Evidently Evan You was an Art History + Studio Art and major and at Parsons School he had to pick up javascript to quickly show his work. During a stint at Creativelab5 at Google, he was so inspired to improve on AngularJS experience that he came up with Vue and the rest is history.
I have no idea what this Cloudflare acquisition will ultimately mean but I know I am so very grateful for the beautiful frameworks/tooling Evan and his team have cranked out over the years.
Evan has done really great work. I haven't used Vue extensively (not my company's stack) but am a huge fan of Vite and it has helped our React pipeline a lot. I've also recently started playing around with CloudFlare pages and workers and it's already such a pain-free process to get basic apps up and running, I imagine this collab will make my life easier.
So is the business model of these projects - 1. build a popular dev tool 2. aquire funding 3. hire great talent 4. pray for an aqui-hire that justifies the initial funding amount
I wonder how the initial investors feel about the aqui-hire path... Must be a pretty nice sum for them to agree to it, or they saw that the path to any revenue was near impossible/non-existant
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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'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.
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'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.
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.
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.
A lot of these very popular FOSS products/frameworks simply are the worst ways to make money. You are selling to a demographic that doesn't want to pay for the tools and value they get. You end up competing against your own free version that can now be modified with a bit of AI agent session to get feature parity.
> Before saying anything else, we want to make the most important thing clear: Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, Oxc, and Vite+ will stay open source, vendor-agnostic, and community-driven. Nothing about that changes.
Appreciate them putting that so clearly. I am highly skeptical of acquisitions now because we've been burned so many times in the past. Time will tell if this stays true, but at least it's clearly on the record. Would love to know if this is in contract/writing somewhere as part of the acquisition.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Very happy for them, they made excellent tools and I hope they can continue their work!
I do believe though that these tools (formatting, linting etc.) should be built into the language like Go, and I really hope the Node team can just absorb the best ideas and make solid primitives that can be built on top of as the ecosystem evolves (think golang's http interfaces, or test interfaces)
It took the JS community many iterations to get to vite. Building it into the language just means you get stuck with a "good enough" solution that survives by inertia. We'd still be using webpack.
I'm all for building things into the language when there's only one way to do it though.
for sure! but there are lots of incremental shareable primitives that could help. I think about go's built in testing tools that can get extended as an example
Had no idea Vite and OXC were made by the same company. Makes so much sense.
I don’t get the complaining about OS developers behind these incredible pieces of software like uv, bun, etc is a bad thing. If anything, it’ll continue to incentivize great developers to fill in the blanks and continue to push things forward. It’s a win for everyone.
OXC predates VoidZero and is made by Boshen. Evan had to try for a while until he was able to convince Boshen to join them. OXC is the best of the JS toolchains implemented in Rust, so it was definitely a scoop.
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.
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
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.
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 :/ )
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?
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.
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.
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
The question I have is: Is Vite becoming the all-in-one nodejs tool that is replacing all the other full featured js tooling favorites like Bun, Deno and pnpm?
Vite is not a package manager and is not a JS runtime. That's what Node/Bun/Deno do. Vite is the remaining glue for any web project's build and testing needs.
Not for the aquire-ee(?), I'm not going to be a hypocrite and claim I wouldn't take the payout if I were in that position. But that companies can build massive moats by just buying up as many other companies as possible.
I don't even feel like I can make a "good" argument for it either. Massive companies becoming more massive through acquisitions just feels wrong, like the end game won't work out well for the commons.
I assume the point here is that now Cloudflare can try and push more Vite users into their ecosystem? Nudge the development to integrate better with their products? They say they are moving towards Vite, not Vite moving towards Cloudflare, but ultimately <tool> moves in the direction <owner> decides - even if it's "developed openly."
> 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.
Huh? Vite is already powered by a huge Rust codebase now that the release of v8.0 is live. They spent years developing their own parser and tooling to make it all possible.
just wondering... do you think bun's rewrite with ai was vibe coded or engineered with ai? i know it wasn't perfect in the beginning but i think it was good engineering and what was built will make it faster and better.
For anyone pissing on this, you have to remember one thing... time equals money and, as someone who spent 7 years building an open source project, you make almost ZERO from doing it. At the end, if you want to continue the project, you have to sell your soul somehow, either by doing a paid tier, consulting or getting corporate sponsorship. Unless you are one of the VERY lucky ones that does the coding on the side while having a full time job (which I was in the VERY fortunate position to be in at the time).
