That's a very fair question. When I first presented my corporate open source anti-patterns talk at FISL in 2012[1][2], I closed by saying that I was certain that we (Joyent) were making mistakes, and that they would have to come back in 2022 to hear what they were. Suffice it to say that after the developments of the last year -- which include not just the io.js fork but also us open sourcing our entire stack[3] -- I'm really looking forward to doing that update, and hope to do it much earlier than 2022. ;)
To answer your question: no, I was not overruled -- it's been clear to me for quite some time that node.js would be best served by a foundation. That said, getting the mechanics of that foundation established has taking (is taking) a long time (and, it must be said, involves a lot of hard, thankless work from a lot of people). Foundations might feel "easy", but they aren't: 501(c)(3) organizations are highly regulated entities that require not just a lot of groundwork and forethought but extensive maintenance. Fortunately, we have made great progress (and we have built a terrific collection of founding members), and we are getting the node.js community what it needs: a foundation that can assure the consensus-driven advancement of the technology, in perpetuity.
I'm waiting for this new foundation to have their moment where they call a core developer an asshole in public, throw him under a bus, and say that if he was an employee, he'd be fired rather than retrained... all while talking about the importance of empathy.
Regardless of the event itself, that was an exceptionally poor handling (soapboxing?) of the situation, and didn't speak much of ability to mediate a heated situation. A foundation born from this management style? Doesn't sound encouraging.
I was wondering if anyone would bring that one up. For me, that was the moment I stopped having vague concerns about Joyent and Node, and realised "wow, these people can't be trusted to run a project".
I completely agree. I hesitate to say this because it might come across too much as 'gut feeling' (and I apologize in advance), but Joyent seems to be somehow too lopsided towards the 'public relations corporate' side of things over developing and maintaining something valuable.
It's not so much to do with my opinion of the specifics of the situation with Noordhuis, or the announcement that is the object of this conversation, but rather the vaguer feeling that they feel way too much like a 'company' acting in its own interest for me to trust them.
Node.js is a Registered Trademark owned by Joyent... even after releasing to the newly started Node Foundation, I'm guessing there may well be some tight reigns here.
The schizophrenic open source ideals of Sun continue to live on at Joyent. It's funny that Oracle is called out many times (which they deserve), and yet, there is