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The public airing of their dirty laundry - especially the snark from so many of the participants - would kill it in my mind. There's no good reason to have this

The public airing of their dirty laundry - especially the snark from so many of the participants - would kill it in my mind. There's no good reason to have this "open and transparent" conversation devolve into "let me bitch about IBM here, but don't bitch back at me, keep to IBM-only channels". It's all very childish. The whole thing should've been on the IBM back channels until they got their shit together and could agree on some messaging, and if the maintainer didn't agree with the messaging or how long it was taking to come up with it, simply fork it into the expressjs org and leave. Shouting out "I'm leaving! I'm going! I really mean it this time!" just seems like ... a child running away from "mean ol' parents" rather than an open source leader whose project work speaks volumes. It's tragic to watch this train wreck that could've been avoided by both sides refusing to posture. Like my father used to say, "shit or get off the pot, don't keep debating out loud if you're really going to do it." Compare it to Linus' openly-hostile dictatorship, which is universally both reviled and excused by contributors, just for a moment: At least when it comes to Linux kernel, shit gets done; nobody has to question the commitment of the project's stewards; and Linus hasn't (that I recall) threatened to take his toys elsewhere.

SwellJoe 11y ago
Linux doesn't seem to be a fair analogy. If Linux had been, somehow, acquired by a large company (or, at least, access/edit rights to all of the code repositories and web presence and such), and Linus had been removed from administrative roles on those repositories and sites (or asked to remove himself and others), then the comparison would be fair. Admittedly, one answer would be to loudly fork the project. That's happened on a number of occasions. Joomla forked from whatever it was called before a similar story (Mambo, maybe?). Node.js itself forked into io.js over similar disagreements (and then people worked those disagreements out). I suspect some of the back and forth happening is people trying to figure out if a fork is necessary and if they actually want to be the people leading the fork (sounds like Doug Wilson does not want to be a leader, but wants to keep contributing). Contributing heavily to a project is not the same as being a leader of a project, and it is entirely fair to not want to lead a project, even if you care strongly about it, and have worked hard on it for a long time.
- spdustin 11y ago
  I think it is a fair comparison, because I think Linus WOULD loudly (and with much profanity) fork it and go back to getting shit done rather than hit slow-mo on a multi-car highway pile-up. EDIT: After further thought, I do see your point. My comparison was purely hypothetical and has some logical flaws. I'm literally guessing at how he'd handle losing control of the reins. My takeaway was that Doug (who, I should clarify/add, I have a lot of respect for as a hard working OSS guy, but lost a few brownie points from me for this soap opera) actually did want to lead the community effort: "I ask them if I can take over the project in order to be the leadership and ensure this gets moved on," we're his exact words. I guess that is an exemplar of why committed project stakeholders need to get their messaging straight before pointing fingers: You and I had different interpretations of the actors' motivations.Nobody wins when fingers are pointing everywhere. At least someone wins when a stakeholder says, "screw you guys, I'm going to do what I know is right rather than vent about what I know is wrong." EDIT: And to his credit, Doug did try to mitigate the problems he saw with the project. I don't know why he didn't take that one last step of trading on his good name and fork the project. In my opinion, StrongLoop folks are hard working people, more than casually invested in the nodejs community. Even the controversial npm tracking could be argued to be a logical act, to help them understand more about how their projects are used than npm can tell them. Politics (and an unfortunate exit) got the best of them. Doug is a hard working guy. And more than casually invested in the nodejs community. Politics got the best of him, too. I believe Doug will come to regret his participation in this drama, and will quietly go back to writing great software and leading great projects, having learned an important lesson: don't believe for a moment that BigCo gives a tiny rat's ass about you or your community's sensibilities, just be the best dev/leader you can be and don't hand the keys to anyone who isn't a trusted driver. And if they take those metaphorical keys anyway, well then, that's what forks are for.
  - SwellJoe 11y ago
    It's an issue in an issue tracker. Nobody's blogging about it, or doing interviews in the media. I would consider this a reasonable level of drama for an issue tracker conversation. Again, I think Doug is probably pushing this in public (though not dramatically so, again it's an issue tracker which normally would have a couple dozen readers) as a final last ditch effort to get IBM to act right. Nothing wrong with taking things public if private conversations are going nowhere fast, as tends to happen with big corporate takeovers. I don't think he needs to worry about his messaging all that much; he's not a marketer, and doesn't seem to be trying to sell anything or get elected to anything. He's just explaining what's going on, and expressing his frustration with it. Anyway, that's how I read it all. I agree that we are interpreting things differently, and I'm probably missing a lot of detail here. I scanned the thread and missed some details you've called out. But, I tend to take an optimistic approach to stuff like this. If someone has proven they're mostly a "head down get shit done" kinda person, I'm not gonna sweat it when they pop their head up and rant for a little while when things go pear-shaped. I'd probably rant, too, if something I was working on was being killed by a corporate overlord. Then I might decide to fork the thing.

