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Node.js, a popular tool for building modern internet services, has split in two

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Re: Node.js, a popular tool for building modern internet services, has split in two

#71

Post by curun1r »

hbbio wrote: post #21
zkhalique wrote: post #15

I think the intersection of politics and internet is interesting. I write about it quite a bit on my blog, as well as here: http://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2013/04/a-new-kind-of-platfor... In this case, we see sort of an "arab spring" of open source projects lately. Consider MySQL after it was bought by Oracle, and then the MariaDB fork was born. Now we have Node.js and Docker being forked. Until now, most successful…

Docker is not being forked. CoreOS (which is another company, not a "democratic community") is launching a competing project: Rocket, and tries to leverage the popularity of Docker for that.

There is a point to be made about Docker, even though it hasn't been forked. The prevailing sentiment in yesterday's thread about the new Docker announcements was one of worry over whether it was too much of a land grab by the people at Docker, Inc and whether we should be trusting so much of our infrastructure to one company that hasn't yet started to monetize the technology but will almost certainly do so at some point in the future.

But what were seeing with Node along with the other examples from the post you're replying to is that so long as the source is freely available, the core developers and the community is what's important. There was a quote in yesterday's thread that 95% of Docker contributors don't work for Docker, Inc. This means that Docker, Inc will need to walk a tightrope between over-monetizing their platform, pissing off the 95% of contributors from outside Docker, Inc and under-monetizing it, pissing off their investors. If they try things that lock people into the platform and force them to pay for other Docker products, you'll see the developer community rebel with an actual fork of the Docker codebase. This is exactly what we're seeing here with Node...Joyent's stewardship of the project is being seen as lacking and the people who are really important, the core developers and the community are taking a proactive step to remedy that.

It think we're nowhere near the point where this will happen to Docker, but this should be an object lesson for Docker, Inc about what can happen if they try to push too much of the Docker, Inc agenda into Docker, the open source project.

Re: Node.js, a popular tool for building modern internet services, has split in two

#72

Post by emergentcypher »

andypants wrote: post #62
exabrial wrote: post #28

If Node forks, does this mean one of the projects will block?

No, node.js is event-driven and non-blocking.

But there is only a single thread, so io.js will probably hog all the time and effectively block everybody else.

Re: Node.js, a popular tool for building modern internet services, has split in two

#74

Post by jamon51 »

oddevan wrote: post #48
buckbova wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, talk about an over the top reaction. I'd probably reject this too from a do-gooder searching github for pronouns to change. "Get another hobby. Rejected."

Out of curiosity, what's the harm in accepting the pull request after someone's already done the work ? Edit: I get not wanting unsolicited input from "do-gooders," but if someone on the project made such a change, would you still reject it?

Makes sense. For the record, I don't know much about the issue at hand, was specifically talking about one-word contributions (which I encourage on my project).

Re: Node.js, a popular tool for building modern internet services, has split in two

#75

Post by snowwrestler »

SloopJon wrote: post #34
wcummings wrote: post #3

Ben Noordhuis, the center of the Node.js pronoun scandal [1] and one of the founders of Strongloop, has activity in IO.js more recent than his activity in Node.js. I can't help but wonder how much of this is a power struggle between Strongloop and Joyent. https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun

Off topic, I guess, but color me unimpressed by the guy claiming he would fire someone for rejecting a pull request that does nothing but advance a political agenda.

Color me impressed, because the political agenda that's being advanced is gender equality in technology, which to me seems pretty worthy.

Re: Node.js, a popular tool for building modern internet services, has split in two

#76

Post by yoctonaut »

ulisesrmzroche wrote: post #36

I think it's great news. Node development has been glacial for a while now. There's an issue where people are sharing logos, https://github.com/iojs/io.js/issues/37 , highly recommend.

When a company I worked for tried Joyent for hosting, I found it strange that Joyent's own package manager didn't offer the latest stable version--in fact, their confusingly named plans at that time came installed with a few different then-old versions as default options. That read to me like a lack of support or investment in Node as a technology.

Re: Node.js, a popular tool for building modern internet services, has split in two

#77

Post by snowwrestler »

oddevan wrote: post #48
buckbova wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, talk about an over the top reaction. I'd probably reject this too from a do-gooder searching github for pronouns to change. "Get another hobby. Rejected."

Out of curiosity, what's the harm in accepting the pull request after someone's already done the work ? Edit: I get not wanting unsolicited input from "do-gooders," but if someone on the project made such a change, would you still reject it?

> I get not wanting unsolicited input from "do-gooders,"

I don't get it. Node is an open-source project that accepts unsolicited input in general...is there some objection to "doing good"?

Re: Node.js, a popular tool for building modern internet services, has split in two

#78

Post by kordless »

buckbova wrote: post #51
oddevan wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, what's the harm in accepting the pull request after someone's already done the work ? Edit: I get not wanting unsolicited input from "do-gooders," but if someone on the project made such a change, would you still reject it?

If I were in this position, I would accept it from a frequent contributor to the project. I don't like the idea of someone poking around to make one-word non-functional changes.

> one-word non-functional changes

What about typos in docs? Contextually it seems reasonable to accept changes of a single word which may cause confusion on operational grounds.

Is a gendered word really different? Operationally, it would appear differentiating between pronouns might be required in documentation if some readers of the docs are offended by the masculine use. One could certainly argue that with excessive profanity.

I would note here that I probably wouldn't care if someone put 'she' in a document to represent a user entity, but that's a simply an observation of my own biases, not a rational to ignore another's.

Re: Node.js, a popular tool for building modern internet services, has split in two

#79

Post by drderidder »

wcummings wrote: post #3

Ben Noordhuis, the center of the Node.js pronoun scandal [1] and one of the founders of Strongloop, has activity in IO.js more recent than his activity in Node.js. I can't help but wonder how much of this is a power struggle between Strongloop and Joyent. https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun

It isn't that. Really it's Fedor and Mikeal pushing it a lot, not the strongloop guys. The other core devs are behind it, too, except a couple from Joyent. It really has nothing to do with corporate power struggles (that's more what Joyent's advisory board is about, frankly)... it has to do with developers getting really frustrated at the stalled pace of development on the Joyent branch. The real objective is to get rapid release cycles, pull in updates on V8, better separation of core modules, and new features for better numerical computing, etc. Oh, and new logo proposals are going wild at the moment.

Re: Node.js, a popular tool for building modern internet services, has split in two

#80

Post by Someone1234 »

dudus wrote: post #6
egeozcan wrote: post #4

> Future of Popular Coding Tool in Doubt After It Splits in Two Are there convincing number of examples of very popular projects being forked and both ends being discontinued, or is this just a typical example of spreading FUD? Forking is a natural process in the open-source world.

I can think of MySQL. While I wouldn't call it dead by any measure it certainly suffered when the spit happened.

By any measure? This web-site indicates no significant decline in MySQL usage:

http://db-engines.com/en/ranking_trend

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