What the IBM Acquisition of StrongLoop Means for the Node.js Community | Hacker News Reader

What the IBM Acquisition of StrongLoop Means for the Node.js Community

strongloop.com

244 pointsijroth130 comments

former IBM dev here (6 years in different areas). I hope they let you work on an island and don't force you to use their tooling/approve listed of open source software.

IBM has long embraced the OSS community (I loved LTC), but the process to release/use anything OSS was not good (to put it nicely) and was one of the many reasons I left.

I worked on a project that was on an island, and while it was more efficient than normal IBM dev, it was still 10x slower and tons of red tape then what was required to make a competitive product (and stay competitive). IBM is big and ultimately has to protect themselves - IMO ultimately it gets in your way of making a good/competitive product.

I like what StrongLoop does for the node community, and I do indeed hope you are successful and nothing changes. But to be honest I am very skeptical.

Current IBM dev here (but only speaking anecdotally for myself and my project), can confirm that when we were acquired they let our product and policies remain and did not "blue wash" the project. I would assume the same will occur for StrongLoop and their software practices will probably continue mostly unfettered.

I hope it works out for StrongLoop. When a company I worked for was purchased by IBM, about 3/4 of the engineering staff left once we heard about "Work Life Integration (tm)". It's really hard to work inside Big Blue when you are used to the freedom provided by a small company.

Care to elaborate on IBM "Work Life Integration (tm)" and why it caused the mass exodus?

A quick google search seems to indicate that IBM wanted to allow their employees more flexibility with their schedules and ability to take leaves. I don't understand how this is a bad thing.

The problem was their justification. It went something along the lines of "Employees are often thinking about their personal lives while at work, so they should also be thinking about their work life while at home."

I'm sure the intentions were good, but the presentation was terrible. Also, it was only one of many factors, but its a catchy line so I chose to call that one out.

Other include:

  * Far worse benefits package and no attempt/willingness to make us whole in that regard

  * About half the team was told they would no longer be eligible for raises because their salaries were above the top of their IBM pay band

  * Several people lost large amounts of 401k matching because they missed their partial vesting date for that year (some by a few weeks) because the transition was done as being fired and then hired again

  * Likewise we were not eligible to start contributing to the IBM 401k for some amount of time

  * The IP agreement was Draconian (and we aren't in a state with nice moonlighting laws)

  * They took away our office's coffee budget, which seems small and petty but it was a damned nice thing to have

  * Two of the worst performers were promoted to be engineering managers because they didn't know what else to do with them....

I was only there for a few months after the merger. Talking to some who lasted longer made me very happy to have left. In all about 3/4 of the engineering team was gone within 9 months.

I find it strange that large companies envy the things smaller shops are able to do, and they'll spend the money to buy them up, but they won't spend the time to understand the culture that let them build what they built. Put employees first and you'll find they can do some pretty amazing things.

It is really bizarre. I think it really comes down to managers/execs realizing that but there's an imbalance of power towards risk averse groups like legal, finance and HR who have been given the latitude to make stupid decisions.

CEOs of these large companies really need to step up and take control of these groups who develop an unreasonable amount of risk aversion due to a long history of dealing with issues that have a great deal of gravity for them even though they're fairly minor for the organization overall.

There are some companies that get this right, but a general shift hasn't happened yet and there's probably quite a few CEOs that can't justify the political expense and fallout without the backing of a major culture shift in businesses at large. It might be years or even decades before that happens and it's going to be sad to see small agile companies fall to it in the meantime.

No only that. You will see some mega corp acquire some smaller company for their proprietary tech. Then replace that tech with something else, often open source, or just not use the technology they acquired at all. Are they just going for acquihire? Swallowing up competitors? It blows my mind.

It might be jealousy combined with power to destroy something cool and maybe eliminate something a competitor might leverage. If they're fewer cool companies thriving, it makes the sucky behemoths look less terrible by comparables.

i think its just them putting chips on the table then spinning the wheel.

