11 ms·

The Next Phase of Node.js

235 points by sintaxi 13y ago

bhouston 13y ago
So NPM Inc.? Interesting. I do think NPM requires its own team, but I am unsure if NPM itself is a business (although I can see it being a sponsored foundation.) But there are hopefully creative business solutions to be had here. Q: How does this relate to the money I gave to the Scale NPM project a few months back? https://npm.nodejitsu.com/ https://npm.nodejitsu.com/
- IsaacSchlueter 13y ago
  > But there are hopefully creative business solutions to be had here. I sure hope so! I'll be sharing many more details about the specifics in the next few days. I just kept it brief in this announcement so as not to drown out the message about TJ taking over Node. > Q: How does this relate to the money I gave to the Scale NPM project a few months back? https://npm.nodejitsu.com/ https://npm.nodejitsu.com/ The money you gave to Nodejitsu to continue supporting npm was a huge part of getting us in front of the exponential growth curve. I'll continue to be closely involved with Nodejitsu. But a service of npm's scale and importance can't survive on handouts forever. At some point, we need much more continued investment and a focused team, and the way to get that is to develop additional features that people are willing to pay for.
  - bhouston 13y ago
    IsaacSchlueter: Your NPM & Node made this possible btw: http://facebook.com/Exocortex http://facebook.com/Exocortex http://clara.io http://clara.io Thank you! (And yeah we do an "npm install" from the NPM servers during production deploys, I guess we like to live dangerously. We should probably fix that.)
    - adamcanady 13y ago
      Clara.io looks great, nice work on that! Would you mind elaborating on how it was created?
    - IsaacSchlueter 13y ago
      Wow! This is really rad!
  - nfoz 13y ago
    Have you considered operating as a non-profit?
    - IsaacSchlueter 13y ago
      Yes, we are considering a variety of corporate and legal structures to make sure that the open source projects and community are taken care of in a sustainable way. There are many trade-offs involved, and we've just started. I don't feel strongly (as some do) that non-profits guarantee benevolence. There are many evil non-profits (and many more incompetent ones!) which do harm to the world, and many capital-G Good for-profit companies. In many cases, a non-profit can easily become an empty hand-wavey thing. (And in that case, what's the real difference, except $800/year to the state of California?) Of course, it has worked out well in some cases. Mozilla and WordPress are great examples of this sort of thing functioning really well to facilitate the interaction between a company and an open source community. But it is very early to even be worrying about such things. In any event, even if we do create a non-profit, the first step is to create a Delaware C as a for-profit company to generate the money that can allow us to create new products, spin up new infrastructure when necessary, and employ people to run the thing. So that's what I'm up to these days. npm has gotten too big to be just some dude's hobby project :)
      - jedschmidt 13y ago
        You might also want to consider whether a B Corporation would make sense: http://www.bcorporation.net http://www.bcorporation.net
        skue 13y ago
        Thank you for mentioning B Corporations. If Isaac is trying to decide between a non-profit and a C Corp, then a B Corp could be the perfect compromise. And as I posted on another thread, there are examples of B Corps raising A rounds.
      - yapcguy 13y ago
        Why Delaware?
  - HNJohnC 13y ago
    You didn't think commercializing NPM would be the lead of that post? Seriously? You seem to have an utterly different perspective on this than anyone I know who relies on Node. This is all starting to look rather amateurish and scary to me now where before I saw stability and excitement.
  - nthrow 13y ago
    >The money you gave to Nodejitsu to continue supporting npm was a huge part of getting us in front of the exponential growth curve. The $300,000 is gone already?
    - IsaacSchlueter 13y ago
      A) It wasn't 300k. B) I don't believe so. But we're also still running on Nodejitsu, because things don't happen over night :)
      - nthrow 13y ago
        https://npm.nodejitsu.com/ https://npm.nodejitsu.com/ says "we raised over $300,000 for the project".
jaiball 13y ago
wonder if this has anything to do with the npm maintainer who is missing. Hope he's ok.
- IsaacSchlueter 13y ago
  No, this does not have anything to do with him. This has been in the works for several months. I also hope Luke's ok. Thanks.
niix 13y ago
Awesome, so glad Isaac gets to focus on what he loves. Congrats to TJ on his new role!
rtfeldman 13y ago
