangerous (think running with scissors in chain mail).
Maybe if you need a specific web app you can reach for the complex tooling but even then I still wonder if it's necessary? The most popular political tool I've shared was a simple HTML page that just fetched the census API for specific codes in a tabular format. Sure I could have used react which would have enabled me to unlock some future value I couldn't foresee at the time but the working alternative is that I have a single html page with minimal JS (around ~2k LOC) that a surprising amount of nontypical devs (think carpenter that is interested in cybersecurity or union negotiators) are able to extend by themselves for their own needs (think adding census codes about snap or public transit).
There is a tremendous amount of value in telling my users how they can modify the source code and see the immediate impact of doing as much.
If this was a project that would have necessitated vite the first thing I would tell them is to install nodeJS and that's where I would lose 99.9999999999% of my users being able.
These projects will never go beyond 500,000 visitors and a CDN is more than sufficient for 90% of the work I do. So that obviously plays a major role but if this is a solo project there are much better choices to make if you want it to be sustainable + low upkeep. Those two qualities are something we as an industry should always value as it makes all our jobs collectively easier.
This one is particularly interesting given that Vercel products (Nuxt) now rely on a competitor's tooling (Vite).
Both are more reliant on V8 derivatives hence Google which they very much compete with.
Next* the framework for React. Nuxt is the framework for Vue.
Nuxt is also on Vercel
https://vercel.com/blog/nuxtlabs-joins-vercel
> It took things that made you feel mentally deficient and made them almost zero-config.
What kind of things?
I'm not the one you replied to, but a typical config & plugins stack for (webpack + eslint + prettier) is nearly impossible to reason about. VoidZero's tools (Vite + oxcfmt + oxclint) are radically simpler and more performant.
> a typical config & plugins stack for (webpack + eslint + prettier) is nearly impossible to reason about.
I think people just don't want to bother. They don't want to read the docs, or maybe watch a video or two (back when webpack was popular, Sean Larkin, webpack evangelist, made a number of popular courses about setting it up). Also, webpack config became easier compared to 2014/2015; I think they got to practically a zero-config by default.
I can understand that people don't want to care; but "impossible to reason about" is not it. It isn't rust, for crying out loud; nor lisp; nor haskell.
What chrisweekly said:
Configuring webpack, mostly. :-D
That’s not a dig at webpack: Those tools are super complex, and hiding complexity from the user is not easy. But it seems that with Vite we finally got there.
I've loved Vite from the moment it was public. I also tried Snowpack back in the day. (fun story that Fred "fks" went on to create Astro after Snowpack didn't gain traction). The fact that we can "just forget it exists" is a major win in my case. Webpack - while maybe a win over Grunt/Gulp, was MASSIVELY complex.
I too am a bit uneasy. It's not always the case but, corporate ingestion is often where cool projects go to die. The good news about open source is that we have enough Terraform->OpenTofu & Redis->Valkey stories out there.
> Webpack - while maybe a win over Grunt/Gulp, was MASSIVELY complex.
and slow
> This news does not make me happy.
It shouldn't. Big corpo buying small companies harms us all long term.
What alternative ending do you prefer? Personally I think acquisition is preferable to dev burnout due to lack of funding and/or extractive practices from other companies.
Last time I checked, VueJs was "quite ok funded" [1]. Sure it's no FAANG income, but it will get you quite far in most parts of this world.
[1] https://opencollective.com/vuejs
Having used Webpack since 2016... Vite was amazing. Few years ago I migrated a rather complex project (monorepo with a Rust wasm binding) from Webpack to Vite (before the LLM days!) and dev builds and real builds went from minutes to seconds. I never looked twice at Webpack ever again.
I don't know what to feel about this news, especially since migrating to from vite 7 to vite 8 broke my project in ways that were not documented, but I'm remaining cautiously optimistic.
Happy for Evan regardless.
The reason this is worth it to CloudFlare is it will cause AI to recommend them more.
The agents already reach for Vite. When they reach for Vite it's very logical they will default to CloudFlare after. (Much like they will guide users to setup Vercel for NextJS).
This could be a $20m acquisition which will generate $billions from the increase in the agent equivalent of SEO.
Also Lovable just switched to TanStack as a default project framework which uses Vite under the hood. Lovable uses Cloudflare so they’re probably deploying it via Cloudflare Workers.
Cloudflare should just buy Lovable next.
This isn’t going to generate billions in additional revenue. That is a huge exaggeration.
I do agree with your underlying argument, though. It will likely help them gain market share for hosting web applications, which is increasing with LLM usage.
Perhaps "potentially billions" is justifiable? In that it's a "change the scenario entirely" level of change.
