Isaac Schlueter wrote at 11:43 (EST) on Friday:
> Thank you very much for the great analysis of the options here.
I hope it was helpful.
> I am getting the sense that we're pitching solutions rather than
> exposing problems. Let's get a solid bug report and reproduction test
> case before we rearchitect anything.
...
> My main objection to "FOUNDATION!" is that there's usually not much
> details about what that means or why we'd benefit. What problems is it
> solving? Are those problems relevant? Does a foundation even solve
> those problems, and if so, is a foundation the BEST way to solve those
> problems?
I think the only problem relates to the main the question of "who should
be in control of the project?". Regardless of all the acrimony, coming
and reviewing the project as an outsider -- which I did about a year
ago, and did so again recently when this recent chain of events began --
it's IMO clear to any observer that Node.js (or, at least, its core) is
a Joyent project. I don't have a value judgment about that necessarily;
it's just a fact that appears to be true, because Joyent controls the
GitHub account where the codebase lives, Joyent controls the trademarked
name, and Joyent is the sole beneficiary of the Node.js CLA.
If the community -- by whatever consensus system this community uses --
feels it's not good for Joyent to be in charge, a non-profit home is the
most common -- and perhaps the only existing -- solution to resolve that
problem.
Meanwhile, also looking as an outsider, I *don't* see the consensus
forming around either "Joyent's control is fine" or "a non-profit would
be better". The views on this from main contributors seem to be all
over the map. So, you'll have to work that out as a community, and --
to make a prediction -- I'd take a large bet at 1.5-to-1 that status quo
is probably inevitable here, at least for a year or two.
> Some people object to having an explicitly profit-motivated
> organization behind a community project. However, if the strategic
> goals of that company are aligned with the goals of the project, then
> such a setup can be extremely beneficial, and provide many valuable
> assets that most foundations would not.
IIRC, I started my previous post with that point: for-profit companies
often have more resources than non-profits to push forward a project.
And, I further agree interests between a FLOSS project and a for-profit
company can sometimes be aligned indefinitely. All can be well --
sometimes for years.
However, I've also watched a lot of key Open Source and Free Software
projects, over the last two decades, move from the a position of great
importance to become "useful but not the 'flavor of the month' anymore".
If any of you believe this will never happen to Node.js, you're also
believing that Node.js is completely unique among all the Open Source
and Free Software projects ever invented.
Some of the work I do at Conservancy is helping projects extend their
"natural life" a bit further than they would have had before, and
sometimes reinvigorating a project that has lost its support temporarily
(e.g., Conservancy recently helped with something like that for the
Mifos project, which recovered through Conservancy to spin off into its
own org.) It's painful when the Free Software project enters the "I
miss the good ol' days" stage, but I've watched a lot of projects do
this over the years [0]. Someone needs to be there to pick up the
pieces when the "big party" becomes just a small gathering of
like-minded friends; a non-profit often does well at that and
for-profits don't.
It's clear to me that Node.js is important enough as technology that
it'll have a long tail of life, but it *will* peak, and then have a slow
decline. What happens to Node.js when it's not a darling technology of
strong start-up companies, but is instead of interest only to those
doing legacy maintenance on existing systems? I suggest the community
plan for the future.
// ravi wrote at 14:02 (EST) on Friday:
>> What happens once we move from being sponsored by one
>> profit-motivated organisation to a foundation sponsored by many
>> profit-motivated organisations?
This is probably a false dichotomy, since it seems to compare single
for-profit company control to control by a trade association. There are
other non-profit options other than a trade association. For example,
public charities, at least in the USA, are legally prohibited from
accepting funding in exchange for influence over their mission, and thus
mitigate well the problem ravi's question suggests.
Isaac Schlueter wrote at 11:43 (EST) on Friday:
> I'm sorry, google groups decided that you're a spammer. That should be
> cleared up now.
Thanks for any effort you did in fixing it. FWIW, I messed with my SPF
records (which originally had a -all instead of a ~all, although the
criteria should have been met regardless, so that shouldn't have
mattered). And, sorry again what ended up happening is that you got
spammed with five of my emails in the end, days after I posted them. :)
[0] I used to be heavily involved in the Perl community, and it led me
to write a blog post last year at Perl's 25th anniversary to talk
about how Perl is the new COBOL, and that there isn't actually
anything wrong with that:
http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2012/12/18/perl-cobol.html
--
-- bkuhn
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