It's going to come down to "can I afford to keep doing this for nothing"?
So for all you high and mighty people calling them sell outs and what not, I would love to see how much you've been contributing to the project in order for it to keep going.
I think what CloudFlare is doing is a good thing. They get a tremendous team that they can have help work on their infrastructure while keeping the open source projects alive.
This is what happens when developers do not pay for their tools. Companies instead take full control over it and the team then loses their independence.
Just like Bun, Astral and Astro, did VoidZero ever make any money?
If not then this is why open source alone is unsustainable, especially in the age of AI.
> 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.
"Vue.js: JavaScript MVVM made simple (vuejs.org)" February 3, 2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7169288
Evidently Evan You was an Art History + Studio Art and major and at Parsons School he had to pick up javascript to quickly show his work. During a stint at Creativelab5 at Google, he was so inspired to improve on AngularJS experience that he came up with Vue and the rest is history.
I have no idea what this Cloudflare acquisition will ultimately mean but I know I am so very grateful for the beautiful frameworks/tooling Evan and his team have cranked out over the years.
Evan has done really great work. I haven't used Vue extensively (not my company's stack) but am a huge fan of Vite and it has helped our React pipeline a lot. I've also recently started playing around with CloudFlare pages and workers and it's already such a pain-free process to get basic apps up and running, I imagine this collab will make my life easier.
Vite is great. Vite+ seemed to offer very little added value and was paid for (or was going to be one day?).
The article didn't mention what happens to paying Vite+ users. Is that because there basically aren't any?
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
In many cases the acquiring company shares investors or board members with the acqui-hired entity.
To put it neutrally, VC partners are treating these are parts of their same portfolios, so if one team doesn't pan out on its own, it can be merged into another with somewhat similar overall goals or markets.
To put it more pointedly, it's perhaps all about who one knows and making sure that everyone gets to tell a story of successful exits.
> it's perhaps all about who one knows and making sure that everyone gets to tell a story of successful exits.
No. It's all about building a great product that people love. Vite is a foundational tool in the JS ecosystem.
Acquihiring the tool/team is entirely downstream from creating a foundational product.
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> Must be a pretty nice sum for them to agree to it
Not necessarily: if the investors don't agree to a reasonable amount, the wanna-be acquirer will simply hire the entire team with generous sign-on bonuses, and the investors will be left with a shell of a company.
In this case, the core product is MIT-licensed, the team can quit on a Friday and pick up exactly where they left off under a new org on Monday.
Not necessarily. There are likely key person clauses in the prior round docs.
My guess is investors are getting a good return on investment so they are probably pretty happy.
They've raised over $16 million [0]. For a decent 3-5x return for that, they would need to have been acquired for around ~$50 million. For a team of 19 [1], thats around $2.5 million per employee for Cloudflare. Worth it? no idea
[0] https://voidzero.dev/posts/announcing-series-a [1] https://voidzero.dev/about
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Acquisition happen for 3 reasons.
1. Product 2. Talent 3. Business/growth
In the AI era, some of acquisition happening in the space is for talent and product.
In this case, it looks like it was that. Vite is a great product they were able to build a great team.
You would be surprised how much of a premium companies can pay for talent.
Your listing is not exhaustive - startups can also be acquired for politics, for marketing purposes, whatever. There is a lot of meat space things going on in the upper echelons of the US tech industry.
Recent history shows that an idealized view only focusing on fiduciary duty does not capture the whole picture of business in the USA.
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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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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Thank you for saying this and being willing to listen.
The worst one I saw is the load balancer config UX/DX. I use CF's load balancer product for clients and so have to do a lot of setup and teardown back-and-forth. Everything related to setting up load balancers is split across multiple screens and/or "wizards" that are extremely confusing.
A lot of the error messages you get are generic at best and so you waste a ton of time clicking between pages and tabs just to set up some pools and attach them to a load balancer.
There's also some inconsistency between how things are labeled, so one thing can have two names and you have to hold that in your head while you move around the UI.
Email in profile if you'd like to chat further.
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.
