The title (which is not the title of the original article) makes it sound as if Meteor is not open source. Meteor is open source, and MIT-licensed at that.
I'd imagine a lot of people (myself included) have cooled somewhat on Meteor as SQL support has failed to materialize, so Feather's DB flexibility seems like a standout feature.
You are right Feathers is MIT and so is Meteor. They both do real-time, albeit a bit differently, so we like to consider Meteor an alternative to Feathers and vice-versa.
We are trying to be as transparent as possible and because we don't currently have any formal support from anyone except for the contributor's time and energy, we rely heavily on the community and need to remain as open as possible.
Personally, I think Meteor has done some amazing stuff and some not so amazing things. I respect a lot of what they have achieved but we are making a different attempt at similar problems. Nothing more to it than that really. We've tried to put up objective comparisons between Feathers and many of the real-time solutions out there http://docs.feathersjs.com/why/vs/readme.html. There is no silver bullet for all situations and all people.
Meteor offers a slew of real time features, propagating real time observation of the database up the stack through your webservers to your views, all functioning seamlessly with feature-packed APIs to query your data and make sure everything is kept up to date.
But I think you know this. Capitalizing on your juxtaposition next to Meteor only makes you look bad to someone that actually uses Meteor. You're trying to convince people who haven't used Meteor--and perhaps don't have much experience when it comes to real time--that Feathers is remotely close of an option if you have real time needs. It's not. And most likely a few months from now you will be using the open source--and decoupled from Meteor--Reactive GraphQL (Apollo) project they are developing as the basis for your real time functionality. Only at that point will you be able to claim your real time--but that's beside the point.
You've been around for years, and now your framework is just "a few hundred lines of code"?? That's because you're likely taking the marketing value of having been in the game for a few years (though minimal value compared to claiming you come remotely close to competing with Meteor), and using the name "Feathers" to back your latest reincarnation where your mix-n-match a hodgepodge of NPM libraries that anyone can easily do. Sorry you had to throw away a bunch of code--I know how that goes--but call it what it is instead of all this dishonesty: your latest NPM boilerplate. The newer and humbler Meatier boilerplate offers more realtime than you do!: https://github.com/mattkrick/meatier . And its author doesn't attempt to presume it's anything more than a highly useful boilerplate.
THESE GUYS (FEATHERS) HAVE NO REAL-TIME OFFERING, EVERYONE. DON'T BE FOOLED. If Real Time is what you want, these guys are not it. I find The dishonesty of their marketing unappealing and I hope anyone reading this does too. They are capitalizing on the "Meteor" name and its deep association with "real time" functionality, when in fact they are nothing like it.
That said, from their web site:
> Feathers is completely open source and is community supported, whereas Meteor, although open source, is venture backed and has raised $31.2 million to date.
A license is either Open Source (it meets the OSD) or is not. There is no 'completely open source'. I think Meteor's overvalued too, but you're not 'more' OSS than Meteor is.
As a counter-point, I have built "real time" web apps and Feathers was exactly what I'm looking for and matches my mental model for what that word means.
We do have plans to (optionally) support "real-time" all the way from the database as well and we are currently working on something similar to Apollo and Falcor. Can't do it all at once with no financial support.
If you feel things could be better and are interested in helping us achieve what you think is a more justified stance on being "real-time" then by all means PRs are more than welcome!