alt Hacker NewsVoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare
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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
Big fan of Cloudflare and a bigger fan of vite. Probably one of the best outcomes for the latter.
It's always scary to see an open source organization being acquired
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.
Do we have any chance left of using software for our work without Big Tech behind it?
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.
Would be happier with this information if I didn't hate Cloudflare's extortion based business model
The dream has always been a first-class framework for Cloudflare Workers.
- In the earliest days (literally go read their blog posts and GitHub repos), they only ever really did dinky little demo's.
- After and for the longest time, they tried to claim they went "Full Stack" with SSR-able abilities, but they were so terrible back then and not even well integrated into their Worker platform tools.
- This was oddly gray mixed (sometimes?) with Pages messaging which definitely was not full-stack in the sense developers wanted.
- Then getting any of this to work in a dev environment was super difficult as "wrangler dev" was very limited (wrangler is so good now FYI).
- Vercel just kind of ate Cloudflare's lunch here. No shame in it. They just couldn't get it right for developers period.
- Then very quietly "Adapters" came around and basically changed the game. Your code base finally felt portable to Workers with essentially full CF platform support.
- Now we live in AI-age and they bought Astro (?), tried to launch WP clone (?), and vibe-coded Next (?)
Big and long time coming for all of this. It is a super breath of fresh air to see even more improvements will likely come to Workers. Icing on cake is Evan is a legend who has a proven track record of delivering tools people love.
didn't Cloudflare just layoff a few hundred people? odd to see a acqui-hire take place right after that but ok. This is great for Evan You
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 has become a very common occurrence; might be the only sustainable path forward for projects and maintainers. Win-win for all parties involved.
Very happy for them, they made excellent tools and I hope they can continue their work!
I do believe though that these tools (formatting, linting etc.) should be built into the language like Go, and I really hope the Node team can just absorb the best ideas and make solid primitives that can be built on top of as the ecosystem evolves (think golang's http interfaces, or test interfaces)
I stop believing in any new product. The game is to be popular, hire talent and sell to corporate ;(
Had no idea Vite and OXC were made by the same company. Makes so much sense.
I don’t get the complaining about OS developers behind these incredible pieces of software like uv, bun, etc is a bad thing. If anything, it’ll continue to incentivize great developers to fill in the blanks and continue to push things forward. It’s a win for everyone.
I am really happy for the developers.
I'm sad to see these tools go. Vite was a godsend after a zoo of webpack/grunt/etc.
But what will happen is that new sane tool will come up once vite dissolves and that's the never ending cycle.
Sponsorships are obviously not enough, and not every open source tool has some obvious hosting product to sell. A lot of this stuff is basically public infrastructure now, but we still fund it like a side project.
Everyone's trying to build end to end agent -> prod platforms and wants to own the tooling for the dev environment part of that.
Guess I was right to be suspicious: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48213860
Vite is great. Vite+ seemed to offer very little added value and was paid for (or was going to be one day?).
The article didn't mention what happens to paying Vite+ users. Is that because there basically aren't any?
I remember thinking that they were making great software, but finding revenue to make the investment payoff could be quite challenging. Looks like that's been solved.
Well at least this time we don’t have to worry about them rewriting their tooling in Rust
Amazing acquisition for Cloudflare.
Unpleasantly close to when Cloudflare bought BastionZero... the promises quickly fell away, the tool decayed (I found three serious bugs in one single week...and they had stopped even bothering to publish changelogs), and Cloudflare eventually gave us a "hey, we're actually shutting this down in a month, good luck" email prompting a scramble to rewire all of our infrastructure.
(Fwiw SDM ended up being a better alternative anyways... not looking forward to their eventual acquisition and shutdown :/ )
Cloudflare acquiring Astro and VoidZero was unexpected. I’ve been using Astro for a solo project, which made things easier to manage.
It also came at a time when expectations for the project were starting to increase.
> Cloudflare's mission is to help build a better Internet. And a better Internet is an open Internet. Developers need choice, frameworks need a neutral foundation, and applications need to be portable. It is not reasonable to expect the entire web ecosystem to build around a single vendor.
Already at this point, I start thinking that they're turning Vite into a foundation, or donating it to the Linux Foundation, or something like that. "foundation" is mentioned 10 times in total in various ways, but then some actual foundation creation/handover never came up. Even when they themselves state how important it is developers have choice and everything shouldn't centralized around a single vendor. Deeply ironic.
This goes down the same path. Every. Time.
Thank god i did not use vite for anything serious.
Esbuild is still my goto even after many years.
Bummer. The Vite ecosystem is fantastic, and VoidZero's tools are all world-class (vite, vitest, oxcfmt, oxclint,...), but I wish they'd remain(ed) independent.
First Bun went to Anthropic. Then Astro and now VoidZero to Cloudflare. Feels like all my favorite open-source projects are getting adopted by the giants.
The question I have is: Is Vite becoming the all-in-one nodejs tool that is replacing all the other full featured js tooling favorites like Bun, Deno and pnpm?
That was evident. It was designed that way :) Congrats.
I hate company acquisitions.
Not for the aquire-ee(?), I'm not going to be a hypocrite and claim I wouldn't take the payout if I were in that position. But that companies can build massive moats by just buying up as many other companies as possible.
I don't even feel like I can make a "good" argument for it either. Massive companies becoming more massive through acquisitions just feels wrong, like the end game won't work out well for the commons.
I assume the point here is that now Cloudflare can try and push more Vite users into their ecosystem? Nudge the development to integrate better with their products? They say they are moving towards Vite, not Vite moving towards Cloudflare, but ultimately <tool> moves in the direction <owner> decides - even if it's "developed openly."
5 years too late. at most this acquisition should've happened before Cloudflare went all in on workers.
I thought they're gonna build their own hosting platform eventually. Where is the fun in this :(
Congrats to the team.
I appreciate Cloudflare's loud positive proclamation here wrt the OS future; I know scepticism is warranted with some takeovers but although there might be a trend towards Cloudflare fit over the long term that's very different from closing down or abandonment so this generally seems positive to me - best wishes to all parties.
Interesting acquisition. Curious how VoidZero's tech will integrate with Cloudflare's stack.
Congratulations to the team! I hope Evan and others got fabulously rich, they deserve it!
Hope it will help to make workers and pages toolset more robust and better.
If it was invariably going to be acquired, Cloudflare is certainly better than Microsoft, Anthropic, or private equity.
All of them are getting acquired nothing bad in that but I feel like the path to revenue with open source just isn't viable anymore. You have to build your own platform like vercel, or build great dev tools like mintlify
"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.