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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
cpojer | 8 hours ago
karpetrosyan | 8 hours ago
aatd86 | 8 hours ago
notnullorvoid | 7 hours ago
Raed667 | 7 hours ago
throw10920 | 7 hours ago
applfanboysbgon | 6 hours ago
thierrydamiba | 7 hours ago
pjmlp | 7 hours ago
Real life isn't 60's hippies community farms.
There are bills to pay in capitalist societies.
rvz | 6 hours ago
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.
orliesaurus | 8 hours ago
bun, astro, uv ... all acquired.
Ok, what are the alternatives to vite/vitest?
CodingJeebus | 8 hours ago
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.
Cthulhu_ | 8 hours ago
phplovesong | 8 hours ago
aatd86 | 8 hours ago
holistio | 8 hours ago
tornikeo | 8 hours ago
notpushkin | 8 hours ago
applfanboysbgon | 8 hours ago
Cthulhu_ | 8 hours ago
limagnolia | 5 hours ago
sph | 8 hours ago
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.
igleria | 8 hours ago
moomoo11 | 8 hours ago
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
raincole | 7 hours ago
pjmlp | 7 hours ago
TiredOfLife | 7 hours ago
pjmlp | 7 hours ago
rvz | 8 hours ago
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.
pier25 | 8 hours ago
bakugo | 8 hours ago
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.
epolanski | 8 hours ago
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.
pier25 | 8 hours ago
yurishimo | 8 hours ago
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.
pier25 | 8 hours ago
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.
TiredOfLife | 7 hours ago
TheAlexLichter | 7 hours ago
bakugo | 8 hours ago
yurishimo | 8 hours ago
phplovesong | 8 hours ago
esafak | 7 hours ago
EDM115 | 8 hours ago
plumocracy | 8 hours ago
yanis_t | 8 hours ago
LoganDark | 8 hours ago
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.
TheAlexLichter | 7 hours ago
LoganDark | 4 hours ago
tuananh | 8 hours ago
hntiz | 8 hours ago
alefnula | 7 hours ago
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.
creamyhorror | 7 hours ago
catapart | 2 hours ago
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.
embedding-shape | 8 hours ago
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.
Sammi | 8 hours ago
moomoo11 | 8 hours ago
ramon156 | 8 hours ago
TheAlexLichter | 7 hours ago
pjmlp | 7 hours ago
chrisweekly | 6 hours ago
francislavoie | 7 hours ago
jesse_dot_id | 8 hours ago
gonzalohm | 7 hours ago
ocdtrekkie | 7 hours ago
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.
ipaddr | 5 hours ago
How by taking out 25% of the internet when they go down?
ocdtrekkie | 4 hours ago
gonzalohm | 2 hours ago
ocdtrekkie | 2 hours ago
havaloc | 7 hours ago
ipaddr | 5 hours ago
opem | an hour ago
rs_rs_rs_rs_rs | 6 hours ago
Absolutely, makes blocking stuff so much easier!
gonzalohm | 2 hours ago
rs_rs_rs_rs_rs | an hour ago
hombre_fatal | 6 hours ago
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.
gonzalohm | 6 hours ago
hombre_fatal | 6 hours ago
jesse_dot_id | 6 hours ago
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.
tonyoconnell | 6 hours ago
arm32 | 5 hours ago
runtime_terror | 5 hours ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29189144
runtime_terror | 5 hours ago
- 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.
gonzalohm | 2 hours ago
rs_rs_rs_rs_rs | an hour ago
phplovesong | 8 hours ago
Thank god i did not use vite for anything serious.
Esbuild is still my goto even after many years.
conaclos | 5 hours ago
postalcoder | 8 hours ago
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.
Sammi | 7 hours ago
theaniketmaurya | 8 hours ago
nkg | 8 hours ago
Vite vs Next
ZiiS | 6 hours ago
tonyoconnell | 6 hours ago
ZiiS | 8 hours ago
Ajunne | 8 hours ago
"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.
nkohari | 8 hours ago
fredoliveira | an hour ago
Aurornis | 8 hours ago
That is the definition of making a choice.
This is some incredible mental backflipping to suggest that their choice wasn’t their choice.
CapsAdmin | 7 hours ago
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)
pjmlp | 7 hours ago
Aurornis | 7 hours ago
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
weird-eye-issue | 7 hours ago
Wow. Bold opinion. The owners of a company get to decide what to do with it?
hobofan | 6 hours ago
esskay | 7 hours ago
Explain how thats not a clear indication of this being a choice and something they agreed to.
TheAlexLichter | 7 hours ago
pjmlp | 7 hours ago
However the poor guys also have to legally accept being bought.