Certainly if you compare it to another likely scenario where Vercel buys them and fast forward 2 years, it's plausible that a huge number of projects went one way or the other because of what the AIs defaulted to.
I think, just from a purely build-step point of view, it's been evident that tools like Vite, Bun, etc. have achieved all they meaningfully can. If I was the creator of these tools, I've move on too. Good luck and thanks for everything.
I think this frames the tools too narrowly.
If Vite, Bun and uv were just "make builds faster" projects, then maybe the returns are diminishing. But the acquisitions by Cloudflare, Anthropic and OpenAI suggest this layer is becoming more strategic, not less.
These tools sit in the software supply chain: dependency resolution, project structure, tests, builds, runtimes, deployment paths and increasingly AI-agent execution loops. They define the default path for building software, and they are where AI-generated code gets tested against real dependencies, builds, tests and deployment constraints.
So I don’t think they’ve achieved all they meaningfully can. The value is shifting from raw build speed to control over the workflow layer where software is assembled.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
lol. any of them - literally just ONE - could have a full blown UI so that you wouldn't have to build projects using a command line like it's 1985. or maybe one of them could just invest in packaging custom html elements, instead of assuming I'm going to use one of a handful of unnecessary "component" libraries, or assuming that I won't be using components at all.
there's plenty of places for these tools to go, but none of them have any appetite to go there. likely because people already have something that's so "good enough" that they don't even bother looking for what "could be better". obviously exacerbated by the management class of development outfits deciding that developers shouldn't actually touch the codebase anymore, in lieu of LLMs doing the actual lifting, so they're building out all kinds of chicanerous nonsense to satisfy "agents". and that doesn't necessarily make things more difficult for devs, but that seems to be the trend. forcing your LLM to comply with tortured and arcane concatenations of character-perfect strings is so much easier than having it navigate anything like a filthy human. so the practical result is less accommodating stuff for humans and more accommodating stuff for robots.
all of which is to say: I disagree. I think there's things they could meaningfully achieve for humans. And I think they are deeply uninterested in doing those things.
I agree. Most startups just aren’t interested in solving a problem only 30 people in the world have. I wonder why?
> or maybe one of them could just invest in packaging custom html elements, instead of assuming I'm going to use one of a handful of unnecessary "component" libraries
... are these not the same thing? I suppose from a technical standpoint they'd differ, but they achieve the same result: reusable, modular building blocks for creating interfaces.
Love Vite, but always felt sorry for them because it was not clear how they can make money, the whole VoidZero thing felt like a stretch.
It's one of those things that always stopped me from building cool tools - you have to make a living somehow.
So I am happy for the team of builders that they were able to receive the deserved payout and sustainability.
A lot of these very popular FOSS products/frameworks simply are the worst ways to make money. You are selling to a demographic that doesn't want to pay for the tools and value they get. You end up competing against your own free version that can now be modified with a bit of AI agent session to get feature parity.
Just for the record,
NPM -> Microsoft
Vite -> Cloudflare
Bun -> Anthropic
Turbopack -> Vercel
Remix -> Shopify (I barely remember this one)
Biome (formerly Rome) -> Indie but largely supported by Depot
SWC -> Indie
esBuild -> Indie
I use RsBuild/RsPack which is ByteDance supported.
Python but also add
Uv -> OpenAI
Nuxt & Nitro -> Vercel Svelte -> Vercel Astro -> Cloudflare
esbuild is a side-project of Evan Wallace, co-founder of Figma, so it's only kinda-indie.
Is the guy from CoreJS still looking for a job?
> Before saying anything else, we want to make the most important thing clear: Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, Oxc, and Vite+ will stay open source, vendor-agnostic, and community-driven. Nothing about that changes.
Appreciate them putting that so clearly. I am highly skeptical of acquisitions now because we've been burned so many times in the past. Time will tell if this stays true, but at least it's clearly on the record. Would love to know if this is in contract/writing somewhere as part of the acquisition.
>Would love to know if this is in contract/writing somewhere as part of the acquisition.
Cloudflare would be insane to allow that provision in the contract or acquisition documents.
So I would take that promise as "will stay open source, blah blah blah, for now...."
Dropbox did it for Zulip.
It entirely depends on how much the seller cared to ensure continuity. It’s not like VoidZero didn’t have plenty of leverage; they weren’t a dying open source project.
Dropbox spun out Zulip because it was a failed project they were going to shut down.
This is completely different?
Dropbox never had any intention of running Zulip. But the team wanted Zulip to continue existing, so they worked that into the agreement with Dropbox.
That is my understanding.
It's natural to be sceptical. They're investing a huge amount of money and claiming that nothing will change. I.e.: that they seek nothing in return.