The only way I have been able to explain this is that the expressed purpose of management hierarchies, which is generally about running successful businesses, is almost entirely different than their actual purpose.

As to the actual purpose, I think it's a similar deal to feudalism. Whatever waffle kings and nobles said, looking back it was pretty clearly about self-aggrandizement, filling one's pockets, taking revenge upon one's enemies, et cetera, ad nauseam.

I guess this shouldn't be surprising; primates gonna prime.

> The IP agreement was Draconian (and we aren't in a state with nice moonlighting laws)

This caused the most of the problems during our acquisition. I'm still with IBM but we had a few people leave over the "IBM owns everything you ever do" clause.

> They took away our office's coffee budget, which seems small and petty but it was a damned nice thing to have

We had company lunch each Friday that had to end with IBM. It's a small thing but it really changes the culture and moral.

" * The IP agreement was Draconian (and we aren't in a state with nice moonlighting laws) "

None of these exist in the US (particularly when you work for someone like IBM). Employees who think otherwise are simply misunderstanding the law :)

Not sure why you think that. Here's California's moonlighting law:

"Any provision in an employment agreement which provides that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of his or her rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time without using the employer’s equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information..."

http://www.weblaws.org/california/codes/ca_lab_section_2870

>without using the employer’s equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information

Good luck trying to prove that against IBM's lawyers and patent portfolio.

Do you have some examples of IBM torpedoing companies in California on this basis?

This is about individuals (ex-IBM employees), not companies.

This might be an example: https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26551.wss

That doesn't appear to be under California law; from his Wikipedia bio it sounds like he was in some state that allows non-competes like that.

Even mighty IBM's lawyers can be sanctioned for bringing a frivolous case out of thin air. If you're careful, you should be OK.

Engineers always get this wrong. They always quote the first part, and then say "see, anything i do on my time with my own stuff is mine".

You forgot the super-important part, which are literally the words after what you quoted, which say: " except for those inventions that either: (1) Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer’s business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer; or (2) Result from any work performed by the employee for the employer."

#1 covers pretty much everything tech related that tech related people do. For example, if you work for IBM, i doubt you can find anything not related to IBM's business, or the R&D of IBM. Becuase it's not what you think IBM's business is, it's what IBM think it's business is. It also doesn't matter whether it's a secret project you don't know about, or historical, or anything.

It makes no difference what you do for the company either. If I work as an IP lawyer for Google, and Google builds self-driving cars (among other things), any work i do on my own time related to self driving cars is Google's.

Note also "related to", not "exactly the same as". So if it's in the same area, field, etc, you are screwed.

But you don't have to take my word for it, look at court cases in CA, which find the same :)

Now, maybe if you work for a small, super-focused company, you may be okay.

But good luck if you work for any mid or large sized tech company, which often have so many projects, strategic initiatives, and research that it covers pretty much everything in the world.

To wit: In every case an employee has come to me saying "well, we don't do that, so why would you own it", it has been a case that the employee did not know there was a team doing it. I have never had a case of an employee coming to me and it turned out "yeah, you know what, we don't really do anything in that area"

> About half the team was told they would no longer be eligible for raises because their salaries were above the top of their IBM pay band

IBM most likely spent (speculating here) several millions of dollars on the acquisition, and they can't afford to pay the devs? This is completely messed up.

I worked for IBM for a period and all the teams I was around were very family-friendly when it came to work/life balance. Much more so than other younger/cooler tech companies I've worked for and read about. There were downsides at IBM for sure, but this wasn't one of them.

Huh. When Blekko got acquired by IBM Watson, all of the employees thought that IBM's policies about flexible working hours and locations were great. So far I'm the only techie who's departed.

But you were the CTO .. that likely said something to the remaining folks.

Also - Hi Greg!

We were in their software services vertical (I forget the name)...the one that had never turned a profit and wasn't sexy. I've known one person who had a great experience on the Watson team. So maybe its a different experience?

