I expect that most people, like myself, want to use good development tools and platforms, rather than waste time getting involved in whatever petty drama happens to be going on.
Node is open-source, and if Joyent act like assholes, it'll be forked.
Node is open-source, and if Joyent act like assholes, it'll be forked.
The fact is that forking it will fragment the community, confuse users, slow down adoption, and generally have negative effects for years and years. Even if everyone eventually moves to the fork (best-case scenario!), the ecosystem will have lost tremendous amounts of momentum.
Worked pretty well for MySQL.
Even so, MySQL was one of the biggest gratis databases, and it happened to be bought by a company that specialized in selling established enterprise database software. There was concern RE the support a gratis database would have under such a company.
The situation that created MariaDB is very specific, and very different to the one Node.js is in.