Not really. The claim is that nothing will change regarding the OSS projects.
First Astro, now this? Cloudflare is getting all the good JS talent.
The monetization story never really made sense to me. It seems really hard to carve out a space in the managed hosting world. Are the Vercel and Laravel teams the only ones to make Private Equity work?
they need to add tanstack to the roster
Ewww
Big fan of Cloudflare and a bigger fan of vite. Probably one of the best outcomes for the latter.
What do you like about Cloudfare? Do you like the centralization of the internet?
IMHO Cloudflare ensures decentralization of the Internet: It provides an alternative to AWS, Azure, and GCE which gives your little personal selfhosting box or small VPS the same level of protection the big providers have. And generally, anything you have either hosted on or proxied by Cloudflare, can be pretty trivially moved to another provider. Whereas things built on top of AWS, Azure, and GCE services tend to be pretty stuck there.
Cloudflare has some big misses in it's history, like deciding to takedown a social media site for sex workers while defending a decision to provide services to Nazis at length, but in comparison to the alternatives it makes more decentralization practical than might be otherwise.
Cloudflare ensures decentralization
How by taking out 25% of the internet when they go down?
Have you ever seen a us-east-1 outage? Or when Exchange Online fails... weekly or so? There's a lot of huge clouds that are load-bearing for the Internet. Cloudflare is the one you can at least circumvent easily.
That's not true. Read about all the drama happening in Spain when an entity (the soccer league) decides to block all the Cloudfare IPs. You are stuck with no access to most websites behind Cloudfare, and that's a lot of them
How does this differ if Spain decided to block AWS IPs?
It doesn't, it's the same problem. But at least AWS provides more services. Cloudfare is just an extra layer to route traffic
Cloudflare does a lot more these days. You can run a JS app in Workers and any Linux app in a container. You can have them host your database and object storage.
Great and I heard they offer haircuts at a discount. But they still block 25% of internet traffic
I like how I can slap up a free Turnstile on my projects in two minutes and not have to worry about endless comment spam and user registration spam. Yes, I understand there's problems with Cloudflare, but there's also a lot of problems out there in the wild west of an open internet.
Or users being able to access the forum. Why not just host it on localhost and call it a day.
Ah! The same turnstile that was supposed to provide users with a more private reCaptcha alternative and ended up fingerprinting users via WebGL to prevent spam.
Yes? It's unclear how they'd do their job without extensive fingerprinting. I don't like it either, but pretending like it's not better positioned from a privacy standpoint is odd. At very least, turnstile isn't ran by the world's largest ads company that directly profits from accurately tracking users across the web.
>Do you like the centralization of the internet?
Absolutely, makes blocking stuff so much easier!
Yeah, Spanish la Liga is so happy about Cloudfare
Wait, so this is why you're mad a Cloudflare? Because, you can't watch your pirated football game?
I don't think you get it. They block Cloudfare IPs so services using Cloudfare become unreachable. I don't live in Spain anymore, but I have friends that can't access their university website while a soccer match is ongoing.
This shows the risks of centralizing internet access
To be clear people are mad about that because large portions of the legitimate internet go dark when football is on because they're running on a virtual server that happens to share an IP with another virtual server which is hosting pirated football.
You and I have no idea how often perfectly legal things we rely enjoy or rely on would go offline during football matches because it doesn't happen to us.
Fundamental flaws/oversights in the internet's design led to centralization, notably zero protections against malicious actors, bots, and botnets.
Cloudflare and co offer some of the only real solutions to that.
If you snap your fingers and Cloudflare disappears, you aren't left with a decentralized wonderland but rather the status quo where $5 of booter time can take most websites offline for the lulz, and all of your human users have to compete with infinite automated AI traffic (basically an amplification attack every time someone prompts an agent and it does a web search).
So, there's a third option where you like Cloudflare's services as a solution to flaws in the internet that led to the need for these services.
And then when Cloudfare decides to start exploiting all the data they have and all the services they provide for their own benefit then what
I'm responding to your non sequitur. Did you already abandon it?
Then I move my stuff somewhere else? I've been writing HTML since 1993. I think I've used literally hundreds of hosts at this point.
I had access to an Enterprise license in my last job, which was my introduction to Cloudflare — something like 7 years ago — and I just kind of fell in love with the DX and their offerings. It's only improved since then. Like, Cloudflare Workers is actually fucking insane. It's insane how good it is for free. It has a secret vault, dude, for free — with API and CLI. It has cron jobs. You can just assign domains to sites from your DNS zones. It's got blue/green deployments built in. I don't have to SSH into anything. It's just there and it works.
