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VOOZH | about |
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VOOZH | about |
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Cloud network security and content delivery network company Cloudflare announced its acquisition of VoidZero this week, and VoidZero founder Evan You and Cloudflare senior director of engineering Steve Faulkner wanted to make one thing clear to the developers who use their tools.
“Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, Oxc, and Vite+ will stay open-source, vendor-agnostic, and community-driven. Nothing about that changes,” write the pair in a blog post.
Known for its JavaScript development ecosystem centered around Vite and Rust-based technologies, VoidZero tools are used across both front-end and back-end web application development.
Known as an acqui-hire (an acquisition to hire), all team members of VoidZero are joining Cloudflare. The company insists that it recognizes a “better Internet is an open Internet” and that the most important tools and frameworks are portable by design. As such, applications built with Vite run anywhere, and they will continue to do so.
The developer community is mixed on this news. Some question whether VoidZero’s original funding partners (led by global venture capital firm Accel alongside a number of angel investors) will be happy about the acquisition, while others simply praise the “beautiful frameworks/tooling” that founder Evan You and his team have cranked out over the years.
More upbeat is debarshri, who reminds us that acquisitions happen for three main reasons: product, talent, or business growth. “In the AI era, some acquisitions happening in this space are 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,” they wrote, suggesting that Cloudflare’s claim to commit to engineering and providing resources to the VoidZero family of projects is substantiated.
On the more skeptical end of the spectrum is embedding-shape, who, as a library/framework/engine/runtime user for the last decade or so, says they have “basically avoided” anything related to VC investments. “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,” they said.
A sharper degree of sarcasm is evident with demetris, who commented that they love Vite, but only when they don’t forget it exists in 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,” they write.
That may be overegging things somewhat. Cloudflare’s January acquisition of content-driven web framework Astro has been viewed as a positive by some, including Yucel F. Sahan, who wrote that he anticipated “Better default deployment paths to Cloudflare [and] more ‘golden paths’ with fewer sharp edges in adapters, [plus] clearer guidance for hybrid rendering and caching.”
As Cloudflare has restated at the point of this VoidZero acquisition, “Astro is still open source, and still deploys anywhere. The team is still shipping the roadmap they were already shipping.”
While all these promises abound, developer nja isn’t convinced; they think that this smells unpleasantly close to when Cloudflare bought BastionZero for its Zero Trust infrastructure access platform.
“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,” wrote nja.
“I’ve seen open source projects get acquired and then seen the promises broken. This matters to me personally… the web only works when its foundational tools and standards stay open, portable, and shared. We aren’t turning it into a Cloudflare product; its value lies in its framework-agnostic nature. My #1 goal is to ensure the project remains healthy, community-driven, and continuously improving for everyone.” —Steve Faulkner, Cloudflare.
Cloudflare engineering director Steve Faulkner tells The New Stack that the team gets it and that they “understand the skepticism” being voiced here among various parties.
“I’ve also seen open source projects get acquired and then seen the promises broken. This matters to me personally, because I’ve built my entire career on the web, and the web only works when its foundational tools and standards stay open, portable, and shared,” Faulkner says. “Vite is now foundational to modern web development, and that includes how it works in its existence at Cloudflare. We aren’t turning it into a Cloudflare product; its value lies in its framework-agnostic nature. My #1 goal is to ensure the project remains healthy, community-driven, and continuously improving for everyone.”
Faulkner rams home his point and reiterates the work carried out with Astro. He says that if anyone is looking for evidence, the company made a similar commitment when Astro joined Cloudflare.
“I think the way that project has continued shows we meant it. We intend to take the same approach here, and people should hold us accountable to that,” he says.
Defensive validations notwithstanding, there are developers out there that think Cloudflare is in the right place. Illustrating just how split opinion really is on this matter, Ocdtrekkie said that “Cloudflare ensures decentralization of the Internet” because it provides an alternative to AWS, Azure and Google Compute Engine (GCE).
“[This] gives your little personal self-hosting box or small VPS the same level of protection the big providers have,” noted Ocdtrekkie. “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.”
“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,” – CodingJeebus.
Summing up the state of the JavaScript shopping cart at a higher level is CodingJeebus, who isn’t happy at all.
“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,” they wrote.
Commenting on the perhaps unwelcome reality of software today, CodingJeebus has suggested that the era and class of open source developers that thanklessly maintained the underlying packages driving the industry are heading for the exits, primarily because 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,” they surmised.
Significant buyouts in the JavaScript space include Anthropic’s consumption of Bun, the all-in-one JavaScript, TypeScript & JSX runtime and toolkit. As a parallel, GitHub acquired npm, which provided Microsoft with closer alignment with the preeminent software registry for Node.js and JavaScript modules.
Slightly further back, web development platform company Netlify acquired Gatsby, a web delivery and content orchestration platform based on JavaScript and TypeScript, or more specifically built on top of the JavaScript user interface library React. For completeness, front-end-as-a-service company Vercel acquired Turborepo, the open-source build system for JavaScript and TypeScript monorepos.
With nerves still raw for some developers in the wake of Cloudflare’s VoidZero acquisition, the company has restated its number one goal is to “maintain the trust” that has earned Vite so much adoption.
Aiming to put its money where its mouth is when it comes to our support for open-source and shared ecosystem foundations, Cloudflare is committing $1 million to a Vite ecosystem fund, administered by the Vite core team, to support maintainers and contributors.
Is everybody happy? Clearly, it’s a case of yes, maybe, and no.
As Cloudflare comes up against key content delivery network competitors such as AWS CloudFront (which will always win for some teams due to its native integration with the AWS ecosystem), Microsoft Azure Front Door, and others such as Akamai, freedom of tooling may be outweighed by incumbent stack footprints as the long-term factor that decides who wins.