I assumed from the title this would be an announcement about Node 1.0, but I'm not terribly surprised to see the trend continue of approaching 1.0 asymptotically. Still, this is interesting stuff. Does anyone know if any similar repos (Ruby Gems, etc.) have their own for-profit companies?
- prezjordan 13y ago
  RubyGems is funded through Ruby Central [0], a 501(c)(3). I imagine Ruby Central gets a significant chunk through conference ticket sales? Someone more knowledgable here can chime in :) [0]: http://rubycentral.org http://rubycentral.org
- mjn 13y ago
  I can think of a few examples, but none of the ones that come to mind are only the repository as its own company. Instead the repository is hosted by a for-profit company that is also primary host of the language itself. For example, D's main repository is hosted by Digital Mars, also the creator and lead steward of the language. And Tcl's main repository for a while was hosted by Scriptics, which was founded by Tcl's creator and also employed most of its core devs.
hartator 13y ago
What about the bnoordhuis story? It seems not to be active again for his lib: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/graphs/contributors https://github.com/joyent/libuv/graphs/contributors For people who don't know, bnoordhuis exiled himself 2 months ago after the bashing the node.js community imposed him for not merging a pull about gender. It was a shame because he was in the top 3 contributors. (all details: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015)
- IsaacSchlueter 13y ago
  What about 9/11?
  - nkohari 13y ago
    Won't someone please think of the children!
  - hartator 13y ago
    I can understand if you don't want to talk of that anymore, no need to be agressive. [I don't know either of you but I think that's a sad story.]
    - IsaacSchlueter 13y ago
      I agree. 9/11 was indeed very sad. And it had about as much to do with this announcement as Ben's departure from Node last year.
      - nthrow 13y ago
        "Last year" is a funny way to frame 2 months ago.
        IsaacSchlueter 13y ago
        Really, what happened 2 months ago was just the tail end of what had taken many months to build up. I say "last year", because it started much earlier, as Ben alluded to in his parting message. People outside a team rarely have much insight into the day to day relationships. That's just how it works. That's what a "team" is.
jnardiello 13y ago
How about the 200k Nodejitsu crowdfunded not long ago for npm? Also, how the npm revenue model is going to affect packages distribution? To whoever may concern: I expect some clear answers. There's simply too much money going around Node at the moment and while it might eventually be a good thing (as involved companies will push node adoption among devs), it's also scaring and quite weird. [EDIT: Isaac already partially replied, see other answer]
- IsaacSchlueter 13y ago
  Copied for posterity from the other answer: The money you gave to Nodejitsu to continue supporting npm was a huge part of getting us in front of the exponential growth curve. I'll continue to be closely involved with Nodejitsu. But a service of npm's scale and importance can't survive on handouts forever. At some point, we need much more continued investment and a focused team, and the way to get that is to develop additional features that people are willing to pay for. > There's simply too much money going around Node at the moment and while it might eventually be a good thing (as involved companies will push node adoption among devs), it's also scaring and quite weird. Yes, there is the hazard of extrinsic motivation messing up intrinsic motivations. That's why pursuing revenue around npm must be done carefully.
matan_a 13y ago
While there are ways to create private registries [0], having a new packaged way to do it would be very useful to some orgs. [0] https://npmjs.org/doc/registry.html#Can-I-run-my-own-private-registry https://npmjs.org/doc/registry.html#Can-I-run-my-own-private...
binocarlos 13y ago
"The peacekeeping budget for the 2013–14 fiscal year was $7.54 billion" - this is from the Wikipedia UN page I'm not saying that npm is like, that important, but - take 0.01% (one ten thousandth) and npm would have an annual budget of 3/4 million bucks. Will we get to a place where core software distribution to devices not humans is deemed as critical infrastructure? It would be great to know that npm (and github and every other package distribution tool) were somehow too big to fail like banks have shown to be. Meanwhile - everyone who has worked hard to make npm and node brilliant - thank you!
- sylvinus 13y ago
  Are you actually suggesting to divert UN money to run NPM servers? ;-)
  - binocarlos 13y ago
    lol not the 'actually' part : ) just comparing the budgets and saying npm is 0.01% as important to the world as the UN
thepumpkin1979 13y ago
"Open-Source Democracy 101"... 3 Leaders in less than five years: Ryan Dahl(2009-2012) -> Isaac Z. Schlueter(2012-2013) -> Timothy J Fontaine(2014-2016?)
