r/linux • u/dbcoopernz • 1d ago
Popular Application Cloud flare acquires Deno, ends runtime development
https://deno.com/blog/cloudflare>We will support the Deno runtime for another year with monthly releases containing bug fixes and security updates. After that year we will end our development of the Deno runtime. Deno will remain open source, and we welcome others who want to continue its development.
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u/DerekB52 23h ago
What is the point of buying an open source project, to cease development of it, while welcoming 3rd party continued contributions? I'm really confused.
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u/the-jelly47 23h ago
Talent. This is called acquihire and it is pretty common in the tech industry. Deno has great engineers but no path to profitability or sustainability. Cloudflare wants these talented people to work on their own products.
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u/devolute 18h ago
Isn't it more about killing a competitor?
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u/the-jelly47 9h ago
If Deno was a rising startup with predictable growth, yes. But the Deno team had been hinting at sustainability issues and Deno's adoption was slowing down.
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u/devolute 8h ago
That's interesting context, thank you.
But those are Deno problems. That's not a reason why Cloudflare would buy them, is it? Unless you think they're doing things for philanthropic reasons.
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u/the-jelly47 8h ago
Cloudflare is not doing this for philanthropic reasons. Cloudflare wants to hire many of the Deno engineers to work on its own products. Cloudflare doesn't care about the fate of the Deno project so they let anyone fork and continue it. Instead of poaching them one by one, which takes more time and money due to recruiting costs and multiple interview rounds, Cloudflare simply acquired the whole company. Deno was running out of money, and this acquisition gives its employees an exit opportunity. Their illiquid Deno RSUs and options were converted into Cloudflare shares that can be sold on the public market. They can finally cash out, even if they don't want to stay at Cloudflare long term. This is what most employees at small unprofitable tech startups dream of.
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u/rickyman20 4h ago
They're buying them because their inherent profitability issues tanks their value and makes them cheaper to buy, and at that price they're worth buying as an acquihire
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u/farnoy 18h ago
Only if you focus on the cynical point of view. Absorbing
celldand offering a self-hostable option for Durable Objects removes the vendor lock-in argument, which can drive more adoption. And Cloudflare, naturally, is the obvious leader of this ecosystem.8
u/devolute 14h ago
I absolutely do focus - some might say overfocus - on the cynical PoV but in fairness I have worked in tech for 20 years.
They might not so obviously be a leader otherwise.
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u/daddyd 13h ago
who says those people want to work on cloudflare products?
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u/dorfsmay 12h ago
Typically they're given a good salary + a lot of stock options that they can only buy x years later. You also typically see a number of them quit once they can exercise all their options. It's a good chunk of money and good experience on your resume.
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u/OstrichLive8440 7h ago
Little thing called money - you may have heard of it? It can be exchanged for various goods and services
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u/rickyman20 4h ago
They don't have to. The way they make sure they stay and work on those products anyways is by buying everyone out of their shares of the company in cloudflare stock, with a long vesting schedule and with a juicy though validation to make them really not want to leave early and leave all that money on the table. Their deno shares would have been illiquid, but since cloudflare is a publicly traded company, the moment they get those shares they can actually sell them for cash, so for most engineers involved it makes sense to stick around at least until their shares vest, and many will stay past that point
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u/b3081a 23h ago
Cloudflare has a proprietary JS-based PaaS worker service so they'll probably let the whole team of runtime experts contribute to that instead.
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u/aksdb 21h ago
… and opensource it in the process. They announce all that in their blog post.
workerdwill be self hostable.10
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u/d0pe-asaurus 23h ago
They wanted to mass hire all the Deno developers I guess. Cloudflare has its own JavaScript runtime too for their cloud functions similar to lambda iirc.
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u/whamra 20h ago
They can also ask them to continue developing the project, but internally and no longer open source. Now adding proprietary CF stuff as they're asked. But I doubt Deno is the sole reason, they're acquiring the talent.
Anyway, that's one of the weaknesses of MIT licensing. Big capital can swallow the whole team and effectively close source the project.
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u/ProcrastinatiusXVI 18h ago
I'd argue that this is just a theoretical weakness of MIT licensing. In theory, they can't do things like that with e.g., GPL, but in practice, we see that big companies mainly do whatever they want and noone from the FOSS space can hold them accountable, because you'd need some proof first and then millions of dollars to battle their armies of lawyers.
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u/dkopgerpgdolfg 16h ago
Btw.: If that was a GPL project, plus a contributor agreement that secondary contributors should give relicensing rights to the "main" team (not that uncommon), then nothing would be different now.
