But (as I interpret the blog post, at least) this isn't an acquisition. Cloudflare didn't buy Sandstorm, it just hired all the Sandstorm developers. Those developers still retain ownership of Sandstorm-the-legal-entity and any intellectual property it owns. It's not an acqui-hire, in other words, just a hire.

Which, if that's the case, means that Sandstorm still is legally independent of Cloudflare, and the original Sandstorm devs can pretty much continue to do whatever they want with it. There would be some gray areas, like what will happen to future code or other IP they create for Sandstorm while employed by Cloudflare, or while using Cloudflare systems/resources; and of course their continued employment with Cloudflare may be contingent on their doing things with Sandstorm that Cloudflare likes, or at least doesn't disapprove of too strongly. But if the Sandstorm devs are just selling their future labor and not the company itself, they'll have more independence than they'd have gotten in an acqui-hire scenario.

Correct. The CF people are cool and have no problem with us continuing to operate Sandstorm, as long as we're getting our Cloudflare work done.

Cap'n Proto will presumably end up with mixed copyright, but it's MIT license anyway so who cares?

I'm sure you have already but look over that employment contract carefully.

CF being "cool" shouldn't put your project and its users (me!) at risk.

We've worked closely with Kenton on this. In fact, our lawyers wanted us to add language to ensure that it was clear that we don't own Kenton's IP around this.

Yes, we have made sure to add appropriate language to the appropriate paperwork (in addition to being protected by California law).

As far as I can tell, Sandstorm did not get acquired or acquihired - Kenton, Jade, and others (?) as individuals all accepted job offers from Cloudflare.

Ah ok, so the team has joined cloudflare but the corporate entity continues with the original owners.

So in some ways better than an acquihire and in some ways worse.

It seems almost universally better? I can't think of any acquirer that would be more successful with Sandstorm than the founders themselves. Nobody I can think of is aligned with "users own their data" and big enough / cares enough to help Sandstorm gain adoption.

Even Sandstorm not gaining traction with their B2B strategy is likely a blessing in disguise: with enterprise money coming in they would have felt a hard pull to do more things that enterprises like. No matter how much conviction you have, making payroll often trumps that.

Now, they've proven that the enterprise route doesn't work. My hope is that the project can continue to improve and gain traction to the point where it sets up or joins a foundation, then potentially try to restart a complementary commercial venture on top of that.

> Now, they've proven that the enterprise route doesn't work.

Well, no... I don't think we proved it didn't work, only that we lacked the expertise to make it work. With more time and some good hiring I think we could have fixed the problem, but the investor money ran out, so...

Ok, that might have been an oversimplification on my part, maybe "isn't a natural fit" would have been better. I'm sure there's enough value there that you could have eventually made a business out of it.

I think some others of the team work for stripe now.

That's correct.