- randylahey 13y ago
  What are you getting at?
  - thepumpkin1979 13y ago
    It's different, it means there is no Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL) in Node.js.
    - IsaacSchlueter 13y ago
      I prefer BDFW: "Benevolent Dictator For a While" A good leader makes themselves obsolete by taking the community somewhere new. A bad leader gets themselves into a problem they can't fix. Either way, occasional change is good and healthy :)
- drawkbox 13y ago
  True but it is quite a load of work. People on average change jobs about that often as well nowadays. It is like a massive project or a fulltime job for x years. Even Guido the Python BDFL largely is more of a Board of Director for Life. He developed Python largely on his own for 5+ years. Only so many years in a project per programmer, not everyone is a Linus or Guido. Too many other fun things to get into after the initial purpose/goal is achieved. Python's code_swarm: http://vimeo.com/1093745 http://vimeo.com/1093745
  - chilledheart 13y ago
    I hope ry can bring us more surprise for node for he invented node and libuv.On the contrary, I didn't see any new techs from Isaac or TJ Fontaine to compare with both of two yet.
mmaunder 13y ago
I suspect that the ecosystems forming around node will find more success by emulating what Ubuntu has done vs RedHat.
beaumartinez 13y ago
> I am starting a company, npm, Inc., to deliver new products and services related to npm. I don't know whether I should be concerned a core part of Node.js is becoming "businessy". Is this common amongst other big software projects? Providing "premium" services is a slippery slope. What happens when someone wants to add a feature to npm that the premium services already provide, for example? Python and Django have non-profits which help sustain their ecosystems, but AFAIK Node.js doesn't. Perhaps it would be a good step.
- treenyc 13y ago
  yes a slippery slop indeed. The bigger problem is the current economic system/context that we are all operating in. I for one would prefer a NPM non-profit (maybe with a for-profit branch for consulting). How does the Python and Django non-profits work right now?
- mbrubeck 13y ago
  I think it can work, though you have to be careful to avoid conflict with community goals. It seems to work best when the "premium services" involve technical support or custom open source development, rather than closed-source code. Canonical and Red Hat are examples of for-profit businesses that primarily build and distribute free software, including employing some of the developers and managing some of the open source projects they distribute. I believe both make money primarily through "premium services" (especially "enterprise" support services). Ximian was a for-profit company started by Nat Friedman and GNOME project founder Miguel de Icaza, which developed much of the GNOME code base for a while. (It was later acquired by Novell.) Miguel went on to found the Mono project and Xamarin, the for-profit company that leads development of Mono. Qt, MySQL, InnoDB, and Berkeley DB were each developed in part by businesses using dual licensing models, where licenses for use with non-free-software were available for a fee. (The original companies have since been acquired by Nokia, Sun, Oracle, and Oracle, respectively. Sun was itself later acquired by Oracle.) The author of SQLite earns income by providing commercial support and custom development services: http://www.sqlite.org/support.html http://www.sqlite.org/support.html The developers of CyanogenMod recently founded a VC-backed company to fund its development. I'm sure there are a bunch more examples like this that I've forgotten or don't know about. I agree that a non-profit foundation has benefits for free software projects. (I've been a developer on three projects associated with non-profits: Audacity, Debian, and Mozilla.) "For profit" as I used it above may be the wrong label, though. "Taxable" might be a better word in some cases. If a company is privately held, then its owners can use it to pursue a mission other than maximizing profit. For example, I'm employed by the Mozilla Corporation, a taxable entity that is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. The Corporation has to pay taxes because of the nature of its income and spending, but its mission is still that of its sole shareholder, the Foundation.
yachtintransit 13y ago
i think is a great thing! communities flourish when they are support by companies with effective ( preferably transparent) revenue models. exciting times . npm inc , best of luck !
nilsbunger 13y ago
What's next? The pip corporation? Worldwide Gems Inc? "Global ./configure&&make&&make install Industries" ?
- astrodust 13y ago
