Big Tech Is Buying Up Open Source... Vite Is Next
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00:00:00Cloudflare just bought VoidZero, the company behind Vite for Test, Rolldown, and OXC,
00:00:04basically half the modern JavaScript toolchain, and naturally with news like this,
00:00:08the internet has its opinions, so let's just dive in and see what Cloudflare is promising here,
00:00:12and whether we should be worried, or if it could actually be good news.
00:00:20So the entire VoidZero company is joining Cloudflare, Evan Yu included,
00:00:24and all of the tools like Vite for Test, Rolldown, OXC, and Vite Plus are going along with it.
00:00:29Just to be extra clear though, Vue is not included as part of this deal,
00:00:32that remains completely separate and community governed.
00:00:35Now obviously when something like this happens, one of the first things they say is that nothing is going to change.
00:00:40All of that project is going to remain open source, stay vendor agnostic, and remain community driven.
00:00:45They also put a million dollars into a separate V ecosystem fund,
00:00:48which is going to be run by the core team, and used to pay maintainers and contributors,
00:00:52which I do think is a pretty nice touch.
00:00:55Out of the two companies, I think it's pretty clear why VoidZero took this deal.
00:00:58They get a stable home at Cloudflare, and no longer have to worry about making profit for their VCs,
00:01:04because if you didn't know, VoidZero actually raised 17 million dollars,
00:01:07and I'll come back to why in a bit.
00:01:09More broadly though, this also seems like a trend of big tech at the moment.
00:01:13We saw that Bun was bought by Anthropic,
00:01:15Cloudflare bought Astro a few months back,
00:01:17OpenAI bought the team behind UV,
00:01:18they're all betting big on developer tooling.
00:01:20From Cloudflare's point of view, you can see what got them interested in Vite.
00:01:23Their weekly downloads of their Vite plugin have been going absolutely astronomical recently,
00:01:27and these numbers would roughly suggest that about 10% of Vite users are also using the Vite Cloudflare plugin,
00:01:33which is 10 million weekly downloads,
00:01:35and Vite itself is also having a pretty crazy year of growth.
00:01:38If we put aside the fact that a lot of that is going to be AI related,
00:01:41I do think another important piece of the puzzle is it's just made Cloudflare way more accessible to developers,
00:01:45being way easier to use than it was before.
00:01:48I personally have migrated a lot of my sites recently from Vite cell to Cloudflare,
00:01:52mainly because I switched to Tanstack,
00:01:53but I found that Cloudflare is actually fairly easy to use now,
00:01:56which if you told me that two years ago,
00:01:58I probably would have laughed at you,
00:01:59as they have a bit of a history of terrible developer experience in UI dashboard hell,
00:02:04and that's what pushed a lot of people over to Vite cell.
00:02:06Now, Cloudflare is definitely not perfect yet,
00:02:08but it is starting to improve,
00:02:10and this is where Void Zero comes back in.
00:02:12If you remember a few months ago,
00:02:13Void Zero actually announced a new deployment platform called Void,
00:02:16which was designed for Vite,
00:02:18but the infrastructure behind the scenes was on Cloudflare.
00:02:20What Vite cell is to AWS,
00:02:22Void would essentially be for Cloudflare.
00:02:24We actually had an episode of the podcast where Evan came on to discuss some of this,
00:02:28so subscribe for more great chats like that.
00:02:30It seems with this acquisition that Void is going to be shut down,
00:02:32and apparently they are planning on open sourcing it in the future,
00:02:35which is pretty cool to see,
00:02:36but in general,
00:02:37Cloudflare is just going to take the lessons that Void was learning
00:02:39about simplifying deploying to Cloudflare,
00:02:41and apply it to their own CLIs and tools.
00:02:43They say the Cloudflare CLI should feel exactly like Void,
00:02:46as it will be built on top of it,
00:02:47but they're going to have commands like CFDev,
00:02:49which is just a superset of Void dev,
00:02:51but with the Cloudflare runtime and bindings built in,
00:02:53and they also want a CFDeploy command
00:02:55that makes deploying a Void app to Cloudflare super simple.
00:02:58So yeah, I'm actually a little bit excited to see how the Void team
00:03:00is going to help Cloudflare fix their developer experience.
00:03:03Now, obviously the elephant in the room is AI,
00:03:05and I think Cloudflare here saw what was going to happen if they didn't improve.
00:03:08Pretty much every front end outside of Next.js is being built using Veet,
00:03:12and if Cloudflare didn't support that well,
00:03:14AI just isn't going to use it.
00:03:16If we take a look at the research on what Claude actually chooses,
00:03:19you can see Vercel are just absolutely dominant in AI recommendations,
00:03:23and these companies are battling it out to be the default for deployment,
00:03:26so acquiring the default for the tooling
00:03:27seems like a pretty strong step towards making that happen.
00:03:30The big worry with all of this though is,
00:03:32of course they always say that nothing changes,
00:03:34but at the end of the day, a business is a business,
00:03:36and they don't spend large sums of money just to not get anything in return.
00:03:40Void Zero, as I said, previously raised 17 million,
00:03:43which might help frame how much Cloudflare paid for it,
00:03:45and when you acquire a team,
00:03:47eventually that team might start working on your priorities,
00:03:49even if nobody forces them to.
00:03:51It's just the nature of possibly liking your employer,
00:03:54and being a little more lenient.
00:03:55I also saw some comments on Hacker News
00:03:56about how Cloudflare bought a company called Bastion Zero before,
00:03:59and this comment was claiming that the tool decayed,
00:04:02bugs piled up, and they stopped publishing changelogs,
00:04:04and then everyone just got an email saying it was shutting down in a month.
00:04:07I personally don't know too much about that situation,
00:04:09and I couldn't see too much online,
00:04:11but again, I might be a bit too optimistic here,
00:04:13but I think V is too big to fail,
00:04:15and this is a pretty different situation.
00:04:16The one concern I can understand though is consolidation.
00:04:19It seems like it's the new thing for these popular open source tools to be acquired,
00:04:23and they're usually acquired by companies trying to own the full stack
00:04:25from development to deployment,
00:04:27and V has always been a neutral tool.
00:04:29And while they promise to continue to be,
00:04:31feeling a little bit uncomfortable about it now being owned by a single vendor,
00:04:34I do think is slightly valid.
00:04:36It's almost as if corporations don't have great track records.
00:04:39Although saying that, I do think Cloudflare does.
00:04:41I haven't seen Astro go down the wrong path yet,
00:04:43but I suppose it is pretty early.
00:04:44But overall, I do think if anyone was going to buy V,
00:04:47Cloudflare is hardly the worst choice.
00:04:49Plus, a lot of my optimism comes down to Evan's track record.
00:04:52VoidZero has been enormously positive for the JavaScript ecosystem,
00:04:55so I trust the team to do right by that community.
00:04:58And on top of all of that, if you're still not happy,
00:05:00all of their licenses are MIT,
00:05:02so if one day Cloudflare does do something the community disagrees with,
00:05:05people can just fork V,
00:05:06and maybe we'll have a situation exactly like what happened with Redis and Valky.
00:05:10I would rather that didn't happen though.
00:05:12I'm genuinely curious what you think about this.
00:05:13Not only the acquisition,
00:05:15but also the trend as a whole of these open source tools being bought.
00:05:18Let me know in the comments down below.
00:05:19While you're there, subscribe.
00:05:20And as always, see you in the next one.
00:05:22I'll see you in the next one.
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