Live data from Hacker News

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

strongloop.com

61–70 of 136 posts

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

#61
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious - how long ago did they acquire you? Your software get rolled into an IBM product or is it self standing? They let you continue to use your productive tools (asana,github,slack etc)?

Current IBM Dev here. I know several IBM teams that use slack & github. There should be no problem with that.

Private or public repos? From my experience collaborating in public (which will continue to be critical in this space) was painful/impossible in some scenarios

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

#62
post #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/spa…

What is it about these posts that bring out the HN contingent who think themselves firebrand skeptics? This is basically a marketing piece, what good is fact-checking it

I've done a fair bit of PR writing myself so I'm happy to be skeptical and understand the line between marketing speak and reality.

The problem here is the audience is clearly the developer community (which I'm also a part of). Developer communities have a right be skeptical about key acquisitions of their open source dependancies. It can have massive commercial implications on software design decisions, etc.

Open source is built on trust. Dubious communication does nothing but erode that trust.

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

#63
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you really left alone, though? As in, not even forced to use Lotus Notes? Because even that kind of small-bore enterprisation can destroy the culture of a small tech-focused company.

About your point about Lotus Notes: I interned at IBM 3 times, and was never forced to use Lotus Notes. No one whom I worked with at IBM used Lotus Notes either. We used either Open Office or MS Office. The most popular IBM software we used was SameTime for instance messaging and it was actually not bad at all.

Just as a counterpoint: when I interned at IBM, we were forced to use various Lotus products including Notes. Lotus Symphony was especially painful, and we begged to be allowed to just use Powerpoint (and were told, emphatically, "No.")

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

#64
post #52
post #42

Just a question -might be dumb- is the merger of io.js and node.js which happened a couple of months ago related to this news in anyway? Anyways IMHO this good news and I hope it will make node.js much better, who knows maybe replace V8 with something even better.

I can't imagine it wouldn't be. This kind of decisions aren't made very quickly. I'm more curious if the IO team was aware of this...

HA! Hahahaha. hahaa.... wheeze

Acquisitions are thoroughly NDA'd. A few of the core team may have been told (but relationships are not universally cordial - recall that Strongloop and Nodesource are direct competitors). The io.js community in general was absolutely not told.

I expect there are a few people who feel a bit betrayed that one of the major movers in a supposed grass-roots community-oriented fork appears to have done it only to make themselves a better acquisition target.

While they're not wrong to feel that way, StrongLoop have been telegraphing this particular intention for a long time (at least since hiring Roth).

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

#65
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is it about these posts that bring out the HN contingent who think themselves firebrand skeptics? This is basically a marketing piece, what good is fact-checking it

> This is basically a marketing piece, what good is fact-checking it Not sure about the US laws, but here in Germany, all marketing claims must stay to the facts, or the company can be sued. (Which is why most marketing speak uses fuzzy terms that sound nice but don't convey any information. But that's a general trend anyway.)

Yeah but we have 'freedom' here in the US . I love French restrictions on adverts for medications as well, they're very stringent. As a dual US/EU citizen, I never run out of interesting divergences like the one you've pointed out.

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

#66

If anything this is a strong validation of Node.js in the enterprise space. This is actually good news for anyone working within the enterprise trying to use a different technology set. It makes selling Node to a CTO a bit easier (even if you choose not to use StrongLoop).

"Enterprise" is already using node.js This is IBM tryng to stay in touch with their customers.

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

#67
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you really left alone, though? As in, not even forced to use Lotus Notes? Because even that kind of small-bore enterprisation can destroy the culture of a small tech-focused company.

About your point about Lotus Notes: I interned at IBM 3 times, and was never forced to use Lotus Notes. No one whom I worked with at IBM used Lotus Notes either. We used either Open Office or MS Office. The most popular IBM software we used was SameTime for instance messaging and it was actually not bad at all.

IBM still uses Notes for email, and a lot of legacy database-like applications. There's Notes-based webmail, but it's still Notes.

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

#68
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Current IBM dev here (but only speaking anecdotally for myself and my project), can confirm that when we were acquired they let our product and policies remain and did not "blue wash" the project. I would assume the same will occur for StrongLoop and their software practices will probably continue mostly unfettered.

I hope it works out for StrongLoop. When a company I worked for was purchased by IBM, about 3/4 of the engineering staff left once we heard about "Work Life Integration (tm)". It's really hard to work inside Big Blue when you are used to the freedom provided by a small company.

Care to elaborate on IBM "Work Life Integration (tm)" and why it caused the mass exodus?

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

#69

If you're trying to relieve fears, the first paragraph does not help. "IBM has identified Node.js as an important part of the future of enterprise middleware and StrongLoop’s technology and expertise as pivotal to their strategy to help companies fully unlock the value of their existing IT investments and legacy data with APIs."

Seems like too much fluff - both the acquirer generating it and the acquisition itself. It would be helpful to see why/where one would use node.js when other platforms support many more workloads well than just pure I/O bound ones. In the "enterprise middleware", going native (C++) or managed (JVM/CLR) brings with it a much richer ecosystem alongwith a more robust runtime that can better support other workloads that entail for example cpu binding. It's hard to see a real need for node.js as it seems to not do anything significantly better than other platform options.

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

#70
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you really left alone, though? As in, not even forced to use Lotus Notes? Because even that kind of small-bore enterprisation can destroy the culture of a small tech-focused company.

About your point about Lotus Notes: I interned at IBM 3 times, and was never forced to use Lotus Notes. No one whom I worked with at IBM used Lotus Notes either. We used either Open Office or MS Office. The most popular IBM software we used was SameTime for instance messaging and it was actually not bad at all.

You might be thinking about the Office-like companion to Notes, Symphony. AFAIK (going from some Name/Location/BU-looking email addresses) IBM still uses Lotus Notes for email.

Lotus Notes is actually quite good when used properly and in moderation, but it really does not set a positive tone culturally.

Post reply on HN