Were you on a CAMSS team? That seems to be the best area inside of IBM right now as it's a strategic growth area. This includes the Watson PS team I'm on.

As an IBMer, many of the complainers I've heard and much of the heartburn around layoffs come from outside of CAMSS. It's like folks at Apple complaining that the iPod team isn't treated as well as the iPad team. Of course, your group isn't making money.

Were you really left alone, though? As in, not even forced to use Lotus Notes? Because even that kind of small-bore enterprisation can destroy the culture of a small tech-focused company.

About your point about Lotus Notes: I interned at IBM 3 times, and was never forced to use Lotus Notes. No one whom I worked with at IBM used Lotus Notes either. We used either Open Office or MS Office.

The most popular IBM software we used was SameTime for instance messaging and it was actually not bad at all.

Just as a counterpoint: when I interned at IBM, we were forced to use various Lotus products including Notes. Lotus Symphony was especially painful, and we begged to be allowed to just use Powerpoint (and were told, emphatically, "No.")

Lotus Cacaphony.

IBM still uses Notes for email, and a lot of legacy database-like applications. There's Notes-based webmail, but it's still Notes.

The new Notes-based webmail is Verse. It's not horrible. It's not great. It's just bad in different ways than Notes was.

Actually there are two. A web based notes, and the new 'verse'.

You might be thinking about the Office-like companion to Notes, Symphony. AFAIK (going from some Name/Location/BU-looking email addresses) IBM still uses Lotus Notes for email.

Lotus Notes is actually quite good when used properly and in moderation, but it really does not set a positive tone culturally.

Notes is _terrible_ from a UI perspective. The server side (domino) though was light-years ahead of anything in terms of ideas at least. Combining a CA, distributed, document-oriented database(think mongodb, couchdb), LDAP server, web server and mail server that supports IMAP, POP, SMTP as well as the proprietary encrypted notes protocol.

Agreed. I worked in Lotus Domino for a short while, and it was absolutely amazing for Rapid Application Development of anything that required e-mail and storing documents (or kinda "schemaless" data). It was even supported multiple languages (a declarative "Formula" language, a Visual Basic derived "LotusScipt", and Java(!)).

You could write a decent Lotus Domino app that served up web pages, so users wouldn't have to use the awful Lotus Notes client.

Amusingly, in I think Lotus Notes 8, they revitalised the GUI by replacing it with... Eclipse RCP. Hrmm.

I did witness some monstrosities, though...

> As in, not even forced to use Lotus Notes?

painful flashback! or, I guess, "trigger" in the parlance of today.

I worked for a biotech software company some years ago that wasn't even bought by IBM but as part of becoming an "IBM Business Partner" agreed to use Lotus Notes to replace a bunch of existing stuff we were using for email/collaboration/etc.

Notes isn't even bad or anything but it was no better than the tools we were already using for the tasks we were using them for, and because it is (or was? haven't used it since) a big all-encompassing "enterprise" system it took like a half-year migration period to get everyone to the point where we could do the same sorts of things we could before, not really any better or worse, just different and incredibly disruptive during the transition.

(also, is this mkozlows from qt3? haven't posted there in a long time, used to use the handle Coca Cola Zero).

Curious - how long ago did they acquire you? Your software get rolled into an IBM product or is it self standing? They let you continue to use your productive tools (asana,github,slack etc)?

Current IBM Dev here. I know several IBM teams that use slack & github. There should be no problem with that.

Private or public repos? From my experience collaborating in public (which will continue to be critical in this space) was painful/impossible in some scenarios

Have you seen this? http://ibm.github.io/

Sorry, what is work on an island?

A euphemism for being left to do things the way you used to do things before you were bought.

As much as I fear this will drag StrongLoop, I feel that this is an excellent fit. StrongLoop has been focused on building "Enterprise" tools and module around node, as well as working on whitelisting/reviewing various modules... This is a good fit for IBM and their clients who are inclined to also want to have "approved" or "certified" modules to be able to use separately from the rest of npm.

