Partnerships can keep open source sustainable

**Ryan Donovan** (0:08)
Hello, and welcome to The Stack Overflow Podcast, a place to talk all things software and technology. I'm your host, Ryan Donovan, and today we are talking about some big recent news, the acquisition of VoidZero by Cloudflare.
And joining me for this conversation is the CTO of Cloudflare, Dane Knecht, and the founder of VoidZero, creator of Vite, Evan You. So welcome to the show, both of you.

**Dane Knecht** (0:33)
Thanks a lot for having us, Ryan.

**Evan You** (0:34)
Great to be here.

**Ryan Donovan** (0:35)
Yeah. So since you've both appeared on our podcast before, we'll skip the intro stuff and get right into the meat of it. I think that what I want to start is a very naked question. Why are you guys doing this?

**Evan You** (0:48)
So a bit of a backstory. So VoidZero is a JavaScript tooling company. So this is based on the momentum of Vite, open-source project that it created. We've been working a lot on improving Vite and its running ecosystem. We rebuilt its internals from the ground up using Rust and then have extended supporting tooling, linkers, test runners, etc. The mission of the company is always to make developers more productive, specifically web developers, JavaScript slash TypeScript developers.
The founding of VoidZero is also a continuation of what I've been doing with, say, Vue, which is the project created way before, and up to a point where the reason I founded VoidZero was because I saw great potential in Vite as serving as the infrastructure for the next generation of apps being built. But at the same time, in order to step up into that role, we needed more firepower, we needed more bandwidth. So that's why I started the company. Obviously, with the company, it came with the challenges of commercialization, and then we raised money, and then we were looking into ways to make the open-source sustainable.
We tried a bunch of different things, and one of the things we tried was called Void.
I think one of the conclusions we came to at VoidZero was that, directly monetizing on open-source tooling, it requires a very delicate balance, and it's a hard thing to do, right? So it made more sense to sort of leverage open-source as your funnel, as your sort of the goodwill from the community, and your wide reach, the amount of users we have, and then try to provide a service that they would be interesting and have natural synergy with the open-source projects we're building. We were building Void, which is a Vite native deployment platform, and that was built on top of Cloudflare. So later on, it became quite clear like, Cloudflare is actually the platform that has great synergy with the tools that we were building. So the question becomes, why are we building a layer on top of Cloudflare? Obviously, we think there are things that Void is positioned uniquely to sort of solve that on top of raw Cloudflare. But at the same time, it kind of competes with Cloudflare in some way, and we feel it would be more complimentary if we leverage our open-source tooling, we add our expertise and user experience, developer experience, and combine that with what Cloudflare already has. I think that's a more one plus one bigger than two kind of situation. So I think that's why I started thinking about, it would be great if we actually get these things to work together instead of we just build on top of Cloudflare.

**Ryan Donovan** (3:45)
Right. We've talked of you and Vite on this show, and I think that's what a lot of people know you for, but there's a whole JavaScript toolchain you've built, and it sounds like you're saying Cloudflare is the last step in the toolchain.

**Evan You** (3:56)
I mean, Cloudflare itself is not the toolchain, but toolchain naturally have strong influence on what kind of apps people build and where they want to deploy. In a lot of ways, you need good supporting toolchain to make the final step of deployment as smooth and enjoyable and seamless as possible.

**Dane Knecht** (4:18)
Cloudflare has always built, I think, some of the best distributed system primitives in the world. That's our heritage, is how do you build big systems? How do you move bytes around the world as fast as possible, be able to radically change and deliver more value on that?
The missing piece Cloudflare has always had is, how do you then translate that and make that accessible to a larger developer community? We've built some tools to make that easier, our Wrangler tool. Each iteration of that actually, we start to pull more out of that and actually put more of the heavy lifting on to Vite, and actually let Vite do the heavy lifting because the same way we thought we were building unique distributed system primitives, we think that Vite had amazing taste and amazing ability to do that for the developer building side. We wanted to pull that in and be able to make sure that was first-class in Cloudflare's system to be able to do both sides of it.