  I hope so. The problem with things like rubygems is so long as it's a community project with people donating their time to it, any grievances you have with the service can be trumped by "we're just doing this in our spare time, lay off". While I respect people who contribute to software in their spare time, pip and rubygems are way, way too important for them to be taken so casually. I really appreciate that the NodeJS community is increasing their commitment to the NPM infrastructure.
dmourati 13y ago
The next phase of npm should be to fix this open issue: https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/4131 https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/4131
- camus2 13y ago
  and to add namespaces to packages , i think its the single thing npm did not get right.
calroc 13y ago
Node.js is a scam.
- josephagoss 13y ago
  Can you explain? I program in Node and have not encountered any plea for money or such. I am guessing the "scam" is that the former lead developer is now trying to monetize Node.js in someway. I wouldn't worry because the core project is free and that cannot be undone.
  - calroc 13y ago
    Oh no, nothing so prosaic as that. (For the record I am in favor of making a [good!] living via open-source software.) The scam is this: I believe that Node.js is waaay too immature to be used as a foundational technology, yet so many people (both folks who should know better and their naive followers) are trumpeting it as a great wonderful thing, pushing it hard as hell. If you really need dynamic programming on your back-end server use Twisted. Twisted. If you just said "but my engineers only know JS!" reflect: you have people that won't or can't learn Python but who feel okay about writing your back-end code. Fire them and hire a real programmer. Toys are very fun, and I would never try to take that away from anyone, but (in my opinion) there are waaay too many people pushing Node for production work that should know better, and that's the scam. Node is not ready for the position which people are hyping it for, and (again in my opinion) if you are telling your non-tech-savvy clients or students that they should learn and use Node because it is ready for prime time then you're lying to them or simply naive and misguided.
    - camus2 13y ago
      > I believe that Node.js is waaay too immature to be used as a foundational technology, yet so many people (both folks who should know better and their naive followers) are trumpeting it as a great wonderful thing, pushing it hard as hell. If you really need dynamic programming on your back-end server use Twisted. Twisted. I fail to see how Twisted is a better choice than Node , but I agree on Node.js(and NPM) immaturity. All async frameworks need async libraries. With Node async is the default.You cant use any python sync io lib with Twisted for instance. Or it defeats its purpose. I dont think Javascript is an issue especially with ES6 coming. But like Twisted , NodeJS is not for everything ,that's the main issue here,with people trying to be fullstack javascript, and claiming they will replace CMS X or MVC framework Y with NodeJS.
transfire 13y ago
NPM "app" store? Should I laugh, cry or try to monetize?
- anarchy8 13y ago
  All three, at the same time.
majke 13y ago
Good luck Isaac and thanks for all the fish! You did a great work as a node lead. The brief moment when our paths crossed, due to a security issue in node, was handled perfectly. Seriously. You will be missed.
drakaal 13y ago
Node is becoming a business not a community, and the community is taken by surprise. I saw this coming, but I think many people thought Node was about free love and changing the world. It is down hill from here. You can avoid a lot of politics when there isn't any money involved, but now there is, and that changes everything.
edwinnathaniel 13y ago
There's nothing wrong to focus on NPM. Take a look at Maven[http://maven.apache.org http://maven.apache.org] and Sonatype[http://www.sonatype.com/ http://www.sonatype.com/] (dependency management in Java-land). Works awesomely (and maybe even better!).
- empthought 13y ago
  There's no "maybe" about it, I don't think.
ozten 13y ago
I'd love to see an alternative to npm that: * Puts security as a high priority * That is operated as a federated system (think bitcoin block chain) * Puts uptime as a high priority Many companies and individuals could run deployments of it, removing the need for a new NPM Inc to pay for service costs.
drderidder 13y ago
I just wanted to wish Isaac the best with his new initiative. He's been a great contributor and helped make the node community a fun and friendly one. [edit] - originally thought TJ Fontaine wasn't employed by Joyent but apparently he is.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
lnanek2 13y ago
Kind of disappointing this wasn't more about the technical direction. Really feel the title is misleading and should have been something about leadership/people change so I would have known not to bother reading it.