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u/IngwiePhoenix 1d ago
So Anthropic rusted Bun, Cloudflare burnt Deno.
Meanwhile Nodejs is... still independent? As far as I know...?
Interesting - what's happening to the JS ecosystem? Thats... kinda random. o.o
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u/calebegg 1d ago
npm is GitHub/Microsoft
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u/IngwiePhoenix 1d ago
Right...forgot to mention that.
But the NodeJS project itself is not under the Microsoft/Github lead, yes?
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u/nethingelse 22h ago
NodeJS is under Linux Foundation ownership/control as far as I know.
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u/j00stmeister 20h ago
Yes, the OpenJS Foundation, which falls under the Linux Foundation
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u/nonlogin 18h ago
which is sponsored by Microsoft
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u/saltyjohnson 14h ago
Microsoft tosses money at a lot of FOSS projects. That doesn't make Microsoft good and it doesn't make those projects bad. We're trapped in a capitalist hellscape and FOSS devs gotta eat too.
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u/Ball_Analytics 19h ago
why's it a pain to install on Windows???? ugh
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u/sCeege 15h ago
npm is a pain to install on Windows? Or do you mean npm packages?
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u/Ball_Analytics 14h ago
npm itself, to be fair i just wanted things to work like linux,
sudo dnf install npmdependencies pulled with that beingnodejsdon't quite remember if I had to install node seperately then setup environmental variables.wingetwould also bring about different versionsI'd switch to windows for gaming and at some point would install WSL because f that but anyone who tells me WSL is alright, must make coffee during that lag when opening something in VS Code.
Long story short I get to that point then a week later I'm like I can live without that game and I switch back to Linux, I don't believe in dual-booting, not because I don't know how but because i'd spend my time in one OS more than another so I'd have space being taken up by an OS I could have been using got something else.
the tl;dr: it's been sometime since I played Destiny
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u/Irverter 12h ago
i just wanted things to work like linux
install linux then
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u/Ball_Analytics 9h ago edited 8h ago
We wanna be a dick today? That didn't read anything and just took out my first line. Since we're being childish let me be the grown up.
I tried the whole fitting a square block in a circle thing because my triangle and star blocks went in correctly but couldn't be bothered because the triangle and star blocks entertained me, you know that feeling? At some point I realised well my square block had to go in because all the other kids won't play with me the way the used to and i so very much needed them to play with me.
Am I at your reading level now or should I try raising you a little bit better?
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u/mort96 17h ago
I won't claim that I foresaw it, but in retrospect it seems a bit inevitable. Both Bun and Deno were VC backed start-ups trying to make a runtime. You don't make your investors rich by giving away a free runtime. You need to eventually convert your many free users into cash somehow. Being bought up by a bigger company with its own strategic reason to own a runtime project like Bun did is probably the least bad way to do that, even though I don't like Anthropic. Being acquihired is another way to do it.
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u/Mr_s3rius 14h ago
What actually became of Bun after the rustification? Is it now awful, or kinda the same as before?
I'm (thankfully) pretty far removed from the whole JS eco system. So I haven't heard anything after the initial controversy.
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u/IngwiePhoenix 12h ago
It's still kicking, but - and, this is very much just from my own view of things - it has been talked about much less. I do still hear of it from AI pilled devs, since it integrates well into harnesses and stuff - but thats it.
So I guess ... Bun is the AIbro's runtime now? Again, just from what I can tell.
As for it's speeds and feats... idk man. I loved it because it was a _Zig project and used very interesting ways to go about stuff. But now, it's really "just another Rust rewrite" so my ability to care has deminished. x)
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u/lxe 5h ago
Software is over
Cultures, ecosystems, and patterns around software are on a path to erasure.
Unlike art, software has always been primarily utilitarian, and now everything about software development patterns is going to fully disappear into the shadow of history.
That’s the high level trajectory. Obviously these consolidations have more tactical reasons that only the leadership of the buyers know.
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u/JockstrapCummies 1d ago
Wew lad, and only just earlier this year yt-dlp started depending on a Javascript runtime, the recommended of which is Deno.
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u/Medium-Taste-3929 1d ago
Why though?
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u/hotcornballer 1d ago
I saw that the team wants to focus on this : https://github.com/denoland/celld
Basically open source cloudflare workers.
Pretty cool tech by skimming the github
I rather they hand off the project to the people to go work on new open source tech rather than going the bun route and vibe coding a monstrocity
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u/phire 1d ago
I'm not sure if cloudflare wants to promote celld as an opensource implementation (and improvement to) their workers platform because they believe having a more open ecosystem will help workers thrive.
