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Node.js Forked By Top Contributors
New submitter jonhorvath writes: Several of the top contributors to Node.js, a popular open source run-time environment, have decided to fork the project, creating io.js as an alternative. The developers were unhappy with how cloud computing company Joyent was directing work on Node.js. Mikeal Rogers said, "We don't want to have just one person who's appointed by a company making decisions. We want contributors to have more control, to seek consensus." Here's the new repository, and a README file to go with it. A developer at Uber tweeted that they've already migrated to io.js on their production systems. It'll be interesting to see how many other sites follow.
I believe this is one part of the "Node Forward" project.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
So they are required to continue donating their time and energy from the start to entirety just because they accepted sponsorship for a period of time?
When you cant win, ad hominem.
You think? You treat a core contributor like this and then wonder why he steps down and leaves? The best part is that when they announced his departure they're like "yeah, uh we totally respect him and his amazing contributions now please respect our wishes and stop bringing up the fact that we are a bunch of SJW tools who treated a major contributor with less respect than Linus Torvalds treats people who intentionally crap all over his code base."
I've shown this crap to coworkers who were interested in learning Node and their reaction was "W...T...F..." that's how they treat their community?
if these open source projects are going to accept corporate sponsorship, they must do that corporation's bidding.
The people and entities who signed the sponsorship contract must do what they contractually agreed to do (which may be virtually nothing or it may be very specific depends what was in the contract).
Other people aren't bound by that though. Most contributors to open source projects do not have any contract with or obligation to the operators of the project. If they (or their employers if relavent) decide they would rather put their effort into a fork then they are perfectly entitled to do so.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
If these guys know how to play it right, Node.js is history. He had the same thing with the Mambo Fork Joomla. Hardly anyone remembers Mambo anymore, and Joomla is a leading project.
I hope this new project knows how to manage things and do good marketing.
Thumbs up. Let's see where this goes.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Very true. For "the common man" to know what direction to take, too many choices can be bad......especially when there is more similarity than differences and not enough experience to know which differences will be important to them in the future.
The scourge of Open Source disguised as choice..
I disagree over the degree of which this would be a problem - think of it more like the free market. Under ideal conditions, the best ideas with the broadest appeal tend to win, grow and evolve, while the worst ideas with little appeal tend to fade away relatively quickly.
It also provides a very useful ejection seat of sorts in case of corporate asshattery (see also OpenOffice/Libre Office), patent follies, or worse. Also, consider this: Closed-Source/proprietary software can be just as prone to this kind of internal dissent as OSS, but you the end-user will never have a say in the results.
Forking is awesome to have as an option - either as a threat or as an actuality. A company who knows that their shit could be forked will either behave themselves, or they will lose control of their product. IMHO that's a damned good thing.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Corporations need to understand that while they will get features they want, sometimes they need to address the needs of the whole community. Else, they will end up with no support. No support, but everything you want may be okay, but more likely no support will kill whatever it is that you wanted.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
People don't fork 'just because they can'. They fork because they are failing to get what they want out of the project. It remains to be seen if they are wasting their time.
It could be like ethereal to wireshark, where the holder of the copyright has precisely *zero* development skin in the game.
It could be like XFree86 to Xorg where both had some nominal capability to continue, but it becomes quickly apparent that the fork is where the development effort went.
It could be like Wayland fork where the fork pretty much died (though the main project isn't seeing massive adoption either).
Worst case would be something like the ffmpeg/libav fiasco, where both forks go and which one is available readily for a given distribution is almost more a matter of politics than technical merit, and yet they have significantly diverged.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I disagree over the degree of which this would be a problem - think of it more like the free market. Under ideal conditions, the best ideas with the broadest appeal tend to win, grow and evolve, while the worst ideas with little appeal tend to fade away relatively quickly.
That's fantasy. The best ideas often wither while mediocre - even bad ones - flourish. It also makes the foolish assumption that "best" conflates with "broadest appeal".
MacDonalds didn't get where they were because their products were the best. Their milkshakes taste like library paste. They got there because once they'd achieved critical mass in the market - as the old saying goes: Nothing Succeeds Like Success. Once customers knew that they could obtain a consistent product from coast-to-coast, even though it was consistently second-rate, growth was assured.
Or perhaps an example closer to home. The Commodore Amiga. The first mass-market computer to include Total Harmonic Distortion and Stereo Separation specs on the outside of the package. The first mass-market computer to come out-of-the-box with color graphics (accelerated), Hi-fi stereo sound and full pre-emptive real-time multi-tasking. Even most modern-day systems aren't real-time.
This was the company that "succeeded in spite of itself". Demonstrating that incompetent government isn't the only way to kill competitiveness, Commodore fielded a superior product which could have been even more successful if they hadn't been cursed with incompetent management.
But bad management or not, I'm really doubtful that they'd own the market today. The Wintel platform was already too well entrenched and "Nobody Ever Got Fired for buying IBM/Microsoft/Intel". Even Apple is just an also-ran. The competiton was inferior, but it was sufficient and these days only a few tattered remnants are all that remains of the Amiga.
Spoken like a true newcomer to open source. I've been reading slashdot since it was called "chips and dips" (that was around 1997) and to this day it still amazes me that somebody who rejects the principles of open source would have the slightest interest reading slashdot, let alone participating in a slashdot discussion. You're as out-of-place here as an atheist at mass.
Are you stupid or just pretending to be stupid? The issue is that there was an established technical reason why commits like that shouldn't go in. He enforced the rule and then called an asshole among other things demonizing his character. If you think this is acceptable, especially from a Vice President of a company (Cantrill is a Vice President according to Wikipedia) then I don't know what to say except that your social skills make Linus Torvalds look like he's ready to ghost write an etiquette book for managing teams.
The point is that the abiliity to fork is a core principle and key prerequisite of open source. Furthermore, choice is the basic premise and driving force of open source. To complain about choice in open source is nonsensical, because if choice wasn't there, it wouldn't be open source in the first place. It's like a proprietary software developer complaining that he DOESN'T have choice. Well, duh!
Don't forget that the PC totally owned the business market, spreadsheets were the killer application of the 80s and the Amiga's multimedia capabilities was totally irrelevant to that. In fact, graphics and sound cards were an add-on to PCs long, long after that. They could have made something similar to the Sony Playstation and become kings of the gaming market, but I doubt they ever had a shot at replacing the PC.
At any rate, it's obvious that in many cases we have picked a non-optimal solution, but the switching costs are just too high. Things like driving on left vs right, power plugs, 50Hz vs 60Hz TV, imperial vs metric and so on. Or simply because of history or network effects, we use COBOL because we got 20 years of code written in COBOL. Or we're on Facebook because everyone else is on Facebook. Products are like genes, it's not the "best" genes that survive it's those that turn a profit and reproduce.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings