These are the guys in control of nodejs. They appear to be both immature and highly profit driven with far more interest in themselves than the platform. If this isn't a red flag for investing time in nodejs, I don't know what is.
It's a good thing for the startup, sure. But it's definitely a very bad thing for a third party choosing to use nodejs as a critical part of their infrastructure. You guys might take nodejs off on a direction that is beneficial to you and not to me, and I'm not in a position to fork the project myself if that happens.
> Let's say that we don't/can't do that, we'd have to create a new foundation. That's not cheap. Conservative estimates put it at around 1-2 million a year for legal, marketing, hiring a few developers to work on Node.js.
BTW, I think the Apache Software Foundation gets by with much less than that.
I agree that 'profit driven' is not a bad thing, though, in any event!
Yes, it highly depends on what your foundation "does".
The ASF does not hire developers to work on projects -- it just provides the infrastructure for development to happen. Once you start hiring developers, budgets for foundations go up way too quickly, and once you do that you get into the whole fundraising trap. (Need to raise 2m? Better pay an ED $250,000 to do that, and then they are motivated to get it to $3m, etc)
Ok, but why does this hypothetical Node.js foundation need to hire developers? Joyent won't shell out the money for it any more if they are not see as "owning" an MIT-licensed open source project?
Their call, I guess, I am more of an Erlang guy than a Node.js guy, so I don't have a horse in this race.
Does Joyent care about the future of node more than about it being its cash cow?
If so, why aren't Joyent willing to collaborate with other companies in a sensible way?
Why are they willing to throw collaborators that work for competitors into the fire as soon as shit hits the fan?
If collaborators know that Joyent will issue a press release to discredit them and protect their asses as soon as that collaborator makes a PR mistake, do you think that anyone would be actually willing to join the node project and work as a collaborator?
Is the answer to the previous question good for node.js?
These are just some of the fears that I'm having for the future of node.
I think that Joyent should apologize. Not for standing up for gender equality, but for betraying the community's trust. The trust that collaboration will consist of good will and support; that all issues will be resolved with reasonable discourse, no matter what company you happen to work for. Or at the very least, for handling things poorly by adding fuel to the fire.
I thought this was a forum about startups.