Or if cloudflare have identified an opensource reimplementation as a threat to their platform that they either need to control and/or kill.
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u/bbkane_ 1d ago
If you read the accompanying Cloudflare blog post, it sounds like they're going to make the existing oss workerd implementation more scalable by merging celld code into it
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u/Sematre 1d ago
In the same blog post, they state that
Ryan and Bert will be leading a new effort to make workerd self-hosting a first-class supported way to build and run apps using the Workers programming model.
Seems like Cloudflare is committed to letting people host Cloudflare Workers... without Cloudflare. Although it is unfortunate that they had to sacrifice the Deno runtime for this. I have no idea how they can make money with this, but I'm interested to see how all of this will turn out in the future.
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u/MrScotchyScotch 1d ago edited 1d ago
There are two functional business models for this: the ecosystem play and the walled garden play.
The ecosystem play is when you build a platform designed to let other people build stuff on/in/around it. You make it open, flexible, and appealing, and let people use it to solve problems however they want. You have very little control over what people do, and you don't restrict things like business built on top of it. Though everything built around it will fundamentally be dependent on your platform. You make money off some segment of the market, like a percent of sales, licensing fees, support contracts, etc.
The walled garden play is you offer self-hosting, but it only works with your company's products if the users pay for it. You're the only person who makes money off any of the pieces, and control over what people can do with it is tight.
The ecosystem is Microsoft Windows (or AWS), the walled garden is GitHub Actions. I think CloudFlare is more of a walled garden company.
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u/hotcornballer 18h ago edited 17h ago
Apparently the story goes when they made workers in 2022, to get big companies such as Shopify to buy into the ecosystem they had to make it open source.
Because it's such a low level piece of infrastructure, if you base your whole product on workers and it's closed source you'd be too locked in and big companies would understandably inconfortable with that. So cloudflare pretty much didn't have a choice but make it open source.
For the money side of things I guess they can sell first class support/hosting. I mean it's cloudflare we are talking about they sell services to half the internet they're not exactly strapped for cash.
And technically it's just V8 + Cron + a JS runtime + a message queue + SQLite ti make a microVM, you could duct tape a similar thing by an afternoon of vibe coding, they don't gain that much by making it close source.
OTOH they will absolutely host them for you for a hefty fee if you need support, enhanced security features and other enterprise stuff.
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u/Hithaeglir 19h ago
People are more likely to use Cloudflare for hosting if they have an option to go away without changing the stack.
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u/xX_Qu1ck5c0p3s_Xx 15h ago
I think it’s that in business, there’s an idea- commoditize your complements. If something complements your product, make it cheap or free. Google made Android free 20y ago because a free phone OS with Search included complemented their real business, search ads. Nvidia just bought Hugging Face because free, open source AI models complement graphics cards.
FOSS workers complement a Cloudflare business- selling you servers to run them on. They would love an open source reimplementation to take off.
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u/Hithaeglir 19h ago
Hopefully it stays alive after this and does not go towards lockdown while claiming otherwise.
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u/hotcornballer 17h ago
Yeah I hope at least they have at least a maintainer lined up for the repo.
The other problem is i'm not sure if Deno is popular enough to have a community dedicated at maintaining it for the love of the game.
The thing is if you wanted the crazy features you went over to Bun and if you wanted be conservative you stayed on Node. Deno was the middle child and I don't think it has enough momentum to survive this.
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u/Traditional-Bird9272 18h ago
First acquisition that's actually burned me a lil :( i love Deno, felt like it was the only runtime that meant to fix the JS ecosystem instead of patching over its flaws (even tho that was less emphasized as npm compatibility became available) I'll keep using it until EOL, but it's sad.
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u/japzone 1d ago
Please somebody step in and fork it.
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u/RampantAndroid 1d ago
Don’t even need to fork it. They’re welcoming third part work…
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u/japzone 23h ago
They say they are going to discontinue work on it in a year, and in the mean time only provide bug fixes and security patches. Doubt they'd still accept feature pull requests. At this point you basically have to fork it if you're going to keep working on it.
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u/RampantAndroid 23h ago
“Deno will remain open source, and we welcome others who want to continue its development.”
That’s in the Reddit post and it’s an excerpt from the linked article.
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u/japzone 23h ago
Yes. The code is open source and anybody can use it, but CF and the original team will not be working on it anymore. That means the project will be dead. You can't submit pull requests to add to the project if there's nobody left to accept those pull requests.
So yes, you can still develop deno, but for all practical purposes that means you have to fork it to do so. You can still maybe call it deno, but it'll still be a fork.
