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

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

#91
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

Es musst die Wahrheit sein!!!

Ah, Hollywood German. How lovely.

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

#92
post #49

If IBM screws ExpressJS up (wishfully not), Hapi[1] is a good alternative. https://github.com/hapijs/hapi

Considering the development history of Express mostly consisted of cutting down on features and streamlining the core, it should be easy to notice whether the acquisition has any effect.

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

#93

Anybody? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_acquisition_by_Oracle

Despite both being big enterprise corporations, IBM is nothing like Oracle. Oracle is pretty much one huge ego trip swallowing everything like the Borg.

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

#94
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem was their justification. It went something along the lines of "Employees are often thinking about their personal lives while at work, so they should also be thinking about their work life while at home." I'm sure the intentions were good, but the presentation was terrible. Also, it was only one of many factors, but its a catchy line so I chose to call that one out. Other include: * Far worse benefits pack…

I find it strange that large companies envy the things smaller shops are able to do, and they'll spend the money to buy them up, but they won't spend the time to understand the culture that let them build what they built. Put employees first and you'll find they can do some pretty amazing things.

It is really bizarre. I think it really comes down to managers/execs realizing that but there's an imbalance of power towards risk averse groups like legal, finance and HR who have been given the latitude to make stupid decisions.

CEOs of these large companies really need to step up and take control of these groups who develop an unreasonable amount of risk aversion due to a long history of dealing with issues that have a great deal of gravity for them even though they're fairly minor for the organization overall.

There are some companies that get this right, but a general shift hasn't happened yet and there's probably quite a few CEOs that can't justify the political expense and fallout without the backing of a major culture shift in businesses at large. It might be years or even decades before that happens and it's going to be sad to see small agile companies fall to it in the meantime.

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

#95
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A quick google search seems to indicate that IBM wanted to allow their employees more flexibility with their schedules and ability to take leaves. I don't understand how this is a bad thing.

The problem was their justification. It went something along the lines of "Employees are often thinking about their personal lives while at work, so they should also be thinking about their work life while at home." I'm sure the intentions were good, but the presentation was terrible. Also, it was only one of many factors, but its a catchy line so I chose to call that one out. Other include: * Far worse benefits pack…

> The IP agreement was Draconian (and we aren't in a state with nice moonlighting laws)

This caused the most of the problems during our acquisition. I'm still with IBM but we had a few people leave over the "IBM owns everything you ever do" clause.

> They took away our office's coffee budget, which seems small and petty but it was a damned nice thing to have

We had company lunch each Friday that had to end with IBM. It's a small thing but it really changes the culture and moral.

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

#96
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem was their justification. It went something along the lines of "Employees are often thinking about their personal lives while at work, so they should also be thinking about their work life while at home." I'm sure the intentions were good, but the presentation was terrible. Also, it was only one of many factors, but its a catchy line so I chose to call that one out. Other include: * Far worse benefits pack…

I find it strange that large companies envy the things smaller shops are able to do, and they'll spend the money to buy them up, but they won't spend the time to understand the culture that let them build what they built. Put employees first and you'll find they can do some pretty amazing things.

No only that. You will see some mega corp acquire some smaller company for their proprietary tech. Then replace that tech with something else, often open source, or just not use the technology they acquired at all. Are they just going for acquihire? Swallowing up competitors? It blows my mind.

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

#97
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. When Blekko got acquired by IBM Watson, all of the employees thought that IBM's policies about flexible working hours and locations were great. So far I'm the only techie who's departed.

We were in their software services vertical (I forget the name)...the one that had never turned a profit and wasn't sexy. I've known one person who had a great experience on the Watson team. So maybe its a different experience?

Were you on a CAMSS team? That seems to be the best area inside of IBM right now as it's a strategic growth area. This includes the Watson PS team I'm on.

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

#98

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.

Mainframes still bring in a lot of money. I actually think of IBM as being led by finance people.

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

#99
post #87

What node.js needs is a better way to manage packages. Right now, upgrading can fail with no way to roll back. Also, reproducibility is missing. E.g, it is not easy to download sources, and deploy those exact same sources on different machines.

Please check out slc build and slc deploy from StrongLoop which attempt to solve exactly this issue and are being used by major deployments.

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

#100
post #90
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…

IBM are working on the runtimes for things like Node, Spark, Python, Docker, and augmenting them to perform well on IBM platforms and integrate with IBMs enterprise monitoring and diagnostic tools. Some of these augmentations have been contributed back to the main projects.

That sounds great, but where is the source?
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