Lets not pretend they aren't putting money into the bank.
demetris | 7 hours ago
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.
embedding-shape | 7 hours ago
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".
trollbridge | 7 hours ago
adzm | 6 hours ago
shimman | an hour ago
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.
avdwrks | 7 hours ago
ZiiS | 6 hours ago
ambicapter | 7 hours ago
What kind of things?
chrisweekly | 6 hours ago
azangru | 6 hours ago
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.
demetris | 6 hours ago
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.
nobleach | 6 hours ago
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.
pier25 | 5 hours ago
and slow
bossyTeacher | 6 hours ago
It shouldn't. Big corpo buying small companies harms us all long term.
ericyd | 3 hours ago
chrisandchris | 2 hours ago
[1] https://opencollective.com/vuejs
abustamam | 34 minutes ago
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.
jazzypants | 7 hours ago
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?
maiko26 | an hour ago
pjmlp | 7 hours ago
holografix | 7 hours ago
pjmlp | 7 hours ago
Flutter hardly matters.
jshier | 7 hours ago
pjmlp | 6 hours ago
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.
owebmaster | 7 hours ago
pjmlp | 6 hours ago
pier25 | 5 hours ago
andrewstuart | 7 hours ago
equasar | 7 hours ago
tonyoconnell | 6 hours ago
timdavid2026 | 7 hours ago
Lord_Zero | 7 hours ago
yuppiepuppie | 7 hours ago
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
embedding-shape | 7 hours ago
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.
stackskipton | 7 hours ago
yuppiepuppie | 6 hours ago
[0] https://voidzero.dev/posts/announcing-series-a [1] https://voidzero.dev/about
stackskipton | 6 hours ago
benoau | 6 hours ago
ameliaquining | 5 hours ago
stackskipton | 2 hours ago
bix6 | 5 hours ago
throwup238 | 5 hours ago
leros | 3 hours ago
arjie | 3 hours ago
bluelightning2k | 3 hours ago
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.
bredren | 2 hours ago
The value to the investors also includes the outcome of dealflow resulting from the relationships and network built up along the way.
debarshri | 7 hours ago
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.
bflesch | 5 hours ago
Recent history shows that an idealized view only focusing on fiduciary duty does not capture the whole picture of business in the USA.
sophacles | 4 hours ago
drewda | 6 hours ago
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.
thethimble | 6 hours ago
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.
seanclayton | 6 hours ago
sophacles | 4 hours ago
There were several different hammers there, bearing different branding and having different manufacturers.
I don't quite get the distinction...
senordevnyc | 4 hours ago
pjmlp | 3 hours ago
sofixa | 5 hours ago
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.
benoau | 5 hours ago
overfeed | 6 hours ago
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.
bix6 | 5 hours ago
rconti | 5 hours ago
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).
tdrz | 2 hours ago
ta-run | 7 hours ago
thrownaway561 | 7 hours ago
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.
localhoster | 7 hours ago
rs_rs_rs_rs_rs | 6 hours ago
olingern | 7 hours ago
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.
gowthamgts12 | 7 hours ago
olingern | 7 hours ago
burcs | 6 hours ago
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
runtime_terror | 5 hours ago
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.
burcs | 4 hours ago
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
runtime_terror | 3 hours ago
Thanks Brandon!
encom | 3 hours ago
rglover | 3 hours ago
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.
olingern | 3 hours ago
pier25 | 5 hours ago
That's exactly what they are doing.
tommy_axle | 5 hours ago
outlore | 7 hours ago
chrisweekly | 7 hours ago
nja | 7 hours ago
(Fwiw SDM ended up being a better alternative anyways... not looking forward to their eventual acquisition and shutdown :/ )
freedomben | 6 hours ago
Original blog post of the acquisition of BastionZero: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-acquires-bastionzero/
mynameisvlad | 3 hours ago
> 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?
maherbeg | 7 hours ago
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)
zarzavat | 6 hours ago
I'm all for building things into the language when there's only one way to do it though.
runtime_terror | 5 hours ago
Go is the best example of this; it's boring but incredible stable and consistent
maherbeg | 4 hours ago
rs_rs_rs_rs_rs | 6 hours ago
freedomben | 6 hours ago
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.
stackskipton | 6 hours ago
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...."
valgaze | 6 hours ago
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.
jamwise | 3 hours ago
mikestorrent | 2 hours ago
CharlieDigital | an hour ago
Totally worth the listen.
brikym | 45 minutes ago
joeyhage | 6 hours ago
shimman | 6 hours ago
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.
j_w | 6 hours ago
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."
lanycrost | 6 hours ago
65 | 6 hours ago
TeriyakiBomb | 5 hours ago
"We just ported Vite to ActionScript in 11 minutes, we swear for legit technical reasons"
swe_dima | 5 hours ago
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.
zuzululu | 5 hours ago
ruguo | 5 hours ago
intellix | 5 hours ago
MrToBe | 5 hours ago
MrToBe | 5 hours ago
pier25 | 5 hours ago
Maiko11 | 5 hours ago
ipaddr | 5 hours ago
todotask2 | 5 hours ago
It also came at a time when expectations for the project were starting to increase.
true_religion | 5 hours ago
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.
jerrygenser | 4 hours ago
Uv -> OpenAI
tom1337 | 2 hours ago
ascorbic | 2 hours ago
jphil529 | 4 hours ago
tracerbulletx | 4 hours ago
dzonga | 4 hours ago
opem | 4 hours ago
egorfine | 4 hours ago
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.
mellosouls | 3 hours ago
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.
bluelightning2k | 3 hours ago
The article didn't mention what happens to paying Vite+ users. Is that because there basically aren't any?
bluelightning2k | 3 hours ago
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.
tom1337 | 2 hours ago
alexandre_m | an hour ago
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.
simultsop | 2 hours ago
Brosper | an hour ago
AndreiCalazans | an hour ago
TIPSIO | an hour ago
- 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.
desireco42 | 43 minutes ago
kylecordes | 37 minutes ago