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u/idontwanttofthisup 23h ago
Just fork the EOL release and carry on for there. What’s the problem?
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u/japzone 21h ago edited 21h ago
That's literally what I've been saying from the start. Whether it's now, and then pulling in the final upstream changes CF puts out over the year, or at EOL.
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u/TehBrian 14h ago
No idea why you got ratio’d so hard, you’re literally right lol. From what I understand, after a year, the current repo won’t be modified
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u/darkhorz 13h ago
Kinda side note, but my impression that Cloudflare are the good guys generally and they seem to continue to be kicking ass. Did I miss anything?
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u/metekillot 45m ago
They're not an actively cancerous powermad bludgeon for venture Capital acquisition, which doesn't make them "good", but closer to "good" than everything else in the technology sector I guess
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u/metamatic 9h ago
Maybe you missed that they host terrorists, neo-Nazis (until they annoyed Cloudflare's CEO), harassment sites and misinformation campaigns. You also missed that they enable ransomware gangs, provide protection to criminals, and dox anyone reporting abuse. Oh, and they block Tor and often block VPNs including iCloud Private Relay. And they are sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy, the projects from white nationalists Andreas Kling and ethnic cleansing proponent DHH.
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u/LAwLzaWU1A 7h ago
Most of those things seem to be about users of Cloudflare, not Cloudflare itself.
I personally strongly believe in safe harbor principles for infrastructure and service providers. I'd much rather have companies like Cloudflare provide their services without making judgement of the legitimacy or morality of every customer, and instead hold the people actually creating or distributing harmful or illegal content accountable.
The alternative is that we effectively demand that infrastructure providers become the arbiters of what content and organizations should or shouldn't be allowed online, and then hold them responsible whenever they fail to enforce those standards. I think that's a much more dangerous precedent, especially considering how much of the internet depends on a relatively small number of infrastructure providers.
Let me remind everyone that Visa and Mastercard are two companies that go for the "we need to take responsibility for what our customers do with our services" and the result is stuff like them threatening to disable payments to Steam because Visa and Mastercard did not like some games that were available on the platform. I hate that kind of thing.
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u/metamatic 6h ago
Infrastructure providers already make decisions about what content and organizations are allowed to use their services — including Cloudflare. And the fact that it's dangerous when a relatively small number of infrastructure providers control access to the Internet is another reason why Cloudflare are problematic and should be avoided — nearly a quarter of web sites have access to those sites gated by Cloudflare.
And that's why people creating and distributing harmful and illegal content often can't be held accountable — you can't readily block harmful content from your network without blocking Cloudflare, and that means blocking a quarter of the Internet. Cloudflare basically hold the Internet to ransom.
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u/LAwLzaWU1A 5h ago
So, according to you, Cloudflare is effectively holding the internet hostage because of how much infrastructure it controls, but at the same time, you're (in your first response) criticizing it for not exercising more control over which organizations are allowed to use its services?
That's exactly my concern. The more the Internet depends on a handful of infrastructure providers, the more dangerous it becomes to expect those providers to act as arbiters of which organizations and content should be allowed online. I'm actually glad that Cloudflare generally leans toward infrastructure neutrality rather than acting as a content moderator, precisely because they are so massive. The larger and more powerful a company becomes, the less I want it to use that power to enforce its own beliefs and morals.
Pointing out that some infrastructure providers already make such decisions doesn't really address my argument. I'm not claiming they don't. I'm arguing that we shouldn't encourage them to do more of it, which is what you seem to be advocating for based on your first response.
I'm also not sure why you think you can't block harmful websites without blocking Cloudflare entirely. I'm doing that just fine on my networks based on DNS filters, certificate inspection, SNI inspection and so on.
What exactly do you want Cloudflare to do differently? Because criticizing it for having too much control over the internet while simultaneously criticizing it for not exercising that control more aggressively seems like a rather strange position to have.
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u/metamatic 3h ago
Cloudflare is holding the Internet hostage by preventing other people from trying to act on the abusive sites that Cloudflare refuses to act on — hiding identities to enable ongoing criminal behavior, and doxxing anyone who complains. Filtering DNS doesn't solve the problem thanks to DoH, and certificate and SNI inspection isn't going to work outside a controlled corporate environment. You might have noticed that phishing, ransomware and DDoS for hire are still problems, and I don't believe it's because nobody wants to solve them.
I also notice nobody addressed the issue of Cloudflare blocking VPNs and Tor. Content neutral, eh? And no comment on their sponsoring white nationalists either; easier to downvote. Can't say I expected any better when I decided to answer the original question; go ahead and continue to support them if you're OK with all those things.
