Seems disingenuous, since the email talked about "branding on expressjs.com", but what actually happened was moving the github repo out of the independent expressjs organization into strongloop's namespace, which is extremely different. It sounds like TJ doesn't understand what part of this was upsetting.
Maybe missed "I understand this won’t clear my name, and that’s not the intention of this post"?
Eran was claiming I mentioned nothing to Douglas at all so I just wanted to put the facts out there. I could have taken the money and run, frankly it's hardly a month's worth of money, not worth all the community BS haha but I wanted to share it with Douglas. I know StrongLoop will do no harm, moving of the repo is completely irrelevant IMO, lots of people will rage and say otherwise but that's my view.
Moving the repo is the source of the issue here. From now on every developer will see "hey, this belongs to strongloop now".
It is completely different from Automattic, because they took over almost dead project. I saw socket.io at the moment with months without commits, and it was necessary to do something about it.
It is different from Joyent. I would rather see node under a foundation now, but five years ago Ryan probably couldn't promote it by himself and needed help.
Express.js had three active developers working on a new version already. It had an organization named "expressjs" where all related modules are stored. It didn't need to be transferred anywhere (especially not to a for-profit organization for using the repo as an advertising place).
Even if strongloop guys will manage to avoid doing harm (not sure about that), seeing the company name in the all hyperlinks to github is a harm enough (considering that the company did nothing for it... well... except for the transfer payment...).
The blog post states TJ moved it from his personal visionmedia account to strongloop's company org. It was never in the expressjs org.
Because of that, it reads to me like TJ saw it as handing over his personal stake in the project to StrongLoop, which consisted of the domain name and the root repo.
It's amusing, the sense of entitlement expressed by contributors. There were some hiccups along the way, but everyone was given back their commit rights.
If you want it to be "your" project, fork it. Everyone who was working on Express was working on TJ's project. There were no "rightful maintainers".
When TJ decided to step away from node, he did offer to give up all his projects to people he felt could maintain them the best. He has said repeatedly he feels StrongLoop can maintain it best. I agree with TJ. The Express "community" can throw all the tantrums they want. It was never their project.
These weren't just contributors, they were github collaborators and the project's active maintainers, including the person TJ himself put in charge of the project, Doug Wilson.
TJ's last commit was on February 19th, 2014 (6b05f60b), and it was simply a version bump on a dependency. Since then there has been one major release (Express 4), six minor releases and 13 patch releases. 167 files changed, 6003 insertions, 1958 deletions.
Of the 581 commits made in the last 12 months, the top five contributors were:
303 Douglas Christopher Wilson
84 Jonathan Ong
66 Roman Shtylman
49 TJ Holowaychuk
5 Fernando Silveira
This is just on master and does not include the work Doug has been doing on the 5.0 branch, or the VOLUMES of work all three had done in the tertiary repos on the ExpressJS organization. StrongLoop hasn't contributed anything.
I'd 100% agree on poor ethics if I didn't talk to Douglas but I did, poorly obviously. I get that now but my intention wasn't to offend him or the other contributors, it seemed (and still does) like a win-win to me and some recognition for the work. I don't recall people freaking out at Ryan when he sold to Joyent, he wasn't the only one working on the project either.
I've not seen any ill will towards you from the people I named above, at least not publicly. They all know it was your project and you were free to do with it as you saw fit. They disagree with your choice, but it was yours to make. You had good intentions, even if the actions played out badly, but that's all now in the past.
Strongloop, on the other hand, has the ability to change the outcome, and have chosen not to. They've been given loads of evidence of what the maintainers want them to do, and so far their actions have not demonstrated a desire to resolve the conflict. Their public responses have been entirely self-serving and barely apologetic.
I am firmly of the impression that they want to hold on to Express so they can claim it's development as an R&D tax write-off. This fits with why they've stated they would only give it to an organization backed by a non-profit foundation, since then it could continue to be a charitable donation. They want to make money off this situation, and that's basically thumbing their noses at the people who put their time into it for free.
As I said in the github thread, there are some major differences between this situation and when Ryan sold to Joyent. Ryan was still working on Node, and Joyent hired both him and Isaac to continue doing so. They also announced [1][2] the transition before it happened, made it very clear what was happening in terms of code ownership, and answered everyone's questions ahead of time. The repos didn't transfer until four months later [3].
edit: I'm being told Strongloop is actually helping to create a foundation for Express to be owned by, they're just not doing it publicly. So that's good.
Express has been a community project for a while. Of course little will change, but this is not how open-source is supposed to work. Only in nodejs land...