| HN Mirror

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.