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Comment by bastawhiz | Hacker News Reader

To everyone chanting "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish", I'd like to remind you that Node proper was a golden egg sitting under Joyent's goose. When Joyent decided they didn't want to embrace anymore, the community took the extinguisher out of their hands. Granted, Microsoft is in a more similar position to Google than to Joyent, but the point of the argument is that the community has driven the language and the runtime forward, not the corporation backing it.

Unlike most of Microsoft's other EEE attempts, this time they're putting their code with their mouths are and putting it all up under MIT. There's little you can do to get more open and honest than that. If the community doesn't like the direction MS is taking Chakra, they're free to take it in a new direction. Hopefully it doesn't come to that, but it's an option.

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>When Joyent decided they didn't want to embrace anymore, the community took the extinguisher out of their hands

Joyent wound up embracing io.js, and Node.js is moving at a very fast pace now while maintaining LTS branches in parallel. It's a very well managed project, in my opinion.

Aside, how come anything remotely questioning of Microsoft when there's an announcement is met with downvotes?

> how come anything remotely questioning of Microsoft when there's an announcement is met with downvotes?

Selection effects! Posts about Microsoft doing something cool will attract a readership in which Microsoft fandom is over-represented, compared to the average readership of HN.

I don't agree with your characterisation. GP was complaining about downvotes to anti-MS comments, and that's nothing to do with 'attracting a readership'. More like the specific criticism of Microsoft demonstrated in this thread so far is the same tired old crap and not relevant to the actual topic.

...that, or "PR bots" at work.

I guess I'll see by the downvotes this comment receives. ;)

Aside, how come anything remotely questioning of Microsoft when there's an announcement is met with downvotes?

I don't think it is. However, I'll downvote criticism that isn't actually based on anything other than "well, you know, it's Microsoft so they won't", "remember extend, embrace, extinguish?" or "M$", etc. etc.

Criticism with actual backing is fine.

I've opened a few issues and sent a some pull requests along to various MS projects (couple of bits shipped).

I've found them generally to be quite supportive and encouraging in the vast majority of places.

I've been un-acknowledged on a couple and have felt un-welcome in only one instance. (In that one case I'm pretty sure the words we were using were all English, but I'm not sure we had the same meaning... I walked away from that one feeling dumber than where I started.)

All said and done, I have been wildly pleased with my experiences as a Microsoft community contributor on github... Though would say that there is some variability as you cross teams.

As you'd expect from people.

> In that one case I'm pretty sure the words we were using were all English, but I'm not sure we had the same meaning

I do not get what you mean here, are you willing to elaborate a bit? :)

Sorry I was trying to be too clever.

I mean that the things that they were saying were so complex that I was completely unable to understand a single word of it.

That's a bit over stated too, but the short version is that they confused me to the point that I didn't think I'd be able to make a valuable contribution to the project.

To break down my phrasing above, "I know you're speaking English, but I don't know what you're saying" is a phrase I've heard used but I think it isn't common.

Hope that helps. Basically it's a bad joke :)

Haha, okay, now I see what you mean :)

> putting it all up under MIT. There's little you can do to get more open and honest than that.

I disagree. Node was OSS-licensed under GitHub back in the Joyent days, but the inner circle was still very much closed. PRs languished for months or even years. The leap from there to here for Node is, arguably, bigger than the leap from closed-source to open. Evidence: io.js had to happen.

But the thing he's saying is that having io.js happen was possible. It's also possible in this scenario too.

Forking is always possible, but it was only practical because the community could plausibly claim to be able to put as much or more effort into building out their fork than Joyent could theirs.

Microsoft is a much, much, much bigger company than Joyent. If they decide they want to take things in their own direction, they can throw an awful lot of programmers at making that happen. Which would make standing up a fork that could plausibly claim to be at least as actively developed as Microsoft's would be much more difficult.

to take things in their own direction

And there is evidence that this is true. Node itself has had to make major changes to it's own code to account for unilateral V8 changes, and node really has had no choice but to suck it up and make corresponding changes. They could fork V8, but it's not likely since Google is always going to be able to throw more resources at it.

Forking isn't possible when the code is not there, and when the company that created/copyrighted the code is openly hostile to forks. By them releasing under MIT, this issue is resolved.

As for the manpower behind Microsoft, git has made it very easy to merge code from relatively similar source code - in the cases that they make large important changes, those can always be merged in, and usually without too much work involved.

The only way they could succeed with something like that would be for them to go closed-source again, in which case you're still better off than if they never went open in the first place because you still at least have some code to work from.

Node isn't a very complicated piece of software though... 30,000 lines of C++ and 20,000 lines of Javascript. We're talking about a top tier Javascript engine here that weighs in at closer to half a million lines (only a fraction smaller than v8) where open source efforts are already split over three other mature engines.

MIT is flawed b/c it does nothing for licensing of patents that might cover sections of that code base.

I'm not saying Microsoft is intentionally not licensing patents through OS, this might be strictly to be compatable with GPL.

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