As much as I like the power/openness of npm, a lot of corporate environments move more slowly... modules need to be cleared by legal and usually limited to specific versions. Having more resources to do this is a good thing and can only help people who are working for financial institutions (as an example).

> And it’s not just Node.js. Maybe you haven’t looked at what IBM is doing with open source lately. I was surprised when I dug in. For example, did you know they are leading contributors to:

Linux OpenStack Cloud Foundry Docker plus many Apache projects like Spark, Cordova and Hadoop and of course, Node

They are? (keyword => "leading")

https://github.com/docker/docker/graphs/contributors

https://github.com/apache/spark/graphs/contributors

I find this claim dubious. Maybe I'm not digging hard enough.

What is it about these posts that bring out the HN contingent who think themselves firebrand skeptics? This is basically a marketing piece, what good is fact-checking it

A little more honest marketing would do the world some good. I'm all for having someone check and call out bs where it is found.

> This is basically a marketing piece, what good is fact-checking it

Not sure about the US laws, but here in Germany, all marketing claims must stay to the facts, or the company can be sued.

(Which is why most marketing speak uses fuzzy terms that sound nice but don't convey any information. But that's a general trend anyway.)

Es musst die Wahrheit sein!!!

Ah, Hollywood German. How lovely.

Yeah but we have 'freedom' here in the US </sarcasm>. I love French restrictions on adverts for medications as well, they're very stringent. As a dual US/EU citizen, I never run out of interesting divergences like the one you've pointed out.

I've done a fair bit of PR writing myself so I'm happy to be skeptical and understand the line between marketing speak and reality.

The problem here is the audience is clearly the developer community (which I'm also a part of). Developer communities have a right be skeptical about key acquisitions of their open source dependancies. It can have massive commercial implications on software design decisions, etc.

Open source is built on trust. Dubious communication does nothing but erode that trust.

It looks like IBM's Spark-related work is planned to be here initially: https://github.com/SparkTC

There's an article here: http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/15/ibm-pours-researchers-and-r...

IBM are working on the runtimes for things like Node, Spark, Python, Docker, and augmenting them to perform well on IBM platforms and integrate with IBMs enterprise monitoring and diagnostic tools.

Some of these augmentations have been contributed back to the main projects.

That sounds great, but where is the source?

On Cloud Foundry they are a major contributor; only Pivotal donates more engineering effort (disclaimer: I work for Pivotal Labs).

IBM has a lot of working engineers at Cloud Foundry HQ in San Francisco. Last I checked IBM-CFers were the whole CLI team and they're doing great.

Speaking just about Docker and not commenting on this post in particular: IBM employs at least 5 people who dedicate their time to working upstream. Duglin, as an example is #11 on the contribution graph in your list

disclosure: I run partnerships for Docker.

From the customer side - I dealt with Netezza and Softlayer before and after IBM acquisition. In both cases an almost palpable drain in support and intelligence. I hate to say it like that as i know that there are brilliant folks in IBM (Watson, etc)

Softlayer and Netezza in different ways were smart, nimble and fearless companies. You had real relationships with the engineers. I got to know Netezza folks in Massachusetts, Poland and Australia - some of the smartest folks I've met. They shared scripts and passionate expertise.

IBM took it over and the bureaucracy set in. The term "TAM" brings tears of rage to my eyes... Opening a support ticket is about as hard as applying for a mortgage online. And they want to have these endless conference calls with 7 or 8 folks from their side. And nothing gets done.

I am embarrassed about the way I have acted on these calls. I have called folks out and out liars. I have screamed at and bashed conference phones.

Maybe it would have been better if I hadn't known the Netezza folks - they were good.

And Softlayer...

I used to be able to call a guy down in texas and after a 20 minute phone call have a cluster of servers ordered. Once did a hadoop cluster this way. Go off and have lunch come back and the servers would we ready by the afternoon.