> Maybe they should invest money in competing with Vercel on UX/DX
That's exactly what they are doing.
their reliability is also way way down lately. too many mishaps and i've long lost trust in CF.
Yes. We’re beginning the process of moving away because of how they’ve become a single point failure that’s unreliable. AWS is more reliable and it’s a bad spot to be in when your CDN / router is down but your actual application is fine
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.
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.
> 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).
Both are more reliant on V8 derivatives hence Google which they very much compete with.
I've loved Vite from the moment it was public. I also tried Snowpack back in the day. (fun story that Fred "fks" went on to create Astro after Snowpack didn't gain traction). The fact that we can "just forget it exists" is a major win in my case. Webpack - while maybe a win over Grunt/Gulp, was MASSIVELY complex.
I too am a bit uneasy. It's not always the case but, corporate ingestion is often where cool projects go to die. The good news about open source is that we have enough Terraform->OpenTofu & Redis->Valkey stories out there.
> Webpack - while maybe a win over Grunt/Gulp, was MASSIVELY complex.
and slow
> It took things that made you feel mentally deficient and made them almost zero-config.
What kind of things?
What chrisweekly said:
Configuring webpack, mostly. :-D
That’s not a dig at webpack: Those tools are super complex, and hiding complexity from the user is not easy. But it seems that with Vite we finally got there.
I'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.
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Yeah. I don't want to sound selfish, but now I need to make plans to eventually migrate off of vite.
Migrate off vite to what exactly? I just migrated a personal project to vite and it simplified the existing webpack thing drastically, I was very impressed.
> This news does not make me happy.
It shouldn't. Big corpo buying small companies harms us all long term.
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.
I think this frames the tools too narrowly.
If Vite, Bun and uv were just "make builds faster" projects, then maybe the returns are diminishing. But the acquisitions by Cloudflare, Anthropic and OpenAI suggest this layer is becoming more strategic, not less.
These tools sit in the software supply chain: dependency resolution, project structure, tests, builds, runtimes, deployment paths and increasingly AI-agent execution loops. They define the default path for building software, and they are where AI-generated code gets tested against real dependencies, builds, tests and deployment constraints.
So I don’t think they’ve achieved all they meaningfully can. The value is shifting from raw build speed to control over the workflow layer where software is assembled.
Love Vite, but always felt sorry for them because it was not clear how they can make money, the whole VoidZero thing felt like a stretch.
It's one of those things that always stopped me from building cool tools - you have to make a living somehow.
So I am happy for the team of builders that they were able to receive the deserved payout and sustainability.
A lot of these very popular FOSS products/frameworks simply are the worst ways to make money. You are selling to a demographic that doesn't want to pay for the tools and value they get. You end up competing against your own free version that can now be modified with a bit of AI agent session to get feature parity.
> Before saying anything else, we want to make the most important thing clear: Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, Oxc, and Vite+ will stay open source, vendor-agnostic, and community-driven. Nothing about that changes.
Appreciate them putting that so clearly. I am highly skeptical of acquisitions now because we've been burned so many times in the past. Time will tell if this stays true, but at least it's clearly on the record. Would love to know if this is in contract/writing somewhere as part of the acquisition.
>Would love to know if this is in contract/writing somewhere as part of the acquisition.
Cloudflare would be insane to allow that provision in the contract or acquisition documents.
So I would take that promise as "will stay open source, blah blah blah, for now...."
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 for the record,
NPM -> Microsoft
Vite -> Cloudflare
Bun -> Anthropic
Turbopack -> Vercel
Remix -> Shopify (I barely remember this one)
Biome (formerly Rome) -> Indie but largely supported by Depot
SWC -> Indie
esBuild -> Indie
I use RsBuild/RsPack which is ByteDance supported.
Python but also add
Uv -> OpenAI
Congrats to the team.
I appreciate Cloudflare's loud positive proclamation here wrt the OS future; I know scepticism is warranted with some takeovers but although there might be a trend towards Cloudflare fit over the long term that's very different from closing down or abandonment so this generally seems positive to me - best wishes to all parties.
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
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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.
People will pay out of the nose for software if they find it useful enough.
That is what happens when no one wants to pay for their tools.
Real life isn't 60's hippies community farms.
There are bills to pay in capitalist societies.
