- Historically the V8 team simply did not care about node, and would introduce breaking changes that would come as a surprise to node core
- It's better now, and V8 folk are on one of the steering committees for node. Also Google Compute Engine team needs node to work so also brings in a real business case for the V8 team to care about node
- Chakra is also a pretty good contingency plan.
People say your company has changed, I hope it has, but I can't help but notice on a weekly basis that I can't print from my office because of your company, that there are constant problems with document formats everywhere because of your company and your email client is actively working against me, the user, all the time by trying to block simple things like cutting and pasting email addresses. Maybe those are all just legacies of the old Microsoft, but all the same there they are slapping me in the face every week.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish
Microsoft is outputting lot of Open Source into their github repos, so there is evidence of Microsoft's change of attitude towards open source, it started few years back and picked up with the change of guard.
Here is some food for your thought: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MicrosoftKilledMyPappy.aspx
I just checked and that condescending blog post hasn't enabled me to print from my office. You know what the IT guys told me? That I should run Microsoft Windows in a VM to be able to print. This is at a large Australian university. The operating system of one of the fastest supercomputers in the southern hemisphere, down the road, is Linux. I am writing software to run on that machine but but in my office I can't even print from Ubuntu. Seriously?
Microsoft is a corporation not a charity, the managers and directors have incentives to make a profit for the shareholders. Even without a track record, or the Department of Justice investigations and the numerous leaks we've seen, it's not like Microsoft should be trusted off the bat in the first place.
Additionally, beyond the things I've mentioned that I currently face, I've been programming since the early 1990s and I lived through the damage that Microsoft did. I didn't mindlessly inherit a distrust of Microsoft. I'm not that much younger than the guy who wrote that blog; I watched it all go down in realtime.
Returning to the point, when I see a Pied Piper blogger saying that Microsoft is "the Future" of some open source project that's ok. But when they haven't even got their implementation running on a non-Microsoft platform I think "maybe we should wait until they've got it running on at least one other platform before declaring anything is 'the Future'". Is that unreasonable? Maybe the blogger should have picked a less outrageous headline. And it is outrageous, it's got people on Reddit saying &yet have "jumped the shark"[1] and others saying "I thought &yet was smarter than this".[2] I am not even going that far, I am just saying they should lay off the hyperbole, given the history of Microsoft.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7281283 [1]https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/3z302e/the_futu... [2]https://www.reddit.com/r/node/comments/3z303d/the_future_of_...