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Comment by qaq | Hacker News Reader

It's not mutually exclusive Hapi was backed by Walmart which is still the largest user of Hapi.

Then why isn't Walmart funding it ? doesn't sound like a Walmart project. Of course plenty of OS projects backed by corporations are abandoned. My point is a project backed by a corp has higher chances being maintained in the long run. So that aspect matters to me when I decide to use something or not.

IIRC Hapi and its ecosystem was borne out of Walmart Labs while Eran was employed there. I would guess that Walmart was "funding" it at the time by paying him a salary.

Once he left they probably felt like they had a team that could contribute to Hapi core themselves if needed, and had no desire to sponsor continued work on the project other than having employees spend time on features/fixes they required. I could be way off -- just a guess at their reasoning.

So basically they are probably still using it but don't contribute back to the open source version?

Not necessarily. They could still be pushing meaningful changes upstream even if they have forked the project (I have no idea if they've forked or not).

I have no basis for any of this, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's the case. The licensing allows it and allows them to maintain more control.

Then why isn't Walmart funding it ?

In this post he mentions, "Since I am no longer employed by a major corporation generous to pay me a salary to work on hapi,". That "major corporation" was Walmart.

edit: You can see it's old URL at walmart labs via archive.org

https://web.archive.org/web/20150101071959/http://walmartlab...

By the way, npm uses Hapi: http://blog.npmjs.org/post/88024339405/nearing-practical-mai...

It does not matter whose is the project. Many, many companies uses that framework and for them Eran like a the goose that lays the golden eggs. That is the key. Who is going to pay anything for that they can get for free.

Someone smart ? It's fairly decent way to ensure a critical piece of your infrastructure will see continued development.

Maybe those companies don't need continued development? If it's already a critical piece of their infrastructure that must mean it's at least good enough (and probably better). And if things blowup, or a "must have" feature is identified then they can always pay Eran his hourly rate to get what they want when they want.

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