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VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare

#251

Post by abustamam »

demetris wrote: post #52

I love Vite, when I don’t forget it exists in my 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. 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.

Having used Webpack since 2016... Vite was amazing. Few years ago I migrated a rather complex project (monorepo with a Rust wasm binding) from Webpack to Vite (before the LLM days!) and dev builds and real builds went from minutes to seconds. I never looked twice at Webpack ever again.

I don't know what to feel about this news, especially since migrating to from vite 7 to vite 8 broke my project in ways that were not documented, but I'm remaining cautiously optimistic.

Happy for Evan regardless.

Re: VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare

#252

Post by misterinfo »

overfeed wrote: post #151
yuppiepuppie wrote: post #83

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 I wonder how the initial investors feel about the aqui-hire path... Must be a pretty nice sum for them to agree to it, or they saw that the path to any revenue was near impossible/non-existant

> 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.

In M&A's you usually sign non-competes.

Re: VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare

#254

Post by user3939382 »

burcs wrote: post #137
olingern wrote: post #98

These acquisition announcements always leave me uneasy. There’s a lot of hand waving, “nothing will change and our roadmap will stay the same!” but we can all do basic math and understand that’s not how business works. As an aside, I have to use Cloudlare at work and it’s a pretty awful experience for the medium sized org I’m at. “Hostile UX” is a common complaint. Maybe they should invest money in competing with Ver…

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

I don't even know where to start. I want to host a static site and it's a closed beta so password protection would be nice.

Let's see, first menu item Compute. Hrm, HTML isn't compute, oh it's there ok. Add Application, HTML isn't an application but ok. 95% of the page and on top are fields for adding a worker. The static page option is a little link at the bottom. Linked it to my repo. Oops wrong repo can I change it, oh, no. Ok delete and set it up all over again. Zero trust. Asked for some field, couldn't determine if it was a root domain, subdomain, URL. Ask the built in AI. It says hrm it's not in the docs, idk. Figure out how to add Cloudflare as an auth provider, link it to the static page. Team member says they can't login even though they're a Super Admin. Ah, I have to add their email manually or say all users of the account, otherwise by default Super Admins are locked out of authenticating via Zero Trust CF.

At one point I asked the AI for a copy of my email related DNS records it froze for 15 min while it output in a single textarea line char by char an extremely long key. Maybe that one's on me, but since the AI was frozen and couldn't be interrupted maybe not.

These are just the parts I remember off the top of my head. Most of us work in this field and should be sympathetic to the fact that designing a dashboard for this much data density isn't trivial. But that's tempered by CF deciding it's the gatekeeper for a web that’s supposed to be decentralized and spending a zillion dollars on engineering.

Re: VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare

#255

Post by gonzalohm »

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote: post #247
gonzalohm wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, Spanish la Liga is so happy about Cloudfare

Wait, so this is why you're mad a Cloudflare? Because, you can't watch your pirated football game?

I don't think you get it. They block Cloudfare IPs so services using Cloudfare become unreachable. I don't live in Spain anymore, but I have friends that can't access their university website while a soccer match is ongoing.

This shows the risks of centralizing internet access

Re: VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare

#256

Post by gonzalohm »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #232
gonzalohm wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true. Read about all the drama happening in Spain when an entity (the soccer league) decides to block all the Cloudfare IPs. You are stuck with no access to most websites behind Cloudfare, and that's a lot of them

How does this differ if Spain decided to block AWS IPs?

It doesn't, it's the same problem. But at least AWS provides more services. Cloudfare is just an extra layer to route traffic

Re: VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare

#257

Post by conartist6 »

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote: post #247
gonzalohm wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, Spanish la Liga is so happy about Cloudfare

Wait, so this is why you're mad a Cloudflare? Because, you can't watch your pirated football game?

To be clear people are mad about that because large portions of the legitimate internet go dark when football is on because they're running on a virtual server that happens to share an IP with another virtual server which is hosting pirated football.

You and I have no idea how often perfectly legal things we rely enjoy or rely on would go offline during football matches because it doesn't happen to us.

Re: VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare

#258

Post by thegagne »

rglover wrote: post #212
burcs wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Thank you for saying this and being willing to listen. The worst one I saw is the load balancer config UX/DX. I use CF's load balancer product for clients and so have to do a lot of setup and teardown back-and-forth. Everything related to setting up load balancers is split across multiple screens and/or "wizards" that are extremely confusing. A lot of the error messages you get are generic at best and so you waste a…

I managed a large enterprise CF account from 2018-2023. Hundreds of load balancers. The UI changed out from under us 3 times, with some big problems being fixed, but introducing new ones. I gave bold feedback directly to the leaders responsible for this, with helpful suggestions on how to make it better.

I was really glad when they fixed the old one that had a big "X" that would delete your load balancer without a warning dialog. But I was not happy that the load balancers got increasingly complex, with settings hidden at multiple layers that you had to independently configure.

Load balancing IS complex, but this is their core business, and in many other places such as DNS, Cloudflare put a lot more thought into making it simple and intuitive to use.

Getting this stuff right takes lots of strong leadership and long-term decision making with determination and wisdom to provide the best experience for customers. Unfortunately I am not confident that is how the business is operating, especially with strong talent being let go or leaving due to lack of fostering of a healthy working environment.

But who will take their place?

Re: VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare

#259

Post by overfeed »

bix6 wrote: post #177
overfeed wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not necessarily. There are likely key person clauses in the prior round docs.

It has happened in the recent past (2-4 years ago?); I can't remember both the acquirer and the hollowed-out startup, and searches are returning chaff, but it got to the HN frontpage.

IANAL, but at-will employment cuts both ways- thr best an employer can do on behalf of investors, are golden handcuffs - and people can be bought out of those.

Re: VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare

#260

Post by conartist6 »

joeyhage wrote: post #140

Everything Cloudflare is announcing could have been done without acquiring VoidZero. The part they aren’t saying is the greater influence they will have on the roadmap and protecting themselves from someone else acquiring vite and making it closed source and/or monetizing it. We’ve seen it so many times - a project promises to stay free and open source, but things change. Are there any licenses or contracts that a pr…

>Are there any licenses or contracts that a project could use and would hold up in court that they need to stay FOSS forever?

I don't understand, the existing licenses say that, and courts uphold them to say that. If a company has given code to you under an OSS license, that code is yours under that license forever. There'd be no point in trying to bind a person to give you all their future creative output for free just because they had given some of it to you for free. That'd be awful! And anyway we don't need courts to fix this because people can fix it just by helping each other maintain open software

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