Now everything I do there is free, even for my contract projects, and I can't believe it's free. I actually keep expecting an enshittification phase to begin but it just doesn't ever begin. When it does, I'll bail — same as it ever was. It would take a lot, though.
the dx is wonderful if you give claude code your global api key. and the price is amazing. you can deploy complex web apps for free. i love vite and astro which is built on vite. i ran both on cloudflare before they were bought by them. i'm happy. at least they weren't bough by adobe.
My issue with Cloudflare is how they enshittify all the open-source & closed-soure utilities they maintain. They vibe code it all now. It's crap. I'm sad Vite/Vue/whatever will go the way of that. Oh well, there's always Svelte. For now.
Vercel hired the Svelte team so I'm not too sure there's much of a difference
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29189144
For your first question:
- The workers platform is quite pleasant to work with compared to competitors. - Globally deploying edge workers which have access to their many services (D1, R2, DO, etc) - Having the ability to assemble globally distributed workers using bindings is dead simple - Their CI pipeline, while limited, is easy to setup and run and keeps improving - Their pricing is extremely competitive
For your second:
- That's my biggest conflict with using any service (Cloudflare, AWS, Azure, etc). Don't have a good answer with what to do about it considering for many projects I don't have the time/energy to fully self host everything.
One thing is hosting, which obviously comes with centralizing risks but a different one is just deciding to add a layer of "protection" in front of every website so that as much traffic as possible goes through one single company.
I love how you put protection in quotes like Cloudflare is some snake oil salesman and not a very good product.
It's always scary to see an open source organization being acquired
Yeah but people don't want to pay for software so all open source is basically subsidized.
If you look at it broadly nearly all software is subsidized by open source, so it's a smart choice to send some subsidies back to open source.
+200 people/orgs are listed as vite github sponsors
How many FTEs does that pay for?
200 people out of how many hundreds of thousands of users? Are they giving an average $5 a month, for a grand total of $12000 a year? Maybe a little bit more?
People will pay out of the nose for software if they find it useful enough.
That is what happens when no one wants to pay for their tools.
Real life isn't 60's hippies community farms.
There are bills to pay in capitalist societies.
There you go. I said this as well and no-one here can explain how these open source dev tools companies are making any money with their open source products.
Now they are surprised to see that acquisitions like this are happening and "open source" has given this entitlement on developers to believe that it is "free" when someone always ends up paying.
I love how they always make it sound like this is by choice.
"VoidZero is joining Cloudflare"
As if they chose to do that. Yes, they agreed to it, but in the end it was just a huge financial transaction.
But i guess "Cloudflare buys VoidZero" just sounds less friendly. Even though that is exactly what happened.
It is by choice, though? VoidZero was well-capitalized and could easily have continued to raise money for the foreseeable.
Could they? Under what business model? Maybe the numbers for the paid products just weren't there and they see this exit as a positive for the team?
> As if they chose to do that. Yes, they agreed to it,
That is the definition of making a choice.
This is some incredible mental backflipping to suggest that their choice wasn’t their choice.
Just to steelman the GP; some people in the company made a choice while the rest had no say.
I personally think the owners should get to decide, but it's an interesting duality.
(assuming it's not like everyone has a share or something, in which case they would've all had to agree I guess)
That is what being employed means, otherwise own the business.
> I personally think the owners should get to decide, but it's an interesting duality.
The owners of a business get to decide what to do with their business.
> (assuming it's not like everyone has a share or something, in which case they would've all had to agree I guess)
Unanimous agreement among shareholders is not necessary to sell a company.
The employees might have had some shares in the company, but not all share classes have equal voting rights. It’s also unlikely that employees in aggregate would have had enough shares to override everyone else anyway. Once shares are split among investors, founders, and employees the individual ownership of any one person or group becomes small.
I wouldn’t assume that the employees wanted to avoid acquisition. They likely benefited significantly from their shares being acquired and their new compensation packages. Imagining that the employees resisted this is projecting some other story on to them
> I personally think the owners should get to decide
Wow. Bold opinion. The owners of a company get to decide what to do with it?
If you join an company with next to no monetizable business model like this, you already have made your choice that you are fine with acquisition when you joined, or have deferred your choice to make a stay/leave decision until the acquisition.
> Evan and the rest of the VoidZero team continue to lead Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, Oxc, and Vite+.
Explain how thats not a clear indication of this being a choice and something they agreed to.
1) The blog post mentions "acquisition" multiple times. 2) VoidZero joins Cloudflare is still correct. Nobody forced anyone to accept a deal and do so
Yes, people love to blame the Microsoft's, Google's, Apple's and co.
However the poor guys also have to legally accept being bought.
Lets not pretend they aren't putting money into the bank.