235 points by sintaxi 13y ago

So NPM Inc.? Interesting. I do think NPM requires its own team, but I am unsure if NPM itself is a business (although I can see it being a sponsored foundation.) But there are hopefully creative business solutions to be had here. Q: How does this relate to the money I gave to the Scale NPM project a few months back? https://npm.nodejitsu.com/ https://npm.nodejitsu.com/

IsaacSchlueter 13y ago
> But there are hopefully creative business solutions to be had here. I sure hope so! I'll be sharing many more details about the specifics in the next few days. I just kept it brief in this announcement so as not to drown out the message about TJ taking over Node. > Q: How does this relate to the money I gave to the Scale NPM project a few months back? https://npm.nodejitsu.com/ https://npm.nodejitsu.com/ The money you gave to Nodejitsu to continue supporting npm was a huge part of getting us in front of the exponential growth curve. I'll continue to be closely involved with Nodejitsu. But a service of npm's scale and importance can't survive on handouts forever. At some point, we need much more continued investment and a focused team, and the way to get that is to develop additional features that people are willing to pay for.
- bhouston 13y ago
  IsaacSchlueter: Your NPM & Node made this possible btw: http://facebook.com/Exocortex http://facebook.com/Exocortex http://clara.io http://clara.io Thank you! (And yeah we do an "npm install" from the NPM servers during production deploys, I guess we like to live dangerously. We should probably fix that.)
  - adamcanady 13y ago
    Clara.io looks great, nice work on that! Would you mind elaborating on how it was created?
  - IsaacSchlueter 13y ago
    Wow! This is really rad!
- nfoz 13y ago
  Have you considered operating as a non-profit?
  - IsaacSchlueter 13y ago
    Yes, we are considering a variety of corporate and legal structures to make sure that the open source projects and community are taken care of in a sustainable way. There are many trade-offs involved, and we've just started. I don't feel strongly (as some do) that non-profits guarantee benevolence. There are many evil non-profits (and many more incompetent ones!) which do harm to the world, and many capital-G Good for-profit companies. In many cases, a non-profit can easily become an empty hand-wavey thing. (And in that case, what's the real difference, except $800/year to the state of California?) Of course, it has worked out well in some cases. Mozilla and WordPress are great examples of this sort of thing functioning really well to facilitate the interaction between a company and an open source community. But it is very early to even be worrying about such things. In any event, even if we do create a non-profit, the first step is to create a Delaware C as a for-profit company to generate the money that can allow us to create new products, spin up new infrastructure when necessary, and employ people to run the thing. So that's what I'm up to these days. npm has gotten too big to be just some dude's hobby project :)
    - jedschmidt 13y ago
      You might also want to consider whether a B Corporation would make sense: http://www.bcorporation.net http://www.bcorporation.net
      - skue 13y ago
        Thank you for mentioning B Corporations. If Isaac is trying to decide between a non-profit and a C Corp, then a B Corp could be the perfect compromise. And as I posted on another thread, there are examples of B Corps raising A rounds.
    - yapcguy 13y ago
      Why Delaware?
- HNJohnC 13y ago
  You didn't think commercializing NPM would be the lead of that post? Seriously? You seem to have an utterly different perspective on this than anyone I know who relies on Node. This is all starting to look rather amateurish and scary to me now where before I saw stability and excitement.
- nthrow 13y ago
  >The money you gave to Nodejitsu to continue supporting npm was a huge part of getting us in front of the exponential growth curve. The $300,000 is gone already?
  - IsaacSchlueter 13y ago
    A) It wasn't 300k. B) I don't believe so. But we're also still running on Nodejitsu, because things don't happen over night :)
    - nthrow 13y ago
      https://npm.nodejitsu.com/ https://npm.nodejitsu.com/ says "we raised over $300,000 for the project".

jaiball 13y ago

wonder if this has anything to do with the npm maintainer who is missing. Hope he's ok.