And now: 2 major outages in the past 2 months. No communication - in both cases entirely their fault. Power failure and network misconfig causing an arp storm. Ignored for hours while we submitted tickets and called support... Nightmare.

And an absurd situation where their security dept threatened us with taking an haproxy server offline due to a clean-mx false positive - even after the tireless guy running clean-mx emailed to that effect...

It became apparent in the discussions following this event that the TAM and sales support which has had our account for years, knew nothing about our business.

Just horrible bureacracy and bad service.

So I have had really negative experiences with 2 IBM acquired companies. Hopefully it will be better for StrongLoop.

For anyone affected - watch for the good folks shedding off.

I hear you on the support side. I used to work for a company that used a product that was bought by IBM. Before that, you could pick up the phone and talk to the lead developer. After, you opened a support ticket online and waited 24-48 hours for a response from someone in Costa Rica or India. Now I work at IBM with this same product, and even I as an employee who supports the product, even I have to go through the same Level 1 tech support crap.

However, the cash injection made the core product worlds better, and it was good to begin with. Support got worse, the product got better. It's almost an even balance.

I completely agree and add that I always find support saying, "Oh, I only support 'X', you need to call for support on 'Y'."

It is a race to pass the buck.

I used to work with an old IBMer who used to say "it's no accident that IBM nearly collapsed at the same time as the Soviet Union did". Lou Gerstner famously rescued IBM from oblivion by turning it into a consultancy led company, and moving the focus away from mainframes. This is just a case of IBM snaffling up the latest cool thing so they can sell consulting services.

What is the connection to the Soviet Union? Were they a large IBM customer?

No, but the people who were afraid of them were :-)

Cold War funds for department of defense and other federal departments dried up.

Both IBM and USSR were bloated, inefficient, slow moving, hierarchical, bureaucratic organisations. Gorbachev failed to save his org, despite heroic efforts. Gerstner did rescue IBM. Maybe if Gorby had saved the USSR Putin would still be working for the KGB in Berlin...

Which is fine, people who build things need an exit after all.

> the Russian decision in the late sixties to develop as their next national computer series a bit-compatible copy of the IBM 360 —the greatest American victory in the cold war!—.

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD05xx/E...

Your quip reminded me of the above quote from Dijkstra!

Despite my other comment, I do regularly post that one. Hilarious. Anyone that saw better architectures (eg Burroughs) knows that he's probably right that cloning 360 wasted a prime opportunity to kick IBM's ass with technically superior, state-funded product. There's a chance they'll make a come-back in near future, though.

> ...moving the focus away from mainframes.

Actually, System z (mainframes) still accounts for a quarter of IBM's revenue and about half of its profits. [1] At least, that was the case in 2012. I suspect that hasn't changed much with IBM's recent announcement of the LinuxONE. In fact, IBM contributed significant effort get Node.js (and thereby V8) ported to s390x. [2]

[1]: http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/09/ibms-mainf... [2]: http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/09/ibms-mainf...

It's too painful for people to check their facts before declaring mainframes dead or something IBM is leaving. As you said, they're incredibly profitable. Same thing happened with OpenVMS, which turned out much profit for HP despite little investment. Next they'll be telling us Group Bull, Unisys, and Fujitsu are similarly scraping by in the mainframe business. And NonStop and IBM i are on verge of cancellation. And blah blah blah.

I'm sure we'll be hearing the same crap in a decade while said crap is posted via a service that imtegrates with a COBOL app on a mainframe. ;)

Mainframes still bring in a lot of money. I actually think of IBM as being led by finance people.

If you're trying to relieve fears, the first paragraph does not help.

"IBM has identified Node.js as an important part of the future of enterprise middleware and StrongLoop’s technology and expertise as pivotal to their strategy to help companies fully unlock the value of their existing IT investments and legacy data with APIs."