There you go. I said this as well and no-one here can explain how these open source dev tools companies are making any money with their open source products.
Now they are surprised to see that acquisitions like this are happening and "open source" has given this entitlement on developers to believe that it is "free" when someone always ends up paying.
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?
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.
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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.
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For your first question:
- The workers platform is quite pleasant to work with compared to competitors. - Globally deploying edge workers which have access to their many services (D1, R2, DO, etc) - Having the ability to assemble globally distributed workers using bindings is dead simple - Their CI pipeline, while limited, is easy to setup and run and keeps improving - Their pricing is extremely competitive
For your second:
- That's my biggest conflict with using any service (Cloudflare, AWS, Azure, etc). Don't have a good answer with what to do about it considering for many projects I don't have the time/energy to fully self host everything.
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.
>Do you like the centralization of the internet?
Absolutely, makes blocking stuff so much easier!
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.
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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.
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Would be happier with this information if I didn't hate Cloudflare's extortion based business model
I am really happy for the developers.
I'm sad to see these tools go. Vite was a godsend after a zoo of webpack/grunt/etc.
But what will happen is that new sane tool will come up once vite dissolves and that's the never ending cycle.
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.
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“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.
That's as easy as making new Vite. :) Which is hard, not easy but my point stands.
Fork?
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.
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/
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.
Very happy for them, they made excellent tools and I hope they can continue their work!
I do believe though that these tools (formatting, linting etc.) should be built into the language like Go, and I really hope the Node team can just absorb the best ideas and make solid primitives that can be built on top of as the ecosystem evolves (think golang's http interfaces, or test interfaces)
It took the JS community many iterations to get to vite. Building it into the language just means you get stuck with a "good enough" solution that survives by inertia. We'd still be using webpack.
I'm all for building things into the language when there's only one way to do it though.
Counter point; good enough is often... good enough
Go is the best example of this; it's boring but incredible stable and consistent
for sure! but there are lots of incremental shareable primitives that could help. I think about go's built in testing tools that can get extended as an example
This has become a very common occurrence; might be the only sustainable path forward for projects and maintainers. Win-win for all parties involved.
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.
Everything Cloudflare is announcing could have been done without acquiring VoidZero. The part they aren’t saying is the greater influence they will have on the roadmap and protecting themselves from someone else acquiring vite and making it closed source and/or monetizing it. We’ve seen it so many times - a project promises to stay free and open source, but things change. Are there any licenses or contracts that a project could use and would hold up in court that they need to stay FOSS forever?
This is why we need to start advocating more public investment into open source technology. Imagine how much better the state of our industry would be if we gave 100,000 open source developers a $100,000 grant. This modest $10,000,000,000 fund would be extremely tiny compared to the bloated private research we see annually at corporations.
Such a wasted amount of capital doing fuck all when there can be real value and economic gain if we supported open source without the influence of VC + big tech that seem to want a return to feudalism, exacerbate the climate crisis, and hoard as much wealth as possible.
A better world is possible.
Everyone's trying to build end to end agent -> prod platforms and wants to own the tooling for the dev environment part of that.
All of them are getting acquired nothing bad in that but I feel like the path to revenue with open source just isn't viable anymore. You have to build your own platform like vercel, or build great dev tools like mintlify
Vercel is killing free public repos in a month. Lure then lock in and pull the rug out.
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)
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> 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.
Cloudflare acquiring Astro and VoidZero was unexpected. I’ve been using Astro for a solo project, which made things easier to manage.
It also came at a time when expectations for the project were starting to increase.
I thought they're gonna build their own hosting platform eventually. Where is the fun in this :(
5 years too late. at most this acquisition should've happened before Cloudflare went all in on workers.
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.
Well at least this time we don’t have to worry about them rewriting their tooling in Rust
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 :/ )
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?
Thanks for the example. I'm skeptical of the claims that "nothing will change" but want to believe them, and examples are the only real data to go on (feels/vibes aren't data), so thank you.
Original blog post of the acquisition of BastionZero: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-acquires-bastionzero/
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.
Amazing acquisition for Cloudflare.
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
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.
That's orthogonal; Vite (and its ecosystem) _with_ pnpm is likely the best combination avlbl.
Hope it will help to make workers and pages toolset more robust and better.
That was evident. It was designed that way :) Congrats.
