[drderidder]

It isn't that. Really it's Fedor and Mikeal pushing it a lot, not the strongloop guys. The other core devs are behind it, too, except a couple from Joyent. It really has nothing to do with corporate power struggles (that's more what Joyent's advisory board is about, frankly)... it has to do with developers getting really frustrated at the stalled pace of development on the Joyent branch. The real objective is to get rapid release cycles, pull in updates on V8, better separation of core modules, and new features for better numerical computing, etc. Oh, and new logo proposals are going wild at the moment.

[craigyk]

New features for numerical computing? I am intrigued... for me that essentially means operator overloading, including []. I think that would open the door for implementing a numpy like module for Node. Is that the plan?

[drderidder]

No, operator overloading isn't in the language spec, with reason. I think numerical computing libs like LAPACK, if ported to JS, will probably require a wrapper around 64-bit floats (a la BigDecimal) and math operators that are really function calls. The plan has been to look into transpiling from fortran to asm.js although my personal feeling is it would be better just to use the C API and compile a module that statically links in the necessary libs. They'll figure it out...