Cloudflare Buys Deno to Murder It in One Year

Ryan Dahl famously created Node.js, spent years regretting its design flaws, and then founded Deno Land Inc to give developers the clean, secure modern runtime they deserved. Now, Cloudflare has bought out the entire startup, effectively drafting its engineers into corporate cloud infrastructure duty while setting an expiration date on the standalone runtime.

Official maintenance releases and emergency vulnerability patches for the open-source Deno project will crawl forward for exactly twelve months. Once that timer expires, Cloudflare is pulling the plug on active development, tossing the codebase into the open-source graveyard where volunteer necromancers can fork it if they feel like maintaining a massive runtime for free.

The hosted platform Deno Deploy gets an even shorter runway, scheduled for total shutdown in six months while paid subscribers are forcibly funneled into Cloudflare Workers. Meanwhile, the package registry JSR will survive the purge, though its physical infrastructure is being relocated deep inside Cloudflare territory alongside the rusty_v8 engine bindings that will be grafted onto their internal workerd runtime.

The acquired development team is being repurposed to build a self-hosted version of Cloudflare Workers using Durable Objects, enabling developers to run the proprietary ecosystem on their own hardware.

Corporate appetite wins again: the proud open-source revolution against bloated runtimes ended with the creator selling the rebellion directly to a vendor-lock-in giant.

Source: deno.com