Seems like too much fluff - both the acquirer generating it and the acquisition itself. It would be helpful to see why/where one would use node.js when other platforms support many more workloads well than just pure I/O bound ones. In the "enterprise middleware", going native (C++) or managed (JVM/CLR) brings with it a much richer ecosystem alongwith a more robust runtime that can better support other workloads that entail for example cpu binding. It's hard to see a real need for node.js as it seems to not do anything significantly better than other platform options.

Recently I got heavily into node-red[0] after playing with a ti sensortag[1], and I'm really amazed at what it can do, and that it is open source and actively used by IBM in bluemix.

Now they acquired another heavy weight in the js world, I wonder what is their next step.

On a side note, to the audience: have you looked at node-red, what do you think of it?

[0]: http://nodered.org/ [1]: http://www.ti.com/sensortag

ps. if you run node-red locally note by default it is insecure, you need to setup the config. But really it is a must try!

IBM recently bought out Softlayer hosting and support went from great to glacially slow and all but uncaring in about 28 seconds.

Damnit! That's one of the companies I found searching for a physical version of cloud hosting. Looked promising. Now they're IBM. (sighs) Going to have to delete them from my bookmarks...

Sucks that IBM has this effect. If they didn't, esp if had opposite effect, they could be the biggest and most awesome tech company in existence.

Once I worked in a project which IBM was also involved. And everything in IBM related to that project was slow, very slow.

It's a gigantic organization that makes hardware, software, and does consulting. Does one anecdotal story really characterize it?

Exactly, it's why I held out on posting my single counter anecdotal story.

It is not just one anecdotal story. I used to work for IBM, then have them as a client, then was a business partner, and have worked on their software for over 20 years.

Based on all my experience, they are slow and expensive, and over-build their teams. They do deliver the final product and it will work, which is why people hire them, but they do not do it efficiently.

Yep. Same here. IBM contract in one of our huge data centers. (This was for a large accounting firm.)

The process to get a new blade installed in one of our chassis took 6 months.

Congrats , I know nothing about "modern" IBM but it seems like they are trying interesting things with Bluemix. Let's see what happens next.

This announcement fits along with Node.js 4.0's release containing a commitment to an 18-month roadmap in giving Node.js a greater maturity.

As much as I like to think I have chosen Node.js purely for its merits, having a wide community who adopts a platform brings a few perks:

- Hiring developers requires less of a gamble on their part. Elixir looks very promising and probably has a lot of advantages over Node.js thanks to it's Erlang foundation but it makes it harder to assemble a team—I hope this changes as I wish the Erlang/Elixir folks all the best.

- There is a great amount of wealth contained in the package repository NPM. Before Node.js, this was a great strength of Perl's CPAN (and TeX' CTAN before that).

- Having large organizations adopt a platform will eventually increase OSS contributions.

I could be mistaken but I don't see Node.js following the bureaucratic of Java's JSR if it continues to adopt a lean and mean approach akin to UNIX tools (do 1 thing well).

Anybody?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_acquisition_by_Oracle

Despite both being big enterprise corporations, IBM is nothing like Oracle. Oracle is pretty much one huge ego trip swallowing everything like the Borg.

You clearly have never dealt with the Professional Services & Consulting arm of IBM.

If anything this is a strong validation of Node.js in the enterprise space. This is actually good news for anyone working within the enterprise trying to use a different technology set. It makes selling Node to a CTO a bit easier (even if you choose not to use StrongLoop).

"Enterprise" is already using node.js This is IBM tryng to stay in touch with their customers.

I realize this blog post is full of optimistic "nothing will change!" statements, but that doesn't seem super-IBM-like.

Congratulations Issac! Happy for you and the team.

Woot thanks Kord. I'm excited for Node.

Hmm, that the acquisition would mean anything for node directly seems off. At least, the blog post seemed to indicate that this wasn't meant to be about IBM buying influence. I wasn't a customer and not particularly keen on the enterprise focus of strongloop but I thought you had a really good thing going with loopback. Not sure what to think of it now... I was in a startup that got acquired by a huge multinational and it was shocking how quickly we went from nimble to gridlock.