Obligatory https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
Do we have any chance left of using software for our work without Big Tech behind it?
That's as easy as making new Vite. :) Which is hard, not easy but my point stands.
Fork?
Yes. Pay for software from independent developers and small businesses. The entire reason big tech is where it is is because nobody wants to pay for software, and big tech is the way to make money off of "free" software. Software developers need money to eat, so this is the inevitable result of demanding everything for free. Actions meet consequences.
While this is the idealist point of view, if you earn 100K a year from open source work - and that's already the top 0.1% if not less of open source developers - and a company comes around to buy you out for $10 million plus a 300K / year job (for example)... open source etc just can't compete.
Well that is why it is open source. It doesn't matter how big the company is behind it, you can use it without the company that owns the name, and even use a different, small tech company for support.
“Be the change you want to see in the world” and other stories powerless people tell themselves to sleep.
I pay for independent software, point is, only big money can afford to hire employees to work on free software, because they don’t make money from selling software but from being a monopoly. Free software will always win, which is not a bad thing of itself, but it also means that Big Tech control over the software world is inevitable.
The entire free software ethos indirectly opened the door to the Big Tech monopoly. There is no FAANG without open source, there is no open source without FAANG.
not if our current trajectory stays undisturbed
why does it matter?
use vite to build apps your business needs and move on
focus on what matters or just be a w2 somewhere and do endless bikeshedding
Linux has Big Tech behind it too and few complain about that.
Because they would be complaining having to pay for Solaris, HP-UX, Aix instead.
https://templeos.org/
Yes, pay for its development.
Weird situation for Vue. The Nuxt guys and Eduardo (creator of vue-router, pinia, etc) are working at Vercel while Evan is now at Cloudflare.
Vue has always handled things well when dealing with cross framework stuff due to their back and forth with Angular for being the go-to number 2.
I’m confident that things will be well maintained for an open ecosystem. Evan is smart enough to know that tying the core technology too much to one platform will create more problems than it solves in the long term.
That said, I’m excited to see if Evan can delivery another massive win for web developers everywhere now that he has access to more funding.
This is just my own impression but I feel that Evan might have distanced himself from Vue to focus on Vite and Void. IIRC Vapor mode was spearheaded by someone else. Same with Alien signals.
To be clear, I don't think this is bad. Vue 3 seems feature complete at this point and nobody needs another Vue 2 situation.
You underestimate how much Guillermo Rauch hates Cloudflare
IMO perfect for Vue (and similar for Vite). All the talented folks working together.
Would be happier with this information if I didn't hate Cloudflare's extortion based business model
The dream has always been a first-class framework for Cloudflare Workers.
- In the earliest days (literally go read their blog posts and GitHub repos), they only ever really did dinky little demo's.
- After and for the longest time, they tried to claim they went "Full Stack" with SSR-able abilities, but they were so terrible back then and not even well integrated into their Worker platform tools.
- This was oddly gray mixed (sometimes?) with Pages messaging which definitely was not full-stack in the sense developers wanted.
- Then getting any of this to work in a dev environment was super difficult as "wrangler dev" was very limited (wrangler is so good now FYI).
- Vercel just kind of ate Cloudflare's lunch here. No shame in it. They just couldn't get it right for developers period.
- Then very quietly "Adapters" came around and basically changed the game. Your code base finally felt portable to Workers with essentially full CF platform support.
- Now we live in AI-age and they bought Astro (?), tried to launch WP clone (?), and vibe-coded Next (?)
Big and long time coming for all of this. It is a super breath of fresh air to see even more improvements will likely come to Workers. Icing on cake is Evan is a legend who has a proven track record of delivering tools people love.
didn't Cloudflare just layoff a few hundred people? odd to see a acqui-hire take place right after that but ok. This is great for Evan You
1,100 people, Just a month ago. https://blog.cloudflare.com/building-for-the-future
Everything Cloudflare is announcing could have been done without acquiring VoidZero. The part they aren’t saying is the greater influence they will have on the roadmap and protecting themselves from someone else acquiring vite and making it closed source and/or monetizing it. We’ve seen it so many times - a project promises to stay free and open source, but things change. Are there any licenses or contracts that a project could use and would hold up in court that they need to stay FOSS forever?
This is why we need to start advocating more public investment into open source technology. Imagine how much better the state of our industry would be if we gave 100,000 open source developers a $100,000 grant. This modest $10,000,000,000 fund would be extremely tiny compared to the bloated private research we see annually at corporations.
Such a wasted amount of capital doing fuck all when there can be real value and economic gain if we supported open source without the influence of VC + big tech that seem to want a return to feudalism, exacerbate the climate crisis, and hoard as much wealth as possible.
A better world is possible.
