[creamyhorror]

Here's some history, from what I've read. The original discussion of the transfer of the Express repo's ownership to Strongloop occurred here in June 2014:

https://github.com/strongloop/express/issues/2264

Back then, many in the community were surprised by the sponsorship (sale?) of the project and called for the repo to be transferred to the Expressjs org instead. So the question of ownership has been a long-running issue.

Now the ownership/involvement seems to have passed from Strongloop to their acquirer IBM. We're just seeing Doug/the community reprise the same issue with the new owners.

Doug (and presumably other third-party contributors) naturally won't want to be the main contributors to a project owned by a company, so the IBM guys will probably have to take over development & maintenance no matter what. (Barring them giving the project back to the organisation.) Chance of a fork too.

I guess a shared governance model is needed here, to get all parties aligned again.

[jacquesm]

This is one of the pitfalls of contributing to an open source project, sooner or later (assuming the project gains traction) some company will acquire the project for what for them is peanuts and in the process they'll do what they can to keep the current project the one people will flock to.

That's why we have MariaDB and a whole raft of other projects that are technically closely related to the original and maintained by a number of people that were originally associated with the project but that moved on after an acquisition by forking the project.

Companies as a rule do not like the kind of autonomy that is associated with FOSS.

Maybe this is a solution in this case too, Doug could in theory fork it under a different name and just keep it running (unless his contract prevents him from doing that).

[dougwilson]

I don't have any type of contract around Express; only the interest in providing a stable project to the community.