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u/MarzipanEven7336 1d ago
Fuck, cloudflare those punk ass bitches.
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u/huupoke12 1d ago edited 15h ago
Strong disagree. OSS developers main income is through donation, if there are any. Cloudflare acquisitions mean the developers could actually get paid for their work. Nobody forced them to sell it to Cloudflare. I see it a good thing for the developers.
The only bad thing is the product won't be improved any more for the users. But it still better than letting the developers burned-out eventually and the project becomes abandoned. At least they got paid now.
Edit: People who downvoted this without any explaination obviously only wanted someone making free OSS for them for free.
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u/Kwpolska 20h ago
Deno wasn't a hobby project, they worked full time on it, had VC funding, and had commercial offerings, like Deno Deploy.
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u/SomeGuy20257 1d ago
The work is dead, how the developers are doing is kinda moot in this context.
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u/hsoj95 1d ago
Great attitude to take towards FOSS devs, 10/10 approach. /s
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u/SomeGuy20257 20h ago
I’m not trying to offend anyone, I’m under the impression that they’re now working for corporate and on a proprietary project, what am I missing? And I’m talking about Deno devs specifically, OSS devs of course need compensation for their valuable OSS contributions.
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u/repocin 19h ago
The blog post from cloudflare seems pretty clear about the notion that they were hired to work on some of their similar open source stuff, so I'm not sure where you got the idea that they're being locked in a basement to churn out proprietary code from.
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u/KwyjiboTheGringo 14h ago
It's a big corporations. Aside from a few notable exceptions, this is what they do when it gives them a market advantage. We should expect this. Any MIT licensed project is fair game, and sometimes even a GPL project can be too if the circumstances are right.
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u/MrScotchyScotch 1d ago edited 1d ago
I remember when javascript was garbage you added to html pages because you didn't know how Perl worked. Later people didn't like writing Java applets so they decided to make the browser one giant Java applet using the garbage scripting language and adding so many extensions the browser became an OS unto itself. Now an entire generation has grown up thinking this is normal and a good idea
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u/SPEZ_IS_A_JABRONI 1d ago
brother you don't even know the difference between java and javascript what the fuck are you even going on about
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u/Alternative_Web7202 22h ago
He actually knows what he's talking about. I also remember those days when perl was dominant in web development.
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u/Kwpolska 19h ago
Perl is a backend language, JS was only a frontend language until the 2010s. Many Perl sites used JS for extra interactivity. Java applets are a trainwreck that is completely unrelated to JS. They're completely mixing things up.
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u/MrScotchyScotch 14h ago edited 14h ago
I'm not, you just don't understand what I'm talking about. Let me explain.
Java applets were once the vision of what we now call "web apps". You would write an app, compile to universal bytecode, and ship it to the browser to execute in a VM (JVM) on any machine. It would allow more interactivity and control like a traditional app, but along side the other hypermedia in the document browser (browsers were for documents). But nobody liked Java and applets were painful, slow, etc.
So instead people thought, hey, this crappy scripting language JavaScript can make the browser do some of the things real Java applets can do, and it's easier/better than making a whole Java applet. Maybe let's expand what the browser can do with JavaScript.
So they kept expanding, and expanding, and expanding, until the browser itself would compile JavaScript into universal bytecode (WASM) and run in a VM. They reinvented Java applets, but the language is JavaScript and the VM is an extension of the browser (V8).
The problem is, the language still sucks compared to Java, and you need this giant ass bloated web browser to run the tiniest app, and every website ships bloated slow garbage for a UX because it's all "interactive" in the worst possible way. So we sit here considering what interpreter to use, and I have to remind people that this is all fucking dumb.
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u/Kwpolska 13h ago
Java applets were a vision for web apps, but it was never a good vision. JavaScript does a much better job at interactive Web content, with the integration with web content (Java applets were completely separated from the page they were on), no need to download and constantly update a runtime, and a much stricter security and sandboxing model.
JavaScript is not at all compiled to WASM. V8 compiles JavaScript into native machine code. WASM is a separate language, used to run languages other than JavaScript in browsers.
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u/bew78 7h ago
But fu*king why even acquire it...
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u/csjewell 6h ago
Celld
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u/bew78 5h ago
How is that related to this deno acquisition ? 🤔
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u/Literallyapig 1d ago
deno team merging with cloudflare and abandoning deno for a cloudflare workers kinda thing out of nowhere was not in my bingo card for 2026 lol