IsaacSchlueter 13y ago
No, this does not have anything to do with him. This has been in the works for several months. I also hope Luke's ok. Thanks.

niix 13y ago

Awesome, so glad Isaac gets to focus on what he loves. Congrats to TJ on his new role!

rtfeldman 13y ago

I assumed from the title this would be an announcement about Node 1.0, but I'm not terribly surprised to see the trend continue of approaching 1.0 asymptotically. Still, this is interesting stuff. Does anyone know if any similar repos (Ruby Gems, etc.) have their own for-profit companies?

prezjordan 13y ago
RubyGems is funded through Ruby Central [0], a 501(c)(3). I imagine Ruby Central gets a significant chunk through conference ticket sales? Someone more knowledgable here can chime in :) [0]: http://rubycentral.org http://rubycentral.org
mjn 13y ago
I can think of a few examples, but none of the ones that come to mind are only the repository as its own company. Instead the repository is hosted by a for-profit company that is also primary host of the language itself. For example, D's main repository is hosted by Digital Mars, also the creator and lead steward of the language. And Tcl's main repository for a while was hosted by Scriptics, which was founded by Tcl's creator and also employed most of its core devs.

hartator 13y ago

What about the bnoordhuis story? It seems not to be active again for his lib: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/graphs/contributors https://github.com/joyent/libuv/graphs/contributors For people who don't know, bnoordhuis exiled himself 2 months ago after the bashing the node.js community imposed him for not merging a pull about gender. It was a shame because he was in the top 3 contributors. (all details: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015)

IsaacSchlueter 13y ago
What about 9/11?
- nkohari 13y ago
  Won't someone please think of the children!
- hartator 13y ago
  I can understand if you don't want to talk of that anymore, no need to be agressive. [I don't know either of you but I think that's a sad story.]
  - IsaacSchlueter 13y ago
    I agree. 9/11 was indeed very sad. And it had about as much to do with this announcement as Ben's departure from Node last year.
    - nthrow 13y ago
      "Last year" is a funny way to frame 2 months ago.
      - IsaacSchlueter 13y ago
        Really, what happened 2 months ago was just the tail end of what had taken many months to build up. I say "last year", because it started much earlier, as Ben alluded to in his parting message. People outside a team rarely have much insight into the day to day relationships. That's just how it works. That's what a "team" is.

jnardiello 13y ago

How about the 200k Nodejitsu crowdfunded not long ago for npm? Also, how the npm revenue model is going to affect packages distribution? To whoever may concern: I expect some clear answers. There's simply too much money going around Node at the moment and while it might eventually be a good thing (as involved companies will push node adoption among devs), it's also scaring and quite weird. [EDIT: Isaac already partially replied, see other answer]

IsaacSchlueter 13y ago
Copied for posterity from the other answer: The money you gave to Nodejitsu to continue supporting npm was a huge part of getting us in front of the exponential growth curve. I'll continue to be closely involved with Nodejitsu. But a service of npm's scale and importance can't survive on handouts forever. At some point, we need much more continued investment and a focused team, and the way to get that is to develop additional features that people are willing to pay for. > There's simply too much money going around Node at the moment and while it might eventually be a good thing (as involved companies will push node adoption among devs), it's also scaring and quite weird. Yes, there is the hazard of extrinsic motivation messing up intrinsic motivations. That's why pursuing revenue around npm must be done carefully.

matan_a 13y ago

While there are ways to create private registries [0], having a new packaged way to do it would be very useful to some orgs. [0] https://npmjs.org/doc/registry.html#Can-I-run-my-own-private-registry https://npmjs.org/doc/registry.html#Can-I-run-my-own-private...

binocarlos 13y ago

"The peacekeeping budget for the 2013–14 fiscal year was $7.54 billion" - this is from the Wikipedia UN page I'm not saying that npm is like, that important, but - take 0.01% (one ten thousandth) and npm would have an annual budget of 3/4 million bucks. Will we get to a place where core software distribution to devices not humans is deemed as critical infrastructure? It would be great to know that npm (and github and every other package distribution tool) were somehow too big to fail like banks have shown to be. Meanwhile - everyone who has worked hard to make npm and node brilliant - thank you!