>Are there any licenses or contracts that a project could use and would hold up in court that they need to stay FOSS forever?
I don't understand, the existing licenses say that, and courts uphold them to say that. If a company has given code to you under an OSS license, that code is yours under that license forever. There'd be no point in trying to bind a person to give you all their future creative output for free just because they had given some of it to you for free. That'd be awful! And anyway we don't need courts to fix this because people can fix it just by helping each other maintain open software
What I meant was the project would stay FOSS forever, so that would mean all future updates including features, bug fixes, and patches. My understanding is the license can be changed at any time so then you would only have FOSS access for the code up until the point in time the license changed.
That said, I completely agree that there’s a better solution.
Unless you literally own me, how would you possibly prevent me from doing new work without giving it to you? Even if I were under an employment contract that assigns all my intellectual property to you, as a free person I would be free to quit that job and cease giving you any further IP.
For the record that my suspicion is that bug fixes to open code are very likely not copyrightable due to the principle of convergence, though I am not a lawyer and to my knowledge this issue has never been tested in court. New features would very much be copyrightable.
> Are there any licenses or contracts that a project could use and would hold up in court that they need to stay FOSS forever?
The Linux kernel is GPL with likely at least hundreds of copyright holders and no CLA, that means there is no way for someone to say "I am the legal owner and the new development will be under a proprietary license".
This has become a very common occurrence; might be the only sustainable path forward for projects and maintainers. Win-win for all parties involved.
Very happy for them, they made excellent tools and I hope they can continue their work!
I do believe though that these tools (formatting, linting etc.) should be built into the language like Go, and I really hope the Node team can just absorb the best ideas and make solid primitives that can be built on top of as the ecosystem evolves (think golang's http interfaces, or test interfaces)
It took the JS community many iterations to get to vite. Building it into the language just means you get stuck with a "good enough" solution that survives by inertia. We'd still be using webpack.
I'm all for building things into the language when there's only one way to do it though.
Counter point; good enough is often... good enough
Go is the best example of this; it's boring but incredible stable and consistent
for sure! but there are lots of incremental shareable primitives that could help. I think about go's built in testing tools that can get extended as an example
I stop believing in any new product. The game is to be popular, hire talent and sell to corporate ;(
Had no idea Vite and OXC were made by the same company. Makes so much sense.
I don’t get the complaining about OS developers behind these incredible pieces of software like uv, bun, etc is a bad thing. If anything, it’ll continue to incentivize great developers to fill in the blanks and continue to push things forward. It’s a win for everyone.
OXC predates VoidZero and is made by Boshen. Evan had to try for a while until he was able to convince Boshen to join them. OXC is the best of the JS toolchains implemented in Rust, so it was definitely a scoop.
I am really happy for the developers.
I'm sad to see these tools go. Vite was a godsend after a zoo of webpack/grunt/etc.
But what will happen is that new sane tool will come up once vite dissolves and that's the never ending cycle.
Sponsorships are obviously not enough, and not every open source tool has some obvious hosting product to sell. A lot of this stuff is basically public infrastructure now, but we still fund it like a side project.
Everyone's trying to build end to end agent -> prod platforms and wants to own the tooling for the dev environment part of that.
Guess I was right to be suspicious: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48213860
Vite is great. Vite+ seemed to offer very little added value and was paid for (or was going to be one day?).
The article didn't mention what happens to paying Vite+ users. Is that because there basically aren't any?
I remember thinking that they were making great software, but finding revenue to make the investment payoff could be quite challenging. Looks like that's been solved.
Well at least this time we don’t have to worry about them rewriting their tooling in Rust
Amazing acquisition for Cloudflare.
Unpleasantly close to when Cloudflare bought BastionZero... the promises quickly fell away, the tool decayed (I found three serious bugs in one single week...and they had stopped even bothering to publish changelogs), and Cloudflare eventually gave us a "hey, we're actually shutting this down in a month, good luck" email prompting a scramble to rewire all of our infrastructure.
(Fwiw SDM ended up being a better alternative anyways... not looking forward to their eventual acquisition and shutdown :/ )
Thanks for the example. I'm skeptical of the claims that "nothing will change" but want to believe them, and examples are the only real data to go on (feels/vibes aren't data), so thank you.
Original blog post of the acquisition of BastionZero: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-acquires-bastionzero/
What promises? The announcement for BastionZero was quite clear as to what would happen:
> The BastionZero team will be focused on integrating their infrastructure access controls directly into Cloudflare One. During the third and fourth quarters of this year, we will be announcing a number of new features to facilitate Zero Trust infrastructure access via Cloudflare One. All functionality delivered this year will be included in the Cloudflare One free tier for organizations with less than 50 users. We believe that everyone should have access to world-class security controls.
