
What the IBM Acquisition of StrongLoop Means for the Node.js Community - ijroth
https://strongloop.com/strongblog/node-js-community-ibm-acquisition/
======
rynop
former IBM dev here (6 years in different areas). I hope they let you work on
an island and don't force you to use their tooling/approve listed of open
source software.

IBM has long embraced the OSS community (I loved LTC), but the process to
release/use anything OSS was not good (to put it nicely) and was one of the
many reasons I left.

I worked on a project that was on an island, and while it was more efficient
than normal IBM dev, it was still 10x slower and tons of red tape then what
was required to make a competitive product (and stay competitive). IBM is big
and ultimately has to protect themselves - IMO ultimately it gets in your way
of making a good/competitive product.

I like what StrongLoop does for the node community, and I do indeed hope you
are successful and nothing changes. But to be honest I am very skeptical.

~~~
kodablah
Current IBM dev here (but only speaking anecdotally for myself and my
project), can confirm that when we were acquired they let our product and
policies remain and did not "blue wash" the project. I would assume the same
will occur for StrongLoop and their software practices will probably continue
mostly unfettered.

~~~
granos
I hope it works out for StrongLoop. When a company I worked for was purchased
by IBM, about 3/4 of the engineering staff left once we heard about "Work Life
Integration (tm)". It's really hard to work inside Big Blue when you are used
to the freedom provided by a small company.

~~~
greglindahl
Huh. When Blekko got acquired by IBM Watson, all of the employees thought that
IBM's policies about flexible working hours and locations were great. So far
I'm the only techie who's departed.

~~~
granos
We were in their software services vertical (I forget the name)...the one that
had never turned a profit and wasn't sexy. I've known one person who had a
great experience on the Watson team. So maybe its a different experience?

~~~
johnward
Were you on a CAMSS team? That seems to be the best area inside of IBM right
now as it's a strategic growth area. This includes the Watson PS team I'm on.

~~~
beginpanic
As an IBMer, many of the complainers I've heard and much of the heartburn
around layoffs come from outside of CAMSS. It's like folks at Apple
complaining that the iPod team isn't treated as well as the iPad team. Of
course, your group isn't making money.

------
tracker1
As much as I fear this will drag StrongLoop, I feel that this is an excellent
fit. StrongLoop has been focused on building "Enterprise" tools and module
around node, as well as working on whitelisting/reviewing various modules...
This is a good fit for IBM and their clients who are inclined to also want to
have "approved" or "certified" modules to be able to use separately from the
rest of npm.

As much as I like the power/openness of npm, a lot of corporate environments
move more slowly... modules need to be cleared by legal and usually limited to
specific versions. Having more resources to do this is a good thing and can
only help people who are working for financial institutions (as an example).

------
mbesto
> _And it’s not just Node.js. Maybe you haven’t looked at what IBM is doing
> with open source lately. I was surprised when I dug in. For example, did you
> know they are leading contributors to:

Linux OpenStack Cloud Foundry Docker plus many Apache projects like Spark,
Cordova and Hadoop and of course, Node_

They are? (keyword => "leading")

[https://github.com/docker/docker/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/docker/docker/graphs/contributors)

[https://github.com/apache/spark/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/apache/spark/graphs/contributors)

I find this claim dubious. Maybe I'm not digging hard enough.

~~~
draw_down
What is it about these posts that bring out the HN contingent who think
themselves firebrand skeptics? This is basically a marketing piece, what good
is fact-checking it

~~~
vog
_> This is basically a marketing piece, what good is fact-checking it_

Not sure about the US laws, but here in Germany, all marketing claims must
stay to the facts, or the company can be sued.

(Which is why most marketing speak uses fuzzy terms that sound nice but don't
convey any information. But that's a general trend anyway.)

~~~
meatysnapper
Es musst die Wahrheit sein!!!

~~~
pluma
Ah, Hollywood German. How lovely.