sylvinus 13y ago
Are you actually suggesting to divert UN money to run NPM servers? ;-)
- binocarlos 13y ago
  lol not the 'actually' part : ) just comparing the budgets and saying npm is 0.01% as important to the world as the UN

thepumpkin1979 13y ago

"Open-Source Democracy 101"... 3 Leaders in less than five years: Ryan Dahl(2009-2012) -> Isaac Z. Schlueter(2012-2013) -> Timothy J Fontaine(2014-2016?)

randylahey 13y ago
What are you getting at?
- thepumpkin1979 13y ago
  It's different, it means there is no Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL) in Node.js.
  - IsaacSchlueter 13y ago
    I prefer BDFW: "Benevolent Dictator For a While" A good leader makes themselves obsolete by taking the community somewhere new. A bad leader gets themselves into a problem they can't fix. Either way, occasional change is good and healthy :)
drawkbox 13y ago
True but it is quite a load of work. People on average change jobs about that often as well nowadays. It is like a massive project or a fulltime job for x years. Even Guido the Python BDFL largely is more of a Board of Director for Life. He developed Python largely on his own for 5+ years. Only so many years in a project per programmer, not everyone is a Linus or Guido. Too many other fun things to get into after the initial purpose/goal is achieved. Python's code_swarm: http://vimeo.com/1093745 http://vimeo.com/1093745
- chilledheart 13y ago
  I hope ry can bring us more surprise for node for he invented node and libuv.On the contrary, I didn't see any new techs from Isaac or TJ Fontaine to compare with both of two yet.

mmaunder 13y ago

I suspect that the ecosystems forming around node will find more success by emulating what Ubuntu has done vs RedHat.

beaumartinez 13y ago

> I am starting a company, npm, Inc., to deliver new products and services related to npm. I don't know whether I should be concerned a core part of Node.js is becoming "businessy". Is this common amongst other big software projects? Providing "premium" services is a slippery slope. What happens when someone wants to add a feature to npm that the premium services already provide, for example? Python and Django have non-profits which help sustain their ecosystems, but AFAIK Node.js doesn't. Perhaps it would be a good step.

treenyc 13y ago
yes a slippery slop indeed. The bigger problem is the current economic system/context that we are all operating in. I for one would prefer a NPM non-profit (maybe with a for-profit branch for consulting). How does the Python and Django non-profits work right now?
mbrubeck 13y ago
I think it can work, though you have to be careful to avoid conflict with community goals. It seems to work best when the "premium services" involve technical support or custom open source development, rather than closed-source code. Canonical and Red Hat are examples of for-profit businesses that primarily build and distribute free software, including employing some of the developers and managing some of the open source projects they distribute. I believe both make money primarily through "premium services" (especially "enterprise" support services). Ximian was a for-profit company started by Nat Friedman and GNOME project founder Miguel de Icaza, which developed much of the GNOME code base for a while. (It was later acquired by Novell.) Miguel went on to found the Mono project and Xamarin, the for-profit company that leads development of Mono. Qt, MySQL, InnoDB, and Berkeley DB were each developed in part by businesses using dual licensing models, where licenses for use with non-free-software were available for a fee. (The original companies have since been acquired by Nokia, Sun, Oracle, and Oracle, respectively. Sun was itself later acquired by Oracle.) The author of SQLite earns income by providing commercial support and custom development services: http://www.sqlite.org/support.html http://www.sqlite.org/support.html The developers of CyanogenMod recently founded a VC-backed company to fund its development. I'm sure there are a bunch more examples like this that I've forgotten or don't know about. I agree that a non-profit foundation has benefits for free software projects. (I've been a developer on three projects associated with non-profits: Audacity, Debian, and Mozilla.) "For profit" as I used it above may be the wrong label, though. "Taxable" might be a better word in some cases. If a company is privately held, then its owners can use it to pursue a mission other than maximizing profit. For example, I'm employed by the Mozilla Corporation, a taxable entity that is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. The Corporation has to pay taxes because of the nature of its income and spending, but its mission is still that of its sole shareholder, the Foundation.

yachtintransit 13y ago

i think is a great thing! communities flourish when they are support by companies with effective ( preferably transparent) revenue models. exciting times . npm inc , best of luck !

nilsbunger 13y ago

What's next? The pip corporation? Worldwide Gems Inc? "Global ./configure&&make&&make install Industries" ?

