Live data from Hacker News

What the IBM Acquisition of StrongLoop Means for the Node.js Community

strongloop.com

11–20 of 136 posts

Re: What the IBM Acquisition of StrongLoop Means for the Node.js Community

#11
I used to work with an old IBMer who used to say "it's no accident that IBM nearly collapsed at the same time as the Soviet Union did". Lou Gerstner famously rescued IBM from oblivion by turning it into a consultancy led company, and moving the focus away from mainframes. This is just a case of IBM snaffling up the latest cool thing so they can sell consulting services.

Re: What the IBM Acquisition of StrongLoop Means for the Node.js Community

#12

I used to work with an old IBMer who used to say "it's no accident that IBM nearly collapsed at the same time as the Soviet Union did". Lou Gerstner famously rescued IBM from oblivion by turning it into a consultancy led company, and moving the focus away from mainframes. This is just a case of IBM snaffling up the latest cool thing so they can sell consulting services.

What is the connection to the Soviet Union? Were they a large IBM customer?

Re: What the IBM Acquisition of StrongLoop Means for the Node.js Community

#13
post #8

This has some awesome implications for open source. If a huge company like IBM openly supports and dedicates resources to FOSS, I think we can expect these products to get way more attention and receive the full treatment of corporate testing and development which would really offset the ephemeral nature of projects like Node. Not saying the current foundation guys aren't doing a great job already, but IBM's expertis…

IBM have been a major Linux contributor since around 2000 (just as a more recent example), so they aren't exactly new to FOSS.

Re: What the IBM Acquisition of StrongLoop Means for the Node.js Community

#17
> And it’s not just Node.js. Maybe you haven’t looked at what IBM is doing with open source lately. I was surprised when I dug in. For example, did you know they are leading contributors to:

Linux OpenStack Cloud Foundry Docker plus many Apache projects like Spark, Cordova and Hadoop and of course, Node

They are? (keyword => "leading")

https://github.com/docker/docker/graphs/contributors

https://github.com/apache/spark/graphs/contributors

I find this claim dubious. Maybe I'm not digging hard enough.

Re: What the IBM Acquisition of StrongLoop Means for the Node.js Community

#18

I used to work with an old IBMer who used to say "it's no accident that IBM nearly collapsed at the same time as the Soviet Union did". Lou Gerstner famously rescued IBM from oblivion by turning it into a consultancy led company, and moving the focus away from mainframes. This is just a case of IBM snaffling up the latest cool thing so they can sell consulting services.

What is the connection to the Soviet Union? Were they a large IBM customer?

No, but the people who were afraid of them were :-)

Re: What the IBM Acquisition of StrongLoop Means for the Node.js Community

#19

I used to work with an old IBMer who used to say "it's no accident that IBM nearly collapsed at the same time as the Soviet Union did". Lou Gerstner famously rescued IBM from oblivion by turning it into a consultancy led company, and moving the focus away from mainframes. This is just a case of IBM snaffling up the latest cool thing so they can sell consulting services.

Which is fine, people who build things need an exit after all.

Re: What the IBM Acquisition of StrongLoop Means for the Node.js Community

#20

I used to work with an old IBMer who used to say "it's no accident that IBM nearly collapsed at the same time as the Soviet Union did". Lou Gerstner famously rescued IBM from oblivion by turning it into a consultancy led company, and moving the focus away from mainframes. This is just a case of IBM snaffling up the latest cool thing so they can sell consulting services.

What is the connection to the Soviet Union? Were they a large IBM customer?

Cold War funds for department of defense and other federal departments dried up.
Post reply on HN