Did you expect them to continue running their own service when it was pretty evident their work would be integrated into CF's zero trust suite?
Cloudflare acquiring Astro and VoidZero was unexpected. I’ve been using Astro for a solo project, which made things easier to manage.
It also came at a time when expectations for the project were starting to increase.
> Cloudflare's mission is to help build a better Internet. And a better Internet is an open Internet. Developers need choice, frameworks need a neutral foundation, and applications need to be portable. It is not reasonable to expect the entire web ecosystem to build around a single vendor.
Already at this point, I start thinking that they're turning Vite into a foundation, or donating it to the Linux Foundation, or something like that. "foundation" is mentioned 10 times in total in various ways, but then some actual foundation creation/handover never came up. Even when they themselves state how important it is developers have choice and everything shouldn't centralized around a single vendor. Deeply ironic.
This goes down the same path. Every. Time.
Thank god i did not use vite for anything serious.
Esbuild is still my goto even after many years.
Same here. I prefer bet on community-led projects like Node.js, ESbuild and BiomeJS (or Prettier / eslint).
Bummer. The Vite ecosystem is fantastic, and VoidZero's tools are all world-class (vite, vitest, oxcfmt, oxclint,...), but I wish they'd remain(ed) independent.
First Bun went to Anthropic. Then Astro and now VoidZero to Cloudflare. Feels like all my favorite open-source projects are getting adopted by the giants.
The question I have is: Is Vite becoming the all-in-one nodejs tool that is replacing all the other full featured js tooling favorites like Bun, Deno and pnpm?
vite just works
Vite is unmatched
Just use Vite Plus (viteplus.dev)
Nope, mostly using pnpm over here.
That's orthogonal; Vite (and its ecosystem) _with_ pnpm is likely the best combination avlbl.
Vite is not a package manager and is not a JS runtime. That's what Node/Bun/Deno do. Vite is the remaining glue for any web project's build and testing needs.
Bun and Deno are not js runtimes either. They are wrappers for existing js runtimes and add additional apis.
But they give a usable interface and toolkit to the runtime (V8 etc). 99% of users use one of those three.
That was evident. It was designed that way :) Congrats.
I hate company acquisitions.
Not for the aquire-ee(?), I'm not going to be a hypocrite and claim I wouldn't take the payout if I were in that position. But that companies can build massive moats by just buying up as many other companies as possible.
I don't even feel like I can make a "good" argument for it either. Massive companies becoming more massive through acquisitions just feels wrong, like the end game won't work out well for the commons.
I assume the point here is that now Cloudflare can try and push more Vite users into their ecosystem? Nudge the development to integrate better with their products? They say they are moving towards Vite, not Vite moving towards Cloudflare, but ultimately <tool> moves in the direction <owner> decides - even if it's "developed openly."
5 years too late. at most this acquisition should've happened before Cloudflare went all in on workers.
I thought they're gonna build their own hosting platform eventually. Where is the fun in this :(
Congrats to the team.
I appreciate Cloudflare's loud positive proclamation here wrt the OS future; I know scepticism is warranted with some takeovers but although there might be a trend towards Cloudflare fit over the long term that's very different from closing down or abandonment so this generally seems positive to me - best wishes to all parties.
Interesting acquisition. Curious how VoidZero's tech will integrate with Cloudflare's stack.
Not so much about the tech as it's about the talent they aquired.
Congratulations to the team! I hope Evan and others got fabulously rich, they deserve it!
Hope it will help to make workers and pages toolset more robust and better.
If it was invariably going to be acquired, Cloudflare is certainly better than Microsoft, Anthropic, or private equity.
All of them are getting acquired nothing bad in that but I feel like the path to revenue with open source just isn't viable anymore. You have to build your own platform like vercel, or build great dev tools like mintlify
Vercel is killing free public repos in a month. Lure then lock in and pull the rug out.
Will it be the next Bun?
What do you mean? Their tools are mostly Rust already :)
Great grab for cloudflare tbh. Excited to see where this goes :)
Really love Cloudflare and I think they've been doing a great job with these acquisitions. Love how they've handled integrating PartyKit with Durable Objects
When will deno be bought?
nobody wants it
by Oracle
This was unexpected.
see also https://voidzero.dev/posts/voidzero-cloudflare & https://vite.dev/blog/cloudflare-supports-vite
I just hope there's not some bullshit publicity stunt coming in a few weeks.
"We just ported Vite to ActionScript in 11 minutes, we swear for legit technical reasons"
I knew this was going to happen the moment they mentioned in a demo that Void, their development platform, was build on top of Cloudflare.
