Crossing fingers (but not holding breath) this doesn't lead to vendor lock-in or otherwise wreck Astro.
Cloudflare acquires Astro
281–290 of 409 posts
Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure. I wouldn't generally call Astro a "dev tool". It's more of a framework. It's possible you are right, but it isn't clear from the content of the comment.
Frameworks are a category of development tool. Things that developers utilitise to be productive.
Like coffee?
Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro
#283Very nice to see these dev tools get an exit. e.g. I love `uv` and friends but did consider that perhaps dev tools are just a bad business and then no one will go into making that kind of stuff. Good exits means more of these tools. I have only used Astro for toy stuff but it seemed neat. Congrats to the team. EDIT: To put paid to the sidebar discussion below, yes I meant "for instance, consider `uv`; they might do t…
i'm interpreting this in the reverse if dev tools can only be "monetized" by being bought out, it does not feel sustainable on any level we will see companies attempt to do things like close source these projects, go subscription based, or just straight up drop support there is no incentives for cloudflare to make astro better, or even keep it around same goes with bun, svelte, and i'm sure countless others
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Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same reason vercel buys open source... it makes cloudflare always a great deployment option for all Astro sites, which in turn helps cloudflare's core business. For example, Cloudflare released their vite plugin which makes it effortless for frameworks that use the vite env API to run inside workerd (meaning you get to use cloudflare service bindings in dev) back in April and only React Router had support for it. Nex…
So when folks say they want to see big companies invest in open source, this is what that looks like. CF could have kept coasting on what Astro was building, but instead they are paying for it. But in return they get a lot of control.
> CF could have kept coasting on what Astro was building, but instead they are paying for it. But in return they get a lot of control.
Supabase pioneered the modern implementation of this model. Probably, RedHat before it? Google also tend to "acquihire" maintainers of popular FOSS projects, like Ben Goodger (Firefox), Scott Remnant (Upstart), Junio Hamano (Git), Guido von Rossum (Python).
Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro
#285I agree a good exit for devtools is good for devtools. I'd like to understand it better.
The Astro claim is that astro developers will all continue full-time on it. So why acquire it instead of supporting it?
The reason given in complementarity (content and infrastructure), but doesn't that mean that Cloudflare is moving into content? Perhaps it's fair to say some content fits better with Cloudflare, or making it easier to just have static sites is beneficial to Cloudflare?
Is there a convention about announcements, for the acquired to announce happily first to bring customers, and then the acquirer to confirm their benign intentions? When can we expect Cloudflare's take?
Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro
#286Crossing fingers (but not holding breath) this doesn't lead to vendor lock-in or otherwise wreck Astro.
Cloudflare doesn't need to vendor lock astro like vercel needed to vendor lock next. They have a massive amount of other things to sell.
Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro
#287Why does Cloudflare need a web framework? Most obvious would be they think they can make money from hosting astro sites (like Vercel and NextJS). I hope Cloudflare's impact on Astro will be tiny. But another great thing being swallowed by big tech...
They are using astro starlight for their docs page and using astro itself in number of their landing pages.
Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro
#288Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think DevTools can be a very good money maker… I wrote two apps that were basically dev tools and they were the biggest of my money makers. I think it’s easier to make money from dev tools that are “apps” than dev tools that are “fundamental technologies” though so it probably heavily depends on the type of dev tools…
It's probably also easier to make cottage-industry money from a single useful tool and some associated services/consulting than it is to turn the whole thing into a big company expected to do the hockey stick curve thing (eg Docker). It'll be interesting to see where Astral ends up landing on that; afaik they have a small team and have only raised seed money, but who knows.
I don't know if it's easier. I definitely think it's better, but there can be a lure to VC money that puts a company like Docker on that path. There's a world where Docker is a small company earning individually good money but with no hockey stick curve, and I think that's more sustainable and ultimately better for them.
I suppose they might disagree, of course :)
Re: Cloudflare acquires Astro
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't anticipate it changing like that. You still do a build using Vite and deploy the static assets. How could they change that to make it difficult to host elsewhere?
Let’s hope you’re right. I think vendor lock in is possible if they focus on features tightly coupled to Cloudflare. Look at Next.js. In theory you can deploy it anywhere, but in practice it is harder outside Vercel because of tight coupling around things like caching. You do not have to use those features, but if the framework is built to expect them, it pushes people into that platform. I can imagine Astro becoming…
It is not similar imho. First NextJS build system is not really exposed apart from a simple docker example and all advanced features of NextJS is kinda coupled to Vercel. For Astro it is just a Vite project with integration designed from day mind they would have to rip everything apart and that would probably cause a prominent fork. The other part is Cloudflare is not dependent Astro being vendor locked as much as Vercel being dependent on NextJS being vendor locked.