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.
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.
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.
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.
Would be happier with this information if I didn't hate Cloudflare's extortion based business model
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.
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 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
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)
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.
This has become a very common occurrence; might be the only sustainable path forward for projects and maintainers. Win-win for all parties involved.
Do we have any chance left of using software for our work without Big Tech behind it?
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?
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.
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.
When will deno be bought
Well at least this time we don’t have to worry about them rewriting their tooling in Rust
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.
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.
Amazing acquisition for Cloudflare.
Hope it will help to make workers and pages toolset more robust and better.
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 :/ )
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?
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."
That was evident. It was designed that way :) Congrats.
Congratulations to the team! I hope Evan and others got fabulously rich, they deserve 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.
> Before saying anything else, we want to make the most important thing clear: Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, Oxc, and Vite+ will stay open source, vendor-agnostic, and community-driven. Nothing about that changes.
Given how every single acquisition like this has gone, especially lately, I look forward to seeing how quickly these products get left behind and unmaintained as their entire team move onto things at CF.
I 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"
Great grab for cloudflare tbh. Excited to see where this goes :)
Interesting acquisition. Curious how VoidZero's tech will integrate with Cloudflare's stack.
If it was invariably going to be acquired, Cloudflare is certainly better than Microsoft, Anthropic, or private equity.
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.
Cool.
So now each major SPA framework belongs to a cloud provider, Vercel, Cloudflare and Google.
ok good for them.
bun, astro, uv ... all acquired.
Ok, what are the alternatives to vite/vitest?
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"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.