------
mbubb
From the customer side - I dealt with Netezza and Softlayer before and after
IBM acquisition. In both cases an almost palpable drain in support and
intelligence. I hate to say it like that as i know that there are brilliant
folks in IBM (Watson, etc)

Softlayer and Netezza in different ways were smart, nimble and fearless
companies. You had real relationships with the engineers. I got to know
Netezza folks in Massachusetts, Poland and Australia - some of the smartest
folks I've met. They shared scripts and passionate expertise.

IBM took it over and the bureaucracy set in. The term "TAM" brings tears of
rage to my eyes... Opening a support ticket is about as hard as applying for a
mortgage online. And they want to have these endless conference calls with 7
or 8 folks from their side. And nothing gets done.

I am embarrassed about the way I have acted on these calls. I have called
folks out and out liars. I have screamed at and bashed conference phones.

Maybe it would have been better if I hadn't known the Netezza folks - they
were good.

And Softlayer...

I used to be able to call a guy down in texas and after a 20 minute phone call
have a cluster of servers ordered. Once did a hadoop cluster this way. Go off
and have lunch come back and the servers would we ready by the afternoon.

And now: 2 major outages in the past 2 months. No communication - in both
cases entirely their fault. Power failure and network misconfig causing an arp
storm. Ignored for hours while we submitted tickets and called support...
Nightmare.

And an absurd situation where their security dept threatened us with taking an
haproxy server offline due to a clean-mx false positive - even after the
tireless guy running clean-mx emailed to that effect...

It became apparent in the discussions following this event that the TAM and
sales support which has had our account for years, knew nothing about our
business.

Just horrible bureacracy and bad service.

So I have had really negative experiences with 2 IBM acquired companies.
Hopefully it will be better for StrongLoop.

For anyone affected - watch for the good folks shedding off.

~~~
beginpanic
I hear you on the support side. I used to work for a company that used a
product that was bought by IBM. Before that, you could pick up the phone and
talk to the lead developer. After, you opened a support ticket online and
waited 24-48 hours for a response from someone in Costa Rica or India. Now I
work at IBM with this same product, and even I as an employee who supports the
product, even I have to go through the same Level 1 tech support crap.

However, the cash injection made the core product worlds better, and it was
good to begin with. Support got worse, the product got better. It's almost an
even balance.

------
osullivj
I used to work with an old IBMer who used to say "it's no accident that IBM
nearly collapsed at the same time as the Soviet Union did". Lou Gerstner
famously rescued IBM from oblivion by turning it into a consultancy led
company, and moving the focus away from mainframes. This is just a case of IBM
snaffling up the latest cool thing so they can sell consulting services.

~~~
jsprogrammer
What is the connection to the Soviet Union? Were they a large IBM customer?

~~~
osullivj
Both IBM and USSR were bloated, inefficient, slow moving, hierarchical,
bureaucratic organisations. Gorbachev failed to save his org, despite heroic
efforts. Gerstner did rescue IBM. Maybe if Gorby had saved the USSR Putin
would still be working for the KGB in Berlin...

------
funkysquid
If you're trying to relieve fears, the first paragraph does not help.

"IBM has identified Node.js as an important part of the future of enterprise
middleware and StrongLoop’s technology and expertise as pivotal to their
strategy to help companies fully unlock the value of their existing IT
investments and legacy data with APIs."

~~~
gshx
Seems like too much fluff - both the acquirer generating it and the
acquisition itself. It would be helpful to see why/where one would use node.js
when other platforms support many more workloads well than just pure I/O bound
ones. In the "enterprise middleware", going native (C++) or managed (JVM/CLR)
brings with it a much richer ecosystem alongwith a more robust runtime that
can better support other workloads that entail for example cpu binding. It's
hard to see a real need for node.js as it seems to not do anything
significantly better than other platform options.

------
oneweekwonder
Recently I got heavily into node-red[0] after playing with a ti sensortag[1],
and I'm really amazed at what it can do, and that it is open source and
actively used by IBM in bluemix.

Now they acquired another heavy weight in the js world, I wonder what is their
next step.

On a side note, to the audience: have you looked at node-red, what do you
think of it?

