[ChiperSoft]

Heroku supports iojs, but I suppose that meets the definition of "almost no one" when you scope it to all available PaaS options worldwide.

> io.js kept mum until the last moment before their release, with an invite-only codebase.

This is factually inaccurate. Fedor Indutny created the iojs fork on November 26th. The 1.0 release came out on January 13th, significantly less than 6 months. The iojs repo was always public.

The project you're referring to was the node-forward/node repo, which was initially public and forced to be made private due to Joyent's trademark.

This history is all fully documented here: http://blog.izs.me/post/104685388058/io-js

[doublerebel]

From your own link:

> On July 11, Mikeal Rogers created a private node-forward repository under his personal GitHub account to discuss the future direction of Node.js.

> Io.js continues the work that was previously being done by Node Forward in the node-forward/node repository. We hope to merge with the original Node.js project at some point in the future.

The "fork threats" started in 2013. [1]

It would have been simple to rename node-forward and keep it public, odd to blame Joyent for their choice to continue trademark infringement in private?

Previous to its release, io.js supporters spammed HN with multiple contentless links about its release. [2] No explanation to the community, raised a ton of questions and did not provide answers except within their insular circle.

Everyone is trying so hard to be part of something new and trendy, that they are blind to the facts in front of them.

[1] http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/18/can-this-startup-steal-nod...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8700554

[iends]

You put an interesting spin on reality.

I don't know the exact history of node-forward, but node-forward/node was only a piece of the node-forward repository. Early on it was my impression was that node-forward was just about collecting pain points in the node ecosystem and working towards those pain points (technical or not). The fork came later.

The fork threats you mention don't seem to have anything to do with node-forward. In addition, the article clearly states that "Roth told VentureBeat his company does not intend to fork Node" so these fork threats were not reality.

As for why they didn't rename node-forward/node? Well the previously linked article explains it quite well "We agreed to make the repository private in order to show our commitment to working with Joyent on improving Node.js."