Hacker News Reader

Comment by mwcampbell | Hacker News Reader

This move surprises me, because Bryan Cantrill doesn't seem to like governance and foundations for open-source projects. I wonder if he was overruled on this.

View on HN

That's a very fair question. When I first presented my corporate open source anti-patterns talk at FISL in 2012[1][2], I closed by saying that I was certain that we (Joyent) were making mistakes, and that they would have to come back in 2022 to hear what they were. Suffice it to say that after the developments of the last year -- which include not just the io.js fork but also us open sourcing our entire stack[3] -- I'm really looking forward to doing that update, and hope to do it much earlier than 2022. ;)

To answer your question: no, I was not overruled -- it's been clear to me for quite some time that node.js would be best served by a foundation. That said, getting the mechanics of that foundation established has taking (is taking) a long time (and, it must be said, involves a lot of hard, thankless work from a lot of people). Foundations might feel "easy", but they aren't: 501(c)(3) organizations are highly regulated entities that require not just a lot of groundwork and forethought but extensive maintenance. Fortunately, we have made great progress (and we have built a terrific collection of founding members), and we are getting the node.js community what it needs: a foundation that can assure the consensus-driven advancement of the technology, in perpetuity.

[1] http://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/corporate-open-source-an...

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhgXQFk9noI

[3] https://www.joyent.com/blog/sdc-and-manta-are-now-open-sourc...

The schizophrenic open source ideals of Sun continue to live on at Joyent. It's funny that Oracle is called out many times (which they deserve), and yet, there is a failure to acknowledge that other open source projects under Sun's stewardship did a lot of mistakes that ended up killing them (OpenSolaris and OpenOffice, to name a few). In any case, as much as corporate America wants to be seen as a faceless entity, Sun was made of its employees and so is Joyent.

Meh, I'm not buying this "yeah, we were going to make node belong to the community all along" when there are lawsuits threats over trademarks and what not.

I'm waiting for this new foundation to have their moment where they call a core developer an asshole in public, throw him under a bus, and say that if he was an employee, he'd be fired rather than retrained... all while talking about the importance of empathy.

Regardless of the event itself, that was an exceptionally poor handling (soapboxing?) of the situation, and didn't speak much of ability to mediate a heated situation. A foundation born from this management style? Doesn't sound encouraging.

[1]https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun

I was wondering if anyone would bring that one up. For me, that was the moment I stopped having vague concerns about Joyent and Node, and realised "wow, these people can't be trusted to run a project".

Not the first time Bryan Cantrill has done that:

    http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-suns-need-to-control-the-code-cost-them-the-company/

    or: http://www.cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html

wow, hadn't read the post. that alone puts me firmly rooting for the io.js camp.

Yeah, because you should chose your software based on your dislike for some community members, not because of real technical facts.

When a project has questionable or poisonous leadership, it's technically wise to steer clear.

Bryan Cantrill is the CTO of Joyent, not the leader of the Node.js project.

And what company owns Node.js again?

No company owns Node.js.

Node.js is a Registered Trademark owned by Joyent... even after releasing to the newly started Node Foundation, I'm guessing there may well be some tight reigns here.

While I understand... plenty of people have chosen "not windows" for server-side projects for just that reason.

I completely agree. I hesitate to say this because it might come across too much as 'gut feeling' (and I apologize in advance), but Joyent seems to be somehow too lopsided towards the 'public relations corporate' side of things over developing and maintaining something valuable.

It's not so much to do with my opinion of the specifics of the situation with Noordhuis, or the announcement that is the object of this conversation, but rather the vaguer feeling that they feel way too much like a 'company' acting in its own interest for me to trust them.

Bryan, your long-winded reply basically says you always wanted a foundation? Really? Well, where were you in November??

This announcement feels like hurried back-room politics, and your reply is reinforcing that impression.

I'm interested in Bryan's view on this as well. He's given talks on open-source governance in the past.

This is the closest entry I could find on his blog regarding node.js and its governance: http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2014/06/11/broadening-nodejs/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com