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In many cases the acquiring company shares investors or board members with the acqui-hired entity.

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.

> Must be a pretty nice sum for them to agree to it

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.

My guess is investors are getting a good return on investment so they are probably pretty happy.

I mean, the alternative is a whole bunch of BS dealing with funding, global compliance and sales, public markets, etc.

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).

Acquisition happen for 3 reasons.

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.

> 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

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.

sorry to hear that's been your experience. i actually joined through an acquisition about a year ago and one of the main things we've been focused on is the dashboard and overall dx.

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

Vite is great and vite 8 was a huge speed-up so definitely a nice win for them. Remaining independent is always great but at the same time there are other "new homes" that could be worse so let's keep our fingers crossed and hope it works out.

> Maybe they should invest money in competing with Vercel on UX/DX

That's exactly what they are doing.

their reliability is also way way down lately. too many mishaps and i've long lost trust in CF.

> 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.

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".

This one is particularly interesting given that Vercel products (Nuxt) now rely on a competitor's tooling (Vite).

I've loved Vite from the moment it was public. I also tried Snowpack back in the day. (fun story that Fred "fks" went on to create Astro after Snowpack didn't gain traction). The fact that we can "just forget it exists" is a major win in my case. Webpack - while maybe a win over Grunt/Gulp, was MASSIVELY complex.

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.

> It took things that made you feel mentally deficient and made them almost zero-config.

What kind of things?

> This news does not make me happy.

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

Yeah. I don't want to sound selfish, but now I need to make plans to eventually migrate off of vite.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

I think this frames the tools too narrowly.

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.

A lot of these very popular FOSS products/frameworks simply are the worst ways to make money. You are selling to a demographic that doesn't want to pay for the tools and value they get. You end up competing against your own free version that can now be modified with a bit of AI agent session to get feature parity.

>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...."

What do you like about Cloudfare? Do you like the centralization of the internet?

Yeah but people don't want to pay for software so all open source is basically subsidized.

That is what happens when no one wants to pay for their tools.

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

There are bills to pay in capitalist societies.

Python but also add

Uv -> OpenAI

Yes. Pay for software from independent developers and small businesses. The entire reason big tech is where it is is because nobody wants to pay for software, and big tech is the way to make money off of "free" software. Software developers need money to eat, so this is the inevitable result of demanding everything for free. Actions meet consequences.

That's as easy as making new Vite. :) Which is hard, not easy but my point stands.

Linux has Big Tech behind it too and few complain about that.

Yes, pay for its development.

why does it matter?

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

not if our current trajectory stays undisturbed

https://templeos.org/

It took the JS community many iterations to get to vite. Building it into the language just means you get stuck with a "good enough" solution that survives by inertia. We'd still be using webpack.

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

Vue has always handled things well when dealing with cross framework stuff due to their back and forth with Angular for being the go-to number 2.

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.

IMO perfect for Vue (and similar for Vite). All the talented folks working together.

Vercel is killing free public repos in a month. Lure then lock in and pull the rug out.

This is why we need to start advocating more public investment into open source technology. Imagine how much better the state of our industry would be if we gave 100,000 open source developers a $100,000 grant. This modest $10,000,000,000 fund would be extremely tiny compared to the bloated private research we see annually at corporations.

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.

OXC predates VoidZero and is made by Boshen. Evan had to try for a while until he was able to convince Boshen to join them. OXC is the best of the JS toolchains implemented in Rust, so it was definitely a scoop.

> As if they chose to do that. Yes, they agreed to it,

That is the definition of making a choice.

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

> Evan and the rest of the VoidZero team continue to lead Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, Oxc, and Vite+.

Explain how thats not a clear indication of this being a choice and something they agreed to.

1) The blog post mentions "acquisition" multiple times. 2) VoidZero joins Cloudflare is still correct. Nobody forced anyone to accept a deal and do so

Yes, people love to blame the Microsoft's, Google's, Apple's and co.

However the poor guys also have to legally accept being bought.

Lets not pretend they aren't putting money into the bank.

It is by choice, though? VoidZero was well-capitalized and could easily have continued to raise money for the foreseeable.

Vite is not a package manager and is not a JS runtime. That's what Node/Bun/Deno do. Vite is the remaining glue for any web project's build and testing needs.

Just use Vite Plus (viteplus.dev)

Vite is unmatched

vite just works

Nope, mostly using pnpm over here.

nobody wants it

Thanks for the example. I'm skeptical of the claims that "nothing will change" but want to believe them, and examples are the only real data to go on (feels/vibes aren't data), so thank you.

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

What do you mean? Their tools are mostly Rust already :)

Same here. I prefer bet on community-led projects like Node.js, ESbuild and BiomeJS (or Prettier / eslint).

Vite is a multi stakeholder team. How would that happen?

Not so much about the tech as it's about the talent they aquired.

Vite is now common for everything not Next (even can do Next).

Vue vs React

Vite vs Next

What’s the Google one? Flutter?

Ironically, Lit that was created by Google isn't maintained by it anymore. The project is, unfortunately, almost dead tho

Web components and Jest I suppose.

Esbuild. Rock solid tech.

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.

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.

Huh? Vite is already powered by a huge Rust codebase now that the release of v8.0 is live. They spent years developing their own parser and tooling to make it all possible.

As mentioned, Vite is already Rust, plus the same developers (the subject of the news) have developed https://viteplus.dev/

Probably in a year or two. Look at bun, same will happen to vite.

These tools are already written in rust.

just wondering... do you think bun's rewrite with ai was vibe coded or engineered with ai? i know it wasn't perfect in the beginning but i think it was good engineering and what was built will make it faster and better.

afaik Void Cloud never went GA

Why not setup proper no profit foundations instead of VC-funded for profits then?

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.

This would happen even if developers were paying, because a 100 billion dollar corporation like Cloudflare can always pay more.

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.