When I wrote Next Generation Tooling for Developers last year, I added a section about the business models of the companies behind these tools. Astral and VoidZero were both venture-backed, and I wondered how they would eventually make money, given that the tools themselves are free and open source. My guess was that they would keep the tools free and sell paid services on top, like Astral’s pyx and VoidZero’s Vite+. I was right to wonder about the business models, though things took a different direction than I had anticipated.
Since then, these companies have been acquired:
- In December 2025, Anthropic acquired Oven, the company behind Bun.
- In January 2026, Cloudflare acquired the Astro team.
- In March 2026, OpenAI acquired Astral (uv, Ruff, ty).
- In June 2026, Cloudflare acquired VoidZero (Vite, Vitest, Rolldown, Oxc).
So the business model, at least for now, turned out to be a simpler one than I expected: get acquired by a bigger company.
The new owners are not all the same
Cloudflare has been the most hands-off of the three. With Astro, as far as I can tell, they haven’t changed much beyond improving compatibility with Cloudflare’s own platform, and they have been clear that Astro stays MIT-licensed and works with every deployment target, not just theirs. They also set up an Astro Ecosystem Fund, and committed a million dollars to an independent Vite fund when they bought VoidZero. So far this looks like a company that mostly wants the tools to keep doing what they were already doing.
OpenAI bought Astral in March 2026, and so far it has been quiet. uv and Ruff still work the way they did. The main concrete change I’ve seen is that OpenAI’s Codex now uses uv instead of pip, which according to OpenAI saves a lot of compute time. Simon Willison wrote a good piece about the acquisition if you want more detail.
Bun is the one that has actually changed.
Anthropic and Bun
Anthropic bought Oven earliest, back in December 2025. Claude Code now ships as a Bun executable, so Anthropic has a clear reason to invest in it.
The official line is that not much changes. Bun stays MIT-licensed, the same team keeps working on it, and the roadmap is roughly the same. What changed is how the code gets written. According to RedMonk, most commits to Bun are now made by bots rather than people, and contributions from outside developers have dropped off. Jarred Sumner, Bun’s creator, said his team hasn’t been typing code themselves for many months.
The clearest example was when the team used Claude to rewrite around 960,000 lines of Bun from Zig to Rust in six days. It passed almost all of the tests, but the result included over 13,000 unsafe calls, and plenty of people were not impressed. There were also memory leaks bad enough that some Claude Code sessions were using more than 14GB of memory.
There is also an interesting backstory to why the rewrite happened at all. Zig, the language Bun was originally written in, has a strict no-AI policy. Andrew Kelley, Zig’s creator, has banned AI-assisted contributions entirely, calling them “invariably garbage” and arguing they just flood a small review team with low-quality patches. Since the Bun team now writes most of their code with Claude, this put them in an awkward spot. They ended up running a fork of Zig instead, though Zig’s maintainers said those changes wouldn’t have been welcome upstream anyway, AI aside. Rather than maintain that fork forever, the team rewrote Bun in Rust, and that rewrite has now been merged into Bun’s main branch.
My theory is that this had more to do with Zig than with Rust. The usual argument for Rust is safety, but the AI-generated rewrite has thousands of unsafe calls in it, so they aren’t really writing safe Rust anyway. To me it looks less like a careful technical decision and more like a culture clash. Anthropic now builds Bun almost entirely with AI, and Zig’s leadership thinks that whole approach is a mistake. It’s hard to keep building on a language whose maintainers consider your way of working garbage. Rust doesn’t come with that conflict, so I suspect that, more than anything about the language itself, is why they switched.
So the changes are real, even if they are more about how Bun is built than where it is going. I’m honestly not sure how I feel about it. On one hand it’s an interesting look at what AI-driven development at this scale actually looks like. On the other hand, I’m not sure I’d want to depend on a runtime while it’s in the middle of being rewritten by an AI.
What happened to Vite+
When VoidZero first announced Vite+, the plan was a mixed license: free for individuals, open source projects, and small businesses, with paid tiers for startups and enterprises. That matched what I had assumed, a paid layer sitting on top of the free tools.
However, VoidZero changed their mind even before the Cloudflare acquisition. They decided the mixed license didn’t feel right and open-sourced Vite+ under the MIT License in March 2026. Around the same time, Evan You announced Void, a Vite-native deployment platform, as the thing they would actually charge for. So the paid-service idea didn’t disappear, it just moved from the tooling to a hosted platform around it. Then Cloudflare bought the whole company anyway.
My Opinion
All this comes at a time when I have already invested the time into learning most of these tools and integrating them into my development workflows. In recent months, I have been using uv, Ruff, oxlint and oxfmt, and Astro in many projects, both personal projects and production projects for clients. The fact that the tools got acquired by large tech companies should hopefully give them the stability to continue being developed, while staying faithful to what made these projects loved in the first place.
These tools are still open source, which I also pointed out in the original article. If one of the new owners ever does something the community really dislikes, the tools can be forked, and that has happened plenty of times before with other projects. But a fork only gets you the code, not the people. A lot of what made these tools good was that small, focused teams were putting a lot of energy into them. An acquisition can keep funding that work, or it can quietly point it somewhere else, and the license doesn’t tell you which. The Bun rewrite is a good example: forking 960,000 lines of AI-generated Rust with 13,000 unsafe calls is not much of a safety net.
So the business-model question I asked last year finally has an answer. It wasn’t pyx or Vite+, it was getting acquired. Given that these were venture-backed companies from the start, that was probably always where this was going.
Featured image by Andre Taissin on Unsplash.
