Comment by mr_luc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mr_luc | Hacker News Reader

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Thank you.

Saying that Node has a package manager is a huge understatement. Node has one hell of a package manager, but you have to hack[1] around Meteor to use npm modules, even in the latest version.

My impression of Meteor, and the impression a number of node people seem to share, and which I've seen reinforced on HN, is:

Meteor is in an almost adversarial relationship with the node.js open-source community, because while they're good hackers building something cool, they took millions of dollars in funding[2] and want to keep their options open for monetizing that codebase.

This makes every decision they make differently than other open-source real-time frameworks (to build their own package manager, require a contributor agreement on an MIT licensed project, and use a nonstandard install process[3,4]) considerably more worrisome.

And it's frustrating, because there's nothing going on in Meteor that necessitates going outside of the "node.js ecosystem" -- aka NPM [4,5,6].

That impression might be unfair in some way, and obviously the meteor people spend a lot of time responding to just these sort of concerns from the node.js community.

But "Meteor" means "worry" to me.

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[1] http://meteorhacks.com/complete-npm-integration-for-meteor.h... [2] http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/25/meteor-funding/ [3] https://atmosphere.meteor.com/ [4] https://github.com/meteor/meteor/pull/516#issuecomment-12919... [5] http://derbyjs.com/ [6] https://github.com/substack/node-browserify

I'm not sure what your problem with contributor agreements are; basically every sizable open source project has one. You know, like... Node: http://nodejs.org/cla.html

Meteor is awesome. It considerably simplifies web-development. I just want to let the core team know that many many people really appreciate your efforts and I sincerely hope that negative comments such as those by Mr. Luc don't discourage your team and do not distract you from the really awesome work you are doing.

Well, all of Meteor is under a MIT license, so if we think we're going to "monetize that codebase" we're pretty stupid :) I'm not a lawyer but I think that under the MIT license there's basically nothing that we can do with the code that you can't do too. Our actual plan is to sell operational tools for larger companies that have mission-critical Meteor apps in production.

The incredible amount of work that we've put into JavaScript build tools over the last two years has all been with the aim of creating a radically easier, faster developer experience, because we know that that's incredibly powerful marketing for the rest of our crazy ideas. In other words, we did it because we thought that the UX of the existing JavaScript tooling was just too janky. Seriously, try Meteor for yourself and see what you think -- maybe you think our work sucks and that we wasted our time, but if so, I wish you would just tell me that (I would genuinely love to know) instead of reading ulterior motives into what was a labor of love and a ton of hard work.

Of course there are many rough edges and it's not done (that's why it's not 1.0 yet) but from people that have actually used it for a while, we actually get the opposite feedback, which is that they want us to go much further down this path, and that's why we continue to slave away at what is by far the least fun part of building a framework.

Hmm. I've actually changed my mind, (though not about their rejection of npm) -- after digging around, I see that there's been more communication about how Meteor plans to make money, and hearing that they have feasible plans that don't sound like a conflict of interest with open source is better than any technical argument for assuaging concerns.

But about me 'imputing bad motives', or whatever -- I said "worry", and "almost adversarial", and I stand by that.

When a company pops up and says "Hi, we're from Silicon Valley, and we have a plan to monetize a framework made from your language of choice; we have VC funding and we leap-frogged similar community frameworks -- now, if you want to write apps with the new hotness, please use our new package manager instead of the excellent community one, and don't install our framework with the community standard method either" ...

You worry. You just do. I think that meteor/derby/etc style app dev is the future, so I'm worried by anything that might threaten to lock it down.

I'm glad to see that upon investigation that worry is diminished, though. And obviously I applaud your efforts in advancing that future (I just wish that it were done in an 'npm install meteor' way).

Out of curiosity, I tried doing an 'npm install meteor' and found that it actually exists right now (but it perhaps isn't official, it hasn't been kept up to date (meteor 0.5.2 compared to the current 0.6.6), and I don't know if it is equivalent to installing meteor the official way).

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