VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare(blog.cloudflare.com) |
VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare(blog.cloudflare.com) |
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.
Thank god i did not use vite for anything serious.
Esbuild is still my goto even after many years.
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.
Flutter hardly matters.
bun, astro, uv ... all acquired.
Ok, what are the alternatives to vite/vitest?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Flutter is the only reason Dart still exists, and in what concerns the Android team, writing cross mobile application, is to be done with Kotlin.
Which contrary to Dart, has a few use cases, besides Android.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://voidzero.dev/posts/announcing-series-a [1] https://voidzero.dev/about
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...."
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?
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.
Absolutely, makes blocking stuff so much easier!
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.
Real life isn't 60's hippies community farms.
There are bills to pay in capitalist societies.
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.
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'm all for building things into the language when there's only one way to do it though.
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.
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.
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
"We just ported Vite to ActionScript in 11 minutes, we swear for legit technical reasons"
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’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.
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.
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."
"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.
That is the definition of making a choice.
This is some incredible mental backflipping to suggest that their choice wasn’t their choice.
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)
Explain how thats not a clear indication of this being a choice and something they agreed to.
However the poor guys also have to legally accept being bought.
Lets not pretend they aren't putting money into the bank.
(Fwiw SDM ended up being a better alternative anyways... not looking forward to their eventual acquisition and shutdown :/ )
Original blog post of the acquisition of BastionZero: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-acquires-bastionzero/
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 too am a bit uneasy. It's not always the case but, corporate ingestion is often where cool projects go to die. The good news about open source is that we have enough Terraform->OpenTofu & Redis->Valkey stories out there.
What kind of things?
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.
It shouldn't. Big corpo buying small companies harms us all long term.
A foundational tool in an open ecosystem doesn't mean a monetisable product. I struggle to think of even a single example of a foundational tool with a business model.
And of course, not everything needs a business model. But if you're getting VC funding, you kind of need one.
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
Wow. Bold opinion. The owners of a company get to decide what to do with it?
I think people just don't want to bother. They don't want to read the docs, or maybe watch a video or two (back when webpack was popular, Sean Larkin, webpack evangelist, made a number of popular courses about setting it up). Also, webpack config became easier compared to 2014/2015; I think they got to practically a zero-config by default.
I can understand that people don't want to care; but "impossible to reason about" is not it. It isn't rust, for crying out loud; nor lisp; nor haskell.
I had access to an Enterprise license in my last job, which was my introduction to Cloudflare — something like 7 years ago — and I just kind of fell in love with the DX and their offerings. It's only improved since then. Like, Cloudflare Workers is actually fucking insane. It's insane how good it is for free. It has a secret vault, dude, for free — with API and CLI. It has cron jobs. You can just assign domains to sites from your DNS zones. It's got blue/green deployments built in. I don't have to SSH into anything. It's just there and it works.
Now everything I do there is free, even for my contract projects, and I can't believe it's free. I actually keep expecting an enshittification phase to begin but it just doesn't ever begin. When it does, I'll bail — same as it ever was. It would take a lot, though.