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.