I hate company acquisitions.
Not for the aquire-ee(?), I'm not going to be a hypocrite and claim I wouldn't take the payout if I were in that position. But that companies can build massive moats by just buying up as many other companies as possible.
I don't even feel like I can make a "good" argument for it either. Massive companies becoming more massive through acquisitions just feels wrong, like the end game won't work out well for the commons.
I assume the point here is that now Cloudflare can try and push more Vite users into their ecosystem? Nudge the development to integrate better with their products? They say they are moving towards Vite, not Vite moving towards Cloudflare, but ultimately <tool> moves in the direction <owner> decides - even if it's "developed openly."
Will it be the next Bun?
What do you mean? Their tools are mostly Rust already :)
Congratulations to the team! I hope Evan and others got fabulously rich, they deserve it!
When will deno be bought?
nobody wants it
This goes down the same path. Every. Time.
Thank god i did not use vite for anything serious.
Esbuild is still my goto even after many years.
Same here. I prefer bet on community-led projects like Node.js, ESbuild and BiomeJS (or Prettier / eslint).
Great grab for cloudflare tbh. Excited to see where this goes :)
If it was invariably going to be acquired, Cloudflare is certainly better than Microsoft, Anthropic, or private equity.
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.
see also https://voidzero.dev/posts/voidzero-cloudflare & https://vite.dev/blog/cloudflare-supports-vite
I just hope there's not some bullshit publicity stunt coming in a few weeks.
"We just ported Vite to ActionScript in 11 minutes, we swear for legit technical reasons"
When will deno be bought
I knew this was going to happen the moment they mentioned in a demo that Void, their development platform, was build on top of Cloudflare.
> Before saying anything else, we want to make the most important thing clear: Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, Oxc, and Vite+ will stay open source, vendor-agnostic, and community-driven. Nothing about that changes.
Given how every single acquisition like this has gone, especially lately, I look forward to seeing how quickly these products get left behind and unmaintained as their entire team move onto things at CF.
Vite is a multi stakeholder team. How would that happen?
I suppose we'll just have to see if it does.
Cool.
So it's Vue vs Next now?
Vite is now common for everything not Next (even can do Next).
Vue vs React
Vite vs Next
I think Nuxt would be the comparison to Next. I.e. a Framework and a build tool (this bit is Vite)
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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.
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Ironically, Lit that was created by Google isn't maintained by it anymore. The project is, unfortunately, almost dead tho
Most of matters has landed on Web Components anyway, and that is fully supported on Angular, contrary to React.
yeah SSR is still marked as experimental after like 3-4 years
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.
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Alright, so, how long until the current Vite codebase is replaced by a vibe coded Rust port? I give it a month or two.
Huh? Vite is already powered by a huge Rust codebase now that the release of v8.0 is live. They spent years developing their own parser and tooling to make it all possible.
As mentioned, Vite is already Rust, plus the same developers (the subject of the news) have developed https://viteplus.dev/
Probably in a year or two. Look at bun, same will happen to vite.
Vibe coded rewrite in rust upcoming!
These tools are already written in rust.
just wondering... do you think bun's rewrite with ai was vibe coded or engineered with ai? i know it wasn't perfect in the beginning but i think it was good engineering and what was built will make it faster and better.
For anyone pissing on this, you have to remember one thing... time equals money and, as someone who spent 7 years building an open source project, you make almost ZERO from doing it. At the end, if you want to continue the project, you have to sell your soul somehow, either by doing a paid tier, consulting or getting corporate sponsorship. Unless you are one of the VERY lucky ones that does the coding on the side while having a full time job (which I was in the VERY fortunate position to be in at the time).
It's going to come down to "can I afford to keep doing this for nothing"?
So for all you high and mighty people calling them sell outs and what not, I would love to see how much you've been contributing to the project in order for it to keep going.
I think what CloudFlare is doing is a good thing. They get a tremendous team that they can have help work on their infrastructure while keeping the open source projects alive.
This is what happens when developers do not pay for their tools. Companies instead take full control over it and the team then loses their independence.
Just like Bun, Astral and Astro, did VoidZero ever make any money?
If not then this is why open source alone is unsustainable, especially in the age of AI.
afaik Void Cloud never went GA
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.
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.
> 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.