> Before saying anything else, we want to make the most important thing clear: Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, Oxc, and Vite+ will stay open source, vendor-agnostic, and community-driven. Nothing about that changes.
Given how every single acquisition like this has gone, especially lately, I look forward to seeing how quickly these products get left behind and unmaintained as their entire team move onto things at CF.
Vite is a multi stakeholder team. How would that happen?
I suppose we'll just have to see if it does.
Cool.
So it's Vue vs Next now?
Vue vs React
Vite vs Next
I think Nuxt would be the comparison to Next. I.e. a Framework and a build tool (this bit is Vite)
you can actually do everything most people do in next with vite/astro. i was worried to do it but i haven't ran into any problems i couldn't solve.
Vite is now common for everything not Next (even can do Next).
When will deno be bought
ok good for them.
bun, astro, uv ... all acquired.
Ok, what are the alternatives to vite/vitest?
Hot take (maybe), but I don't think any javascript tool that's reached a critical mass of users is really safe from acquisition at this point. Reason being is that these modern projects are often being spun up as businesses and raising capital, and eventually all businesses in this industry seek an exit, especially those focused on growth and establishing themselves in the ecosystem.
The class of open source developers that thanklessly maintained the underlying packages driving this industry are heading for the exits, and they're being replaced by people who want to build businesses from the get-go. Who's to say this is right or wrong, but I think this is where it's all headed.
Web components and Jest I suppose.
Esbuild. Rock solid tech.
So now each major SPA framework belongs to a cloud provider, Vercel, Cloudflare and Google.
What’s the Google one? Flutter?
Angular.
Flutter hardly matters.
You say that, but Cloudflare just rewrote their WARP / Cloudflare One clients in Flutter. It really sucks, but they are using it.
I don't even know what that is.
Flutter is the only reason Dart still exists, and in what concerns the Android team, writing cross mobile application, is to be done with Kotlin.
Which contrary to Dart, has a few use cases, besides Android.
But dart can also compile to js/wasm and has very great native aot support. Flutter Desktop is maintained by Ubuntu
Ironically, Lit that was created by Google isn't maintained by it anymore. The project is, unfortunately, almost dead tho
Most of matters has landed on Web Components anyway, and that is fully supported on Angular, contrary to React.
yeah SSR is still marked as experimental after like 3-4 years
For anyone pissing on this, you have to remember one thing... time equals money and, as someone who spent 7 years building an open source project, you make almost ZERO from doing it. At the end, if you want to continue the project, you have to sell your soul somehow, either by doing a paid tier, consulting or getting corporate sponsorship. Unless you are one of the VERY lucky ones that does the coding on the side while having a full time job (which I was in the VERY fortunate position to be in at the time).
It's going to come down to "can I afford to keep doing this for nothing"?
So for all you high and mighty people calling them sell outs and what not, I would love to see how much you've been contributing to the project in order for it to keep going.
I think what CloudFlare is doing is a good thing. They get a tremendous team that they can have help work on their infrastructure while keeping the open source projects alive.
This is what happens when developers do not pay for their tools. Companies instead take full control over it and the team then loses their independence.
Just like Bun, Astral and Astro, did VoidZero ever make any money?
If not then this is why open source alone is unsustainable, especially in the age of AI.
afaik Void Cloud never went GA
This would happen even if developers were paying, because a 100 billion dollar corporation like Cloudflare can always pay more.
It has nothing to do with sustainability and everything to do with cashing out a huge payday, which seems to be the end goal of everything nowadays.
Why not setup proper no profit foundations instead of VC-funded for profits then?
I think major projects that are core to the infrastructure should get financing and donations from the major tech companies benefitting.
I'm not saying my solution would work, maybe I'm being naive and unaware of the realities of most of these projects.
It’s scary how cf has become this giant tech corporation. If cf has issues, we see a cascading effect across the many services we depend on. With the age of AI slop, it’s only going to get worse.
I for one love this. Cloudflare is doing really excellent job last few years and of all the companies, this acquisition will not hurt developers like those other might or already do.
Alright, so, how long until the current Vite codebase is replaced by a vibe coded Rust port? I give it a month or two.
Huh? Vite is already powered by a huge Rust codebase now that the release of v8.0 is live. They spent years developing their own parser and tooling to make it all possible.
Probably in a year or two. Look at bun, same will happen to vite.
As mentioned, Vite is already Rust, plus the same developers (the subject of the news) have developed https://viteplus.dev/
Vibe coded rewrite in rust upcoming!
These tools are already written in rust.
just wondering... do you think bun's rewrite with ai was vibe coded or engineered with ai? i know it wasn't perfect in the beginning but i think it was good engineering and what was built will make it faster and better.