4 ms·

StrongLoop and Express

10 points by ellisonleao 12y ago

gnuwilliam 12y ago
There's also an article about this matter -- http://hueniverse.com/2014/07/30/open-source-dickishness/ http://hueniverse.com/2014/07/30/open-source-dickishness/
cjbprime 12y ago
Seems disingenuous, since the email talked about "branding on expressjs.com", but what actually happened was moving the github repo out of the independent expressjs organization into strongloop's namespace, which is extremely different. It sounds like TJ doesn't understand what part of this was upsetting.
- tjholowaychuk 12y ago
  Maybe missed "I understand this won’t clear my name, and that’s not the intention of this post"? Eran was claiming I mentioned nothing to Douglas at all so I just wanted to put the facts out there. I could have taken the money and run, frankly it's hardly a month's worth of money, not worth all the community BS haha but I wanted to share it with Douglas. I know StrongLoop will do no harm, moving of the repo is completely irrelevant IMO, lots of people will rage and say otherwise but that's my view.
  - rlidwka 12y ago
    Moving the repo is the source of the issue here. From now on every developer will see "hey, this belongs to strongloop now". It is completely different from Automattic, because they took over almost dead project. I saw socket.io at the moment with months without commits, and it was necessary to do something about it. It is different from Joyent. I would rather see node under a foundation now, but five years ago Ryan probably couldn't promote it by himself and needed help. Express.js had three active developers working on a new version already. It had an organization named "expressjs" where all related modules are stored. It didn't need to be transferred anywhere (especially not to a for-profit organization for using the repo as an advertising place). Even if strongloop guys will manage to avoid doing harm (not sure about that), seeing the company name in the all hyperlinks to github is a harm enough (considering that the company did nothing for it... well... except for the transfer payment...).
- rmgraham 12y ago
  The blog post states TJ moved it from his personal visionmedia account to strongloop's company org. It was never in the expressjs org. Because of that, it reads to me like TJ saw it as handing over his personal stake in the project to StrongLoop, which consisted of the domain name and the root repo.
rrss1122 12y ago
It's amusing, the sense of entitlement expressed by contributors. There were some hiccups along the way, but everyone was given back their commit rights. If you want it to be "your" project, fork it. Everyone who was working on Express was working on TJ's project. There were no "rightful maintainers". When TJ decided to step away from node, he did offer to give up all his projects to people he felt could maintain them the best. He has said repeatedly he feels StrongLoop can maintain it best. I agree with TJ. The Express "community" can throw all the tantrums they want. It was never their project.
- ricardobeat 12y ago
  Express has been a community project for a while. Of course little will change, but this is not how open-source is supposed to work. Only in nodejs land...
  - tjholowaychuk 12y ago
    Most OSS already has a "parent" company, mozilla's everything, walmart's Hapi, Joyent's Node etc. Nothing overly different about this case.
- ChiperSoft 12y ago
  These weren't just contributors, they were github collaborators and the project's active maintainers, including the person TJ himself put in charge of the project, Doug Wilson. TJ's last commit was on February 19th, 2014 (6b05f60b), and it was simply a version bump on a dependency. Since then there has been one major release (Express 4), six minor releases and 13 patch releases. 167 files changed, 6003 insertions, 1958 deletions. Of the 581 commits made in the last 12 months, the top five contributors were: 303 Douglas Christopher Wilson 84 Jonathan Ong 66 Roman Shtylman 49 TJ Holowaychuk 5 Fernando Silveira This is just on master and does not include the work Doug has been doing on the 5.0 branch, or the VOLUMES of work all three had done in the tertiary repos on the ExpressJS organization. StrongLoop hasn't contributed anything. It stopped being TJ's project a long time ago.
  - 12y ago

10 points by ellisonleao 12y ago

There's also an article about this matter -- http://hueniverse.com/2014/07/30/open-source-dickishness/ http://hueniverse.com/2014/07/30/open-source-dickishness/

cjbprime 12y ago

Seems disingenuous, since the email talked about "branding on expressjs.com", but what actually happened was moving the github repo out of the independent expressjs organization into strongloop's namespace, which is extremely different. It sounds like TJ doesn't understand what part of this was upsetting.

tjholowaychuk 12y ago
Maybe missed "I understand this won’t clear my name, and that’s not the intention of this post"? Eran was claiming I mentioned nothing to Douglas at all so I just wanted to put the facts out there. I could have taken the money and run, frankly it's hardly a month's worth of money, not worth all the community BS haha but I wanted to share it with Douglas. I know StrongLoop will do no harm, moving of the repo is completely irrelevant IMO, lots of people will rage and say otherwise but that's my view.
- rlidwka 12y ago
  Moving the repo is the source of the issue here. From now on every developer will see "hey, this belongs to strongloop now". It is completely different from Automattic, because they took over almost dead project. I saw socket.io at the moment with months without commits, and it was necessary to do something about it. It is different from Joyent. I would rather see node under a foundation now, but five years ago Ryan probably couldn't promote it by himself and needed help. Express.js had three active developers working on a new version already. It had an organization named "expressjs" where all related modules are stored. It didn't need to be transferred anywhere (especially not to a for-profit organization for using the repo as an advertising place). Even if strongloop guys will manage to avoid doing harm (not sure about that), seeing the company name in the all hyperlinks to github is a harm enough (considering that the company did nothing for it... well... except for the transfer payment...).
rmgraham 12y ago
The blog post states TJ moved it from his personal visionmedia account to strongloop's company org. It was never in the expressjs org. Because of that, it reads to me like TJ saw it as handing over his personal stake in the project to StrongLoop, which consisted of the domain name and the root repo.

rrss1122 12y ago

It's amusing, the sense of entitlement expressed by contributors. There were some hiccups along the way, but everyone was given back their commit rights. If you want it to be "your" project, fork it. Everyone who was working on Express was working on TJ's project. There were no "rightful maintainers". When TJ decided to step away from node, he did offer to give up all his projects to people he felt could maintain them the best. He has said repeatedly he feels StrongLoop can maintain it best. I agree with TJ. The Express "community" can throw all the tantrums they want. It was never their project.

ricardobeat 12y ago
Express has been a community project for a while. Of course little will change, but this is not how open-source is supposed to work. Only in nodejs land...
- tjholowaychuk 12y ago
  Most OSS already has a "parent" company, mozilla's everything, walmart's Hapi, Joyent's Node etc. Nothing overly different about this case.
ChiperSoft 12y ago
These weren't just contributors, they were github collaborators and the project's active maintainers, including the person TJ himself put in charge of the project, Doug Wilson. TJ's last commit was on February 19th, 2014 (6b05f60b), and it was simply a version bump on a dependency. Since then there has been one major release (Express 4), six minor releases and 13 patch releases. 167 files changed, 6003 insertions, 1958 deletions. Of the 581 commits made in the last 12 months, the top five contributors were: 303 Douglas Christopher Wilson 84 Jonathan Ong 66 Roman Shtylman 49 TJ Holowaychuk 5 Fernando Silveira This is just on master and does not include the work Doug has been doing on the 5.0 branch, or the VOLUMES of work all three had done in the tertiary repos on the ExpressJS organization. StrongLoop hasn't contributed anything. It stopped being TJ's project a long time ago.
- 12y ago