[0]: [http://nodered.org/](http://nodered.org/) [1]:
[http://www.ti.com/sensortag](http://www.ti.com/sensortag)

ps. if you run node-red locally note by default it is insecure, you need to
setup the config. But really it is a must try!

------
OldSchoolJohnny
IBM recently bought out Softlayer hosting and support went from great to
glacially slow and all but uncaring in about 28 seconds.

~~~
nickpsecurity
Damnit! That's one of the companies I found searching for a physical version
of cloud hosting. Looked promising. Now they're IBM. (sighs) Going to have to
delete them from my bookmarks...

Sucks that IBM has this effect. If they didn't, esp if had opposite effect,
they could be the biggest and most awesome tech company in existence.

------
rogerthis
Once I worked in a project which IBM was also involved. And everything in IBM
related to that project was slow, very slow.

~~~
astrodust
It's a gigantic organization that makes hardware, software, and does
consulting. Does one anecdotal story really characterize it?

~~~
codingdave
It is not just one anecdotal story. I used to work for IBM, then have them as
a client, then was a business partner, and have worked on their software for
over 20 years.

Based on all my experience, they are slow and expensive, and over-build their
teams. They do deliver the final product and it will work, which is why people
hire them, but they do not do it efficiently.

------
aikah
Congrats , I know nothing about "modern" IBM but it seems like they are trying
interesting things with Bluemix. Let's see what happens next.

------
athenot
This announcement fits along with Node.js 4.0's release containing a
commitment to an 18-month roadmap in giving Node.js a greater maturity.

As much as I like to think I have chosen Node.js purely for its merits, having
a wide community who adopts a platform brings a few perks:

\- Hiring developers requires less of a gamble on their part. Elixir looks
very promising and probably has a lot of advantages over Node.js thanks to
it's Erlang foundation but it makes it harder to assemble a team—I hope this
changes as I wish the Erlang/Elixir folks all the best.

\- There is a great amount of wealth contained in the package repository NPM.
Before Node.js, this was a great strength of Perl's CPAN (and TeX' CTAN before
that).

\- Having large organizations adopt a platform will eventually increase OSS
contributions.

I could be mistaken but I don't see Node.js following the bureaucratic of
Java's JSR if it continues to adopt a lean and mean approach akin to UNIX
tools (do 1 thing well).

------
emperornortonus
Anybody?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_acquisition_by_Oracle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_acquisition_by_Oracle)

~~~
pluma
Despite both being big enterprise corporations, IBM is nothing like Oracle.
Oracle is pretty much one huge ego trip swallowing everything like the Borg.

~~~
emperornortonus
You clearly have never dealt with the Professional Services & Consulting arm
of IBM.

------
cdnsteve
If anything this is a strong validation of Node.js in the enterprise space.
This is actually good news for anyone working within the enterprise trying to
use a different technology set. It makes selling Node to a CTO a bit easier
(even if you choose not to use StrongLoop).

~~~
rodgerd
"Enterprise" is already using node.js This is IBM tryng to stay in touch with
their customers.

------
mkozlows
I realize this blog post is full of optimistic "nothing will change!"
statements, but that doesn't seem super-IBM-like.

------
kordless
Congratulations Issac! Happy for you and the team.

~~~
ijroth
Woot thanks Kord. I'm excited for Node.

~~~
drderidder
Hmm, that the acquisition would mean anything for node directly seems off. At
least, the blog post seemed to indicate that this wasn't meant to be about IBM
buying influence. I wasn't a customer and not particularly keen on the
enterprise focus of strongloop but I thought you had a really good thing going
with loopback. Not sure what to think of it now... I was in a startup that got
acquired by a huge multinational and it was shocking how quickly we went from
nimble to gridlock.

------
Aldo_MX
If IBM screws ExpressJS up (wishfully not), Hapi[1] is a good alternative.

