

StrongLoop and Express - ellisonleao
https://medium.com/code-adventures/strongloop-express-40b8bcb8e5af

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cjbprime
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
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
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...).

------
rrss1122
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.

~~~
ChiperSoft
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.

~~~
tjholowaychuk
I'd 100% agree on poor ethics if I didn't talk to Douglas but I did, poorly
obviously. I get that now but my intention wasn't to offend him or the other
contributors, it seemed (and still does) like a win-win to me and some
recognition for the work. I don't recall people freaking out at Ryan when he
sold to Joyent, he wasn't the only one working on the project either.

~~~
ChiperSoft
I've not seen any ill will towards you from the people I named above, at least
not publicly. They all know it was your project and you were free to do with
it as you saw fit. They disagree with your choice, but it was yours to make.
You had good intentions, even if the actions played out badly, but that's all
now in the past.

Strongloop, on the other hand, has the ability to change the outcome, and have
chosen not to. They've been given loads of evidence of what the maintainers
want them to do, and so far their actions have not demonstrated a desire to
resolve the conflict. Their public responses have been entirely self-serving
and barely apologetic.

I am firmly of the impression that they want to hold on to Express so they can
claim it's development as an R&D tax write-off. This fits with why they've
stated they would only give it to an organization backed by a non-profit
foundation, since then it could continue to be a charitable donation. They
want to make money off this situation, and that's basically thumbing their
noses at the people who put their time into it for free.

As I said in the github thread, there are some major differences between this
situation and when Ryan sold to Joyent. Ryan was still working on Node, and
Joyent hired both him and Isaac to continue doing so. They also announced
[1][2] the transition before it happened, made it very clear what was
happening in terms of code ownership, and answered everyone's questions ahead
of time. The repos didn't transfer until four months later [3].

[1]
[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/nodejs/lWo0MbHZ6Tc](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/nodejs/lWo0MbHZ6Tc)

[2] [https://www.joyent.com/blog/a-new-abode-for-
node](https://www.joyent.com/blog/a-new-abode-for-node)

[3]
[https://github.com/joyent/node/commit/45adc907c9b3eff0bc560d...](https://github.com/joyent/node/commit/45adc907c9b3eff0bc560d0c6a0f904ff9ee0c39)

 _edit_ : I'm being told Strongloop is actually helping to create a foundation
for Express to be owned by, they're just not doing it publicly. So that's
good.

------
gnuwilliam
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/)