SwellJoe 11y ago

Linux doesn't seem to be a fair analogy. If Linux had been, somehow, acquired by a large company (or, at least, access/edit rights to all of the code repositories and web presence and such), and Linus had been removed from administrative roles on those repositories and sites (or asked to remove himself and others), then the comparison would be fair. Admittedly, one answer would be to loudly fork the project. That's happened on a number of occasions. Joomla forked from whatever it was called before a similar story (Mambo, maybe?). Node.js itself forked into io.js over similar disagreements (and then people worked those disagreements out). I suspect some of the back and forth happening is people trying to figure out if a fork is necessary and if they actually want to be the people leading the fork (sounds like Doug Wilson does not want to be a leader, but wants to keep contributing). Contributing heavily to a project is not the same as being a leader of a project, and it is entirely fair to not want to lead a project, even if you care strongly about it, and have worked hard on it for a long time.

spdustin 11y ago
I think it is a fair comparison, because I think Linus WOULD loudly (and with much profanity) fork it and go back to getting shit done rather than hit slow-mo on a multi-car highway pile-up. EDIT: After further thought, I do see your point. My comparison was purely hypothetical and has some logical flaws. I'm literally guessing at how he'd handle losing control of the reins. My takeaway was that Doug (who, I should clarify/add, I have a lot of respect for as a hard working OSS guy, but lost a few brownie points from me for this soap opera) actually did want to lead the community effort: "I ask them if I can take over the project in order to be the leadership and ensure this gets moved on," we're his exact words. I guess that is an exemplar of why committed project stakeholders need to get their messaging straight before pointing fingers: You and I had different interpretations of the actors' motivations.Nobody wins when fingers are pointing everywhere. At least someone wins when a stakeholder says, "screw you guys, I'm going to do what I know is right rather than vent about what I know is wrong." EDIT: And to his credit, Doug did try to mitigate the problems he saw with the project. I don't know why he didn't take that one last step of trading on his good name and fork the project. In my opinion, StrongLoop folks are hard working people, more than casually invested in the nodejs community. Even the controversial npm tracking could be argued to be a logical act, to help them understand more about how their projects are used than npm can tell them. Politics (and an unfortunate exit) got the best of them. Doug is a hard working guy. And more than casually invested in the nodejs community. Politics got the best of him, too. I believe Doug will come to regret his participation in this drama, and will quietly go back to writing great software and leading great projects, having learned an important lesson: don't believe for a moment that BigCo gives a tiny rat's ass about you or your community's sensibilities, just be the best dev/leader you can be and don't hand the keys to anyone who isn't a trusted driver. And if they take those metaphorical keys anyway, well then, that's what forks are for.
- SwellJoe 11y ago
  It's an issue in an issue tracker. Nobody's blogging about it, or doing interviews in the media. I would consider this a reasonable level of drama for an issue tracker conversation. Again, I think Doug is probably pushing this in public (though not dramatically so, again it's an issue tracker which normally would have a couple dozen readers) as a final last ditch effort to get IBM to act right. Nothing wrong with taking things public if private conversations are going nowhere fast, as tends to happen with big corporate takeovers. I don't think he needs to worry about his messaging all that much; he's not a marketer, and doesn't seem to be trying to sell anything or get elected to anything. He's just explaining what's going on, and expressing his frustration with it. Anyway, that's how I read it all. I agree that we are interpreting things differently, and I'm probably missing a lot of detail here. I scanned the thread and missed some details you've called out. But, I tend to take an optimistic approach to stuff like this. If someone has proven they're mostly a "head down get shit done" kinda person, I'm not gonna sweat it when they pop their head up and rant for a little while when things go pear-shaped. I'd probably rant, too, if something I was working on was being killed by a corporate overlord. Then I might decide to fork the thing.