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What the IBM Acquisition of StrongLoop Means for the Node.js Community
101–110 of 136 posts
Re: What the IBM Acquisition of StrongLoop Means for the Node.js Community
#102I imagine it doesn't mean much beyond some more b2b uses of Node. Node has its own independent governance and nothing about this acquisition changes that.
Re: What the IBM Acquisition of StrongLoop Means for the Node.js Community
#103> Making sure that Node.js is a first class citizen on Softlayer and BlueMix
BlueMix is a Cloud Foundry installation. Is there a separate BlueMix-specific thing that is distinct from the Node.js buildpack?[0]
Re: What the IBM Acquisition of StrongLoop Means for the Node.js Community
#104> 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…
On Cloud Foundry they are a major contributor; only Pivotal donates more engineering effort (disclaimer: I work for Pivotal Labs).
IBM has a lot of working engineers at Cloud Foundry HQ in San Francisco. Last I checked IBM-CFers were the whole CLI team and they're doing great.
Re: What the IBM Acquisition of StrongLoop Means for the Node.js Community
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Have you seen this?
http://ibm.github.io/
Re: What the IBM Acquisition of StrongLoop Means for the Node.js Community
#106I 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.
> ...moving the focus away from mainframes. Actually, System z (mainframes) still accounts for a quarter of IBM's revenue and about half of its profits. [1] At least, that was the case in 2012. I suspect that hasn't changed much with IBM's recent announcement of the LinuxONE. In fact, IBM contributed significant effort get Node.js (and thereby V8) ported to s390x. [2] [1]: http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/20…
It's too painful for people to check their facts before declaring mainframes dead or something IBM is leaving. As you said, they're incredibly profitable. Same thing happened with OpenVMS, which turned out much profit for HP despite little investment. Next they'll be telling us Group Bull, Unisys, and Fujitsu are similarly scraping by in the mainframe business. And NonStop and IBM i are on verge of cancellation. And blah blah blah.
I'm sure we'll be hearing the same crap in a decade while said crap is posted via a service that imtegrates with a COBOL app on a mainframe. ;)
Re: What the IBM Acquisition of StrongLoop Means for the Node.js Community
#107I 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.
> the Russian decision in the late sixties to develop as their next national computer series a bit-compatible copy of the IBM 360 —the greatest American victory in the cold war!—. https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD05xx/E... Your quip reminded me of the above quote from Dijkstra!
Despite my other comment, I do regularly post that one. Hilarious. Anyone that saw better architectures (eg Burroughs) knows that he's probably right that cloning 360 wasted a prime opportunity to kick IBM's ass with technically superior, state-funded product. There's a chance they'll make a come-back in near future, though.
Re: What the IBM Acquisition of StrongLoop Means for the Node.js Community
#108> 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…
Speaking just about Docker and not commenting on this post in particular: IBM employs at least 5 people who dedicate their time to working upstream. Duglin, as an example is #11 on the contribution graph in your list
disclosure: I run partnerships for Docker.
Re: What the IBM Acquisition of StrongLoop Means for the Node.js Community
#109From the customer side - I dealt with Netezza and Softlayer before and after IBM acquisition. In both cases an almost palpable drain in support and intelligence. I hate to say it like that as i know that there are brilliant folks in IBM (Watson, etc)
Softlayer and Netezza in different ways were smart, nimble and fearless companies. You had real relationships with the engineers. I got to know Netezza folks in Massachusetts, Poland and Australia - some of the smartest folks I've met. They shared scripts and passionate expertise.
IBM took it over and the bureaucracy set in. The term "TAM" brings tears of rage to my eyes... Opening a support ticket is about as hard as applying for a mortgage online. And they want to have these endless conference calls with 7 or 8 folks from their side. And nothing gets done.
I am embarrassed about the way I have acted on these calls. I have called folks out and out liars. I have screamed at and bashed conference phones.
Maybe it would have been better if I hadn't known the Netezza folks - they were good.
And Softlayer...
I used to be able to call a guy down in texas and after a 20 minute phone call have a cluster of servers ordered. Once did a hadoop cluster this way. Go off and have lunch come back and the servers would we ready by the afternoon.
And now: 2 major outages in the past 2 months. No communication - in both cases entirely their fault. Power failure and network misconfig causing an arp storm. Ignored for hours while we submitted tickets and called support... Nightmare.
And an absurd situation where their security dept threatened us with taking an haproxy server offline due to a clean-mx false positive - even after the tireless guy running clean-mx emailed to that effect...
It became apparent in the discussions following this event that the TAM and sales support which has had our account for years, knew nothing about our business.
Just horrible bureacracy and bad service.
So I have had really negative experiences with 2 IBM acquired companies. Hopefully it will be better for StrongLoop.
For anyone affected - watch for the good folks shedding off.
Re: What the IBM Acquisition of StrongLoop Means for the Node.js Community
#110Congratulations Issac! Happy for you and the team.
Woot thanks Kord. I'm excited for Node.
Hmm, that the acquisition would mean anything for node directly seems off. At least, the blog post seemed to indicate that this wasn't meant to be about IBM buying influence. I wasn't a customer and not particularly keen on the enterprise focus of strongloop but I thought you had a really good thing going with loopback. Not sure what to think of it now... I was in a startup that got acquired by a huge multinational and it was shocking how quickly we went from nimble to gridlock.