Wow, this is quite a thread, and quite a blowup, obviously about much more than pronouns. There are a lot of different issues here, although fundamentally there are two parts that are the most important: one that's easy to define, and one that's much much harder.
1. Who legally owns the Node.js trademarks? That's easy, or at least reasonably easy to determine. The wordmark is owned by Joyent, Inc.: http://www.trademarkia.com/nodejs-85262623.html 2. What does the community want to do, and how efficient are the committers (who write the code and publish websites about the technology) at organizing themselves around a shared goal? That's hard, as any question dealing with a lot of people working together usually is. Another key issue that I often find engineers tend to under-estimate is the appearance of their brand and their work to the larger world. I.e. who in this community is going to be most effective at taking their message not just to the existing core contributors to the Node.js code, but more to the outside world of new users and corporations who might want to use it - and therefore contribute new things to it. This focus on the larger impact outside of just the core community is often (for better or worse!) something that for-profit corporations tend to be better at than passionate engineers working on it just for the community or for a smaller company. In any case, a number of people were talking about the ASF, and I wanted to add a few useful links about how Apache projects work for those that are interested. The most important thing to understand is that there is no one typical Apache project: every project has it's own community with it's own way of doing things. Generalizing behavior over 140+ active project communities at Apache is not a good way to understand us. 8-) By definition, the ASF has a fairly small set of hard rules that must be followed for Apache projects. These include branding yourself as "Apache Foo", using ASF infrastructure to store the master repo, some basic [VOTE] rules on adding committers and making releases, using the Apache license, and PMCs managing projects independently. Beyond that, the ASF has a variety of sets of best practices for managing communities, deciding consensus, and the like, but those are all just best practices, and healthy communities are allowed to chose their own ways of doing things within them. But the thing I find most interesting for this conversation is the concept that Apache projects must be managed independently. These behaviors are *required* for any Apache project: http://community.apache.org/projectIndependence.html That's the fundamental difference between Node.js at it's current home at Joyent, and the potential idea of an "Apache Node.js" project. Currently, Joyent owns the trademark, and over the long term, it's likely their overriding goal will be corporate profits. Fundamentally, the ASF is a public charity, and it's long term goal is providing software for the public good. I'm not saying that Apache is the right home for Node.js - we'd certainly be thrilled if people were interested in joining the ASF! - that's truly up to the community of people doing the actual work to decide. But I did want to explain a bit about how Apache projects work in case people were considering that idea. Thanks for reading, - Shane -- -- Job Board: http://jobs.nodejs.org/ Posting guidelines: https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Mailing-List-Posting-Guidelines You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "nodejs" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs?hl=en?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "nodejs" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