astrodust 13y ago
I hope so. The problem with things like rubygems is so long as it's a community project with people donating their time to it, any grievances you have with the service can be trumped by "we're just doing this in our spare time, lay off". While I respect people who contribute to software in their spare time, pip and rubygems are way, way too important for them to be taken so casually. I really appreciate that the NodeJS community is increasing their commitment to the NPM infrastructure.

dmourati 13y ago

The next phase of npm should be to fix this open issue: https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/4131 https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/4131

camus2 13y ago
and to add namespaces to packages , i think its the single thing npm did not get right.

calroc 13y ago

Node.js is a scam.

josephagoss 13y ago
Can you explain? I program in Node and have not encountered any plea for money or such. I am guessing the "scam" is that the former lead developer is now trying to monetize Node.js in someway. I wouldn't worry because the core project is free and that cannot be undone.
- calroc 13y ago
  Oh no, nothing so prosaic as that. (For the record I am in favor of making a [good!] living via open-source software.) The scam is this: I believe that Node.js is waaay too immature to be used as a foundational technology, yet so many people (both folks who should know better and their naive followers) are trumpeting it as a great wonderful thing, pushing it hard as hell. If you really need dynamic programming on your back-end server use Twisted. Twisted. If you just said "but my engineers only know JS!" reflect: you have people that won't or can't learn Python but who feel okay about writing your back-end code. Fire them and hire a real programmer. Toys are very fun, and I would never try to take that away from anyone, but (in my opinion) there are waaay too many people pushing Node for production work that should know better, and that's the scam. Node is not ready for the position which people are hyping it for, and (again in my opinion) if you are telling your non-tech-savvy clients or students that they should learn and use Node because it is ready for prime time then you're lying to them or simply naive and misguided.
  - camus2 13y ago
    > I believe that Node.js is waaay too immature to be used as a foundational technology, yet so many people (both folks who should know better and their naive followers) are trumpeting it as a great wonderful thing, pushing it hard as hell. If you really need dynamic programming on your back-end server use Twisted. Twisted. I fail to see how Twisted is a better choice than Node , but I agree on Node.js(and NPM) immaturity. All async frameworks need async libraries. With Node async is the default.You cant use any python sync io lib with Twisted for instance. Or it defeats its purpose. I dont think Javascript is an issue especially with ES6 coming. But like Twisted , NodeJS is not for everything ,that's the main issue here,with people trying to be fullstack javascript, and claiming they will replace CMS X or MVC framework Y with NodeJS.

transfire 13y ago

NPM "app" store? Should I laugh, cry or try to monetize?

anarchy8 13y ago
All three, at the same time.

majke 13y ago

Good luck Isaac and thanks for all the fish! You did a great work as a node lead. The brief moment when our paths crossed, due to a security issue in node, was handled perfectly. Seriously. You will be missed.

drakaal 13y ago

Node is becoming a business not a community, and the community is taken by surprise. I saw this coming, but I think many people thought Node was about free love and changing the world. It is down hill from here. You can avoid a lot of politics when there isn't any money involved, but now there is, and that changes everything.

edwinnathaniel 13y ago

There's nothing wrong to focus on NPM. Take a look at Maven[http://maven.apache.org http://maven.apache.org] and Sonatype[http://www.sonatype.com/ http://www.sonatype.com/] (dependency management in Java-land). Works awesomely (and maybe even better!).

empthought 13y ago
There's no "maybe" about it, I don't think.

ozten 13y ago

I'd love to see an alternative to npm that: * Puts security as a high priority * That is operated as a federated system (think bitcoin block chain) * Puts uptime as a high priority Many companies and individuals could run deployments of it, removing the need for a new NPM Inc to pay for service costs.

drderidder 13y ago

I just wanted to wish Isaac the best with his new initiative. He's been a great contributor and helped make the node community a fun and friendly one. [edit] - originally thought TJ Fontaine wasn't employed by Joyent but apparently he is.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

lnanek2 13y ago

Kind of disappointing this wasn't more about the technical direction. Really feel the title is misleading and should have been something about leadership/people change so I would have known not to bother reading it.