[https://github.com/hapijs/hapi](https://github.com/hapijs/hapi)

~~~
pluma
Considering the development history of Express mostly consisted of cutting
down on features and streamlining the core, it should be easy to notice
whether the acquisition has any effect.

------
jacques_chester
> _Making sure that Node.js is a first class citizen on Softlayer and BlueMix_

BlueMix is a Cloud Foundry installation. Is there a separate BlueMix-specific
thing that is distinct from the Node.js buildpack?[0]

[0] [https://github.com/cloudfoundry/nodejs-
buildpack](https://github.com/cloudfoundry/nodejs-buildpack)

------
codingdave
It is hard to say what this means at this stage...

IBM develops products that it acquires based on where IBM needs the product to
go. Sometimes that matches where the user community wants it to go, sometimes
it does not. But they will put resources behind it, and it will change - we
just need to give it time to see what direction that change takes things.

------
ramigb
Just a question -might be dumb- is the merger of io.js and node.js which
happened a couple of months ago related to this news in anyway? Anyways IMHO
this good news and I hope it will make node.js much better, who knows maybe
replace V8 with something even better.

~~~
cag_ii
I can't imagine it wouldn't be. This kind of decisions aren't made very
quickly. I'm more curious if the IO team was aware of this...

~~~
actualprogram
HA! Hahahaha. hahaa.... _wheeze_

Acquisitions are thoroughly NDA'd. A few of the core team may have been told
(but relationships are not universally cordial - recall that Strongloop and
Nodesource are direct competitors). The io.js community in general was
absolutely not told.

I expect there are a few people who feel a bit betrayed that one of the major
movers in a supposed grass-roots community-oriented fork appears to have done
it only to make themselves a better acquisition target.

While they're not wrong to feel that way, StrongLoop have been telegraphing
this particular intention for a long time (at least since hiring Roth).

------
amelius
What node.js needs is a better way to manage packages. Right now, upgrading
can fail with no way to roll back. Also, reproducibility is missing. E.g, it
is not easy to download sources, and deploy those exact same sources on
different machines.

~~~
ijroth
Please check out slc build and slc deploy from StrongLoop which attempt to
solve exactly this issue and are being used by major deployments.

------
nnain
What's a good book to learn about the new stuff? Async et al..

I learnt Python from "Dive Into Python 3", but that hasn't been updated for
few years now. Any similar book with recent updates?

------
potch
I imagine it doesn't mean much beyond some more b2b uses of Node. Node has its
own independent governance and nothing about this acquisition changes that.

------
mhd
Well, at least it's not Oracle…

------
ilurkedhere
IBM Nodesphere.

------
wslh
Sorry for the joke but how many callbacks did they need to make this
transaction?

~~~
robotnoises
I promise it wasn't that many.

~~~
tothepixel
async I saw what you did there.

~~~
akiselev
I don't get it and await an explanation

~~~
smnrchrds
This is starting to look like Reddit.

~~~
iyn
Nothing wrong with a little bit of humor, imo. It's not like a thread is full
of puns.

~~~
idibidiart
make it then-able... like so:

doSomeAsync() .andThen(doSomeOtherAsync1) .andThen(doSomeOtherAsync2) ...
.andThen(SomeOtherAsync10) .noAndThen(finalize)

~~~
rekshaw
callback hell

------
curiousjorge
so how much was it acquired for?

~~~
utuxia
3 souls and a rabbit.

------
atorralb
guess i will move to php

~~~
oluwie
said no one EVER

------
geniium
Dislike

------
frandroid
JavaScript is eating the world, part XXIV.

------
meesles
This has some awesome implications for open source. If a huge company like IBM
openly supports and dedicates resources to FOSS, I think we can expect these
products to get way more attention and receive the full treatment of corporate
testing and development which would really offset the ephemeral nature of
projects like Node. Not saying the current foundation guys aren't doing a
great job already, but IBM's expertise in software can only be a plus I think!

~~~
vidarh
IBM has been an open source supporter for a long time. Their first Linux
kernel contributions came no later than '99 (when they started upstreaming
changes to support Linux on their mainframes, available since 2000).

You can see some details about their open source contributions here:
[http://www-03.ibm.com/linux/ossstds/oss/ossindex.html](http://www-03.ibm.com/linux/ossstds/oss/ossindex.html)

~~~
murukesh_s
And Eclipse.. When it was open sourced, it was one of the largest project to
be open sourced.

