VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare

Totally worth the listen.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

Most of the time, it doesn’t. But it can.

I think Voidzero was already adrift without a plan and this acquihire is literally just that, new employment for the people behind it.

Maybe Cloudflare will allow them to maintain oxc, but expect them to writing features for Cloudflare Workers from now on.

That's exactly what they are doing.

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.

I don't know what to feel about this news, especially since migrating to from vite 7 to vite 8 broke my project in ways that were not documented, but I'm remaining cautiously optimistic.

Happy for Evan regardless.

It shouldn't. Big corpo buying small companies harms us all long term.

What kind of things?

there's plenty of places for these tools to go, but none of them have any appetite to go there. likely because people already have something that's so "good enough" that they don't even bother looking for what "could be better". obviously exacerbated by the management class of development outfits deciding that developers shouldn't actually touch the codebase anymore, in lieu of LLMs doing the actual lifting, so they're building out all kinds of chicanerous nonsense to satisfy "agents". and that doesn't necessarily make things more difficult for devs, but that seems to be the trend. forcing your LLM to comply with tortured and arcane concatenations of character-perfect strings is so much easier than having it navigate anything like a filthy human. so the practical result is less accommodating stuff for humans and more accommodating stuff for robots.

all of which is to say: I disagree. I think there's things they could meaningfully achieve for humans. And I think they are deeply uninterested in doing those things.

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.

I do agree with your underlying argument, though. It will likely help them gain market share for hosting web applications, which is increasing with LLM usage.

Uv -> OpenAI

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...."

Real life isn't 60's hippies community farms.

There are bills to pay in capitalist societies.

That is the definition of making a choice.

This is some incredible mental backflipping to suggest that their choice wasn’t their choice.

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.

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

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.

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 don't understand, the existing licenses say that, and courts uphold them to say that. If a company has given code to you under an OSS license, that code is yours under that license forever. There'd be no point in trying to bind a person to give you all their future creative output for free just because they had given some of it to you for free. That'd be awful! And anyway we don't need courts to fix this because people can fix it just by helping each other maintain open software

The Linux kernel is GPL with likely at least hundreds of copyright holders and no CLA, that means there is no way for someone to say "I am the legal owner and the new development will be under a proprietary license".

I'm all for building things into the language when there's only one way to do it though.

> 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?

Original blog post of the acquisition of BastionZero: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-acquires-bastionzero/

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.

Vite vs Next

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.