If IBM screws ExpressJS up (wishfully not), Hapi[1] is a good alternative.

https://github.com/hapijs/hapi

Considering the development history of Express mostly consisted of cutting down on features and streamlining the core, it should be easy to notice whether the acquisition has any effect.

> Making sure that Node.js is a first class citizen on Softlayer and BlueMix

BlueMix is a Cloud Foundry installation. Is there a separate BlueMix-specific thing that is distinct from the Node.js buildpack?[0]

[0] https://github.com/cloudfoundry/nodejs-buildpack

It is hard to say what this means at this stage...

IBM develops products that it acquires based on where IBM needs the product to go. Sometimes that matches where the user community wants it to go, sometimes it does not. But they will put resources behind it, and it will change - we just need to give it time to see what direction that change takes things.

Just a question -might be dumb- is the merger of io.js and node.js which happened a couple of months ago related to this news in anyway? Anyways IMHO this good news and I hope it will make node.js much better, who knows maybe replace V8 with something even better.

I can't imagine it wouldn't be. This kind of decisions aren't made very quickly. I'm more curious if the IO team was aware of this...

HA! Hahahaha. hahaa.... wheeze

Acquisitions are thoroughly NDA'd. A few of the core team may have been told (but relationships are not universally cordial - recall that Strongloop and Nodesource are direct competitors). The io.js community in general was absolutely not told.

I expect there are a few people who feel a bit betrayed that one of the major movers in a supposed grass-roots community-oriented fork appears to have done it only to make themselves a better acquisition target.

While they're not wrong to feel that way, StrongLoop have been telegraphing this particular intention for a long time (at least since hiring Roth).

What node.js needs is a better way to manage packages. Right now, upgrading can fail with no way to roll back. Also, reproducibility is missing. E.g, it is not easy to download sources, and deploy those exact same sources on different machines.

npm is now its own company, so I think there is hope that serious work is being done to fix those issues.

Please check out slc build and slc deploy from StrongLoop which attempt to solve exactly this issue and are being used by major deployments.

What's a good book to learn about the new stuff? Async et al..

I learnt Python from "Dive Into Python 3", but that hasn't been updated for few years now. Any similar book with recent updates?

I imagine it doesn't mean much beyond some more b2b uses of Node. Node has its own independent governance and nothing about this acquisition changes that.

Well, at least it's not Oracle…

IBM Nodesphere.

Sorry for the joke but how many callbacks did they need to make this transaction?

I promise it wasn't that many.

async I saw what you did there.

I don't get it and await an explanation

This is starting to look like Reddit.

Nothing wrong with a little bit of humor, imo. It's not like a thread is full of puns.

make it then-able... like so:

doSomeAsync() .andThen(doSomeOtherAsync1) .andThen(doSomeOtherAsync2) ... .andThen(SomeOtherAsync10) .noAndThen(finalize)

callback hell

Something went wrong, I'll stop here and you'll never know. Next time, try to catch it.

you forked the thread. node doesn't have threads.

Two: one to begin work, and one to commit.

so how much was it acquired for?

3 souls and a rabbit.

guess i will move to php

said no one EVER

Dislike

JavaScript is eating the world, part XXIV.

This has some awesome implications for open source. If a huge company like IBM openly supports and dedicates resources to FOSS, I think we can expect these products to get way more attention and receive the full treatment of corporate testing and development which would really offset the ephemeral nature of projects like Node. Not saying the current foundation guys aren't doing a great job already, but IBM's expertise in software can only be a plus I think!

IBM have been a major Linux contributor since around 2000 (just as a more recent example), so they aren't exactly new to FOSS.

Never said so :)

IBM has been an open source supporter for a long time. Their first Linux kernel contributions came no later than '99 (when they started upstreaming changes to support Linux on their mainframes, available since 2000).

You can see some details about their open source contributions here: http://www-03.ibm.com/linux/ossstds/oss/ossindex.html

And Eclipse.. When it was open sourced, it was one of the largest project to be open sourced.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com