Evan has done really great work. I haven't used Vue extensively (not my company's stack) but am a huge fan of Vite and it has helped our React pipeline a lot. I've also recently started playing around with CloudFlare pages and workers and it's already such a pain-free process to get basic apps up and running, I imagine this collab will make my life easier.

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.

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.

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).

> 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?

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

> This news does not make me happy.

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

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...."

Python but also add

Uv -> OpenAI