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.
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.
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".
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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".
This one is particularly interesting given that Vercel products (Nuxt) now rely on a competitor's tooling (Vite).
Yeah. I don't want to sound selfish, but now I need to make plans to eventually migrate off of vite.
This has become a very common occurrence; might be the only sustainable path forward for projects and maintainers. Win-win for all parties involved.
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.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
+200 people/orgs are listed as vite github sponsors
How many FTEs does that pay for?
People will pay out of the nose for software if they find it useful enough.
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.
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.
Will it be the next Bun?
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.
> 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)
> 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
That is what being employed means, otherwise own the business.
> 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?
> 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.
It is by choice, though? VoidZero was well-capitalized and could easily have continued to raise money for the foreseeable.
Do we have any chance left of using software for our work without Big Tech behind it?
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.
“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.
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.
Yes, pay for its development.
That's as easy as making new Vite. :) Which is hard, not easy but my point stands.
Fork?
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
not if our current trajectory stays undisturbed
https://templeos.org/
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.
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.
Just use Vite Plus (viteplus.dev)
Vite is unmatched
vite just works
Nope, mostly using pnpm over here.
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.
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.
That was evident. It was designed that way :) Congrats.
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.
Amazing acquisition for Cloudflare.
Congratulations to the team! I hope Evan and others got fabulously rich, they deserve it!
Great grab for cloudflare tbh. Excited to see where this goes :)
> 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?
Vibe coded rewrite in rust upcoming!
These tools are already written in rust.
see also https://voidzero.dev/posts/voidzero-cloudflare & https://vite.dev/blog/cloudflare-supports-vite
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.
Ironically, Lit that was created by Google isn't maintained by it anymore. The project is, unfortunately, almost dead tho
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.
So it's Vue vs Next now?
Vite is now common for everything not Next (even can do Next).
Vue vs React
Vite vs Next
Cool.
ok good for them.
bun, astro, uv ... all acquired.
Ok, what are the alternatives to vite/vitest?
Web components and Jest I suppose.
Esbuild. Rock solid tech.
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.
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.
Alright, so, how long until the current Vite codebase is replaced by a vibe coded Rust port? I give it a month or two.
As mentioned, Vite is already Rust, plus the same developers (the subject of the news) have developed https://viteplus.dev/
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.
> 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.