[rrss1122]

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.

[ChiperSoft]

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.

It stopped being TJ's project a long time ago.

[tjholowaychuk]

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.

[ChiperSoft]

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].

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/nodejs/lWo0MbHZ6Tc

[2] https://www.joyent.com/blog/a-new-abode-for-node

[3] https://github.com/joyent/node/commit/45adc907c9b3eff0bc560d...

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.

[ricardobeat]

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...

[tjholowaychuk]

Most OSS already has a "parent" company, mozilla's everything, walmart's Hapi, Joyent's Node etc. Nothing overly different about this case.