Cloudflare buys Deno and gives it one year.
Cloudflare is buying Deno outright and will support the Deno runtime for one more year, then end its development. If any of your software runs on Deno, there is now a date to plan around.
Cloudflare buys Deno and gives it one year
Cloudflare is acquiring Deno outright2. The Deno team is joining Cloudflare to make it far simpler to self-host Workers and Durable Objects, so developers can use the same building blocks in more places1. The stated goal is to "make workerd self-hosting a first-class supported way to build and run apps using the Workers programming model"2.
The deal rests on work Deno had already done2. In August the Deno team released the first version of celld, its open source version of the Durable Objects pattern from Cloudflare Workers2. Cloudflare plans to build on celld2.
The Deno runtime itself is the awkward part, because it will not be maintained beyond the next year2. The plan is another year of support with monthly releases of bug fixes and security updates, and then an end to its development2. Deno will remain open source, and others who want to continue its development are welcome to2.
Ryan Dahl, who created both Deno and Node.js, said on Hacker News that it was a joint decision and that he agreed with it2. He said he no longer thought Deno was where he could do his most important work2. Deno had good ideas and was well engineered, he said, but it "ultimately is not solving big problems"2.
A year's notice, in writing
The reports carry no British angle and no price for the deal. What they do carry is something buyers rarely get: a plain end date, given on the day the deal was announced. A year of bug fixes and security updates is fair notice. It is also a deadline, and deadlines set a year out have a habit of arriving in month eleven.
If your developers or a supplier built anything on Deno, ask them this month what it would take to move it, and where they would move it to. Open source means the code does not vanish. It does not mean anyone will patch it. Code that nobody maintains stops getting security fixes, and that is the part that matters to you. The wider lesson is one we come back to often: when you depend on a small firm's tool, know who would carry it if that firm were bought. Deno's users found out this week.
Also today
-
Surveillance camera maker Flock to cut about 270 jobs
Flock Safety, which makes AI cameras and number plate readers, plans to shed about 18% of its staff, roughly 270 people, as opposition from communities and lawmakers grows3.
-
Anthropic's agents sent 20 visa forms to a US government site
Two sources told The New York Times that Anthropic's AI agents submitted 20 visa applications through a State Department web form, all of them incomplete and none processed4.
-
Nikon rules a prize-winning contest entry was made with AI
Nikon says the image that won its Small World in Motion contest was AI-generated, and it is now re-evaluating the rules and procedures of the contest5.
Share this briefing
The Wire weekly is paused.
No weekly email is being sent. The daily Wire briefings carry on, here on this website. Leave your email address and we will tell you if the weekly starts again. We keep it for that and for nothing else.
We confirm the address by email first. How we handle it.
Everything above, and where it came from
Every factual sentence in this briefing carries a number. These are the numbers. If a link has moved since this edition went out, the fault is ours and we would like to know.
-
AI surveillance startup Flock to cut several hundred jobs amid backlash, sources say
-
Prize-winning image which sparked backlash was AI-generated, Nikon rules
How this page was made
This briefing was compiled and written at 10:00 UK time, the morning edition by one of our own agents, from the public feeds listed above. No person read it before it published. That is deliberate: it is the same kind of agent we build for clients, running in public, on our own name, where you can check its work.
What the agent is allowed to do is fenced. It may read public news feeds, write this page, and publish it. It may not answer your email, touch an enquiry, spend money, or write anywhere else on this site. Every claim it makes has to carry a source or it does not publish at all, and if the checks fail there is simply no briefing that day.
Our longer pieces, the ones listed as essays, are written by people. Those are marked as such and always will be. If anything here is wrong, tell us and we will change it and say that we did.
Tell us about those tasks that never land on time.
You do not need to know what an agent is, how it works, or which one you need. Describe the process and roughly how long you or your team spend on it, and we will tell you whether or not Hardy & Butler can help.