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Comment by xs_kid | Hacker News Reader

That was Joyent defending their control over to project, remember that Ben & StrongLoop were a menace for Joyent:

http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/18/can-this-startup-steal-nod...

I think that's attributing malice where a simpler explanation is available. You would be amazed how often people misunderstand the relationships between organizations. People blame Apple for poorly designed Mac and iPhone apps. People blame Google for problems with websites. People blame independent website operators for Google ranking algorithm changes. People will call up and chew out the receptionist at a newspaper for positions taken by its competitor.

It is entirely possible that Joyent was getting a lot of blowback along the lines of "Do you guys really have a guy trying to keep gender-neutral language out of this project you control?" from people who didn't understand that Ben was not a Joyent employee, and thus Joyent felt pressured to publicly distance itself.

The way Joyent did this came across as pretty tasteless, but the idea that it was purely political seems to assume more than is really necessary to explain what we've seen. It seems more likely to me that they just wanted to make themselves look good by setting up Ben as the enemy and they did it in a rather ham-fisted way.

That explains a ton, I imagine. It might even explain everything.

...makes Ben's decision to pull out of the project even more interesting though. Where does that leave StrongLoop?

Before of this incident each company (Joyent & StrongLoop) had two core members in the project, now StrongLoop have only one: Bert Belder

Man, corporate political games in an open source project.

I don't feel like I can possibly have an informed opinion on this, but I certainly feel played for having voiced a less informed opinion on the original discussion.

I would not be surprised to see StrongLoop fork node.

That's right, and with their expertise in libuv they could easily target a version to large multicore (32, 64) servers. IBM has also created a PowerPC fork, incidentally.

Not exactly a fork but they do have their own distribution: http://strongloop.com/strongloop-suite/strongnode/

I've read this elsewhere. Joyent appears to be threatened economically by StrongLoop. And there's a suggestion that Bryan Cantrill was annoyed up by Ben Noordhuis in the past.

I think that clears up the question of Bryan's intentions in writing that blog post.

Others have said 'judge Noordhuis by his actions not his intentions'. I don't believe this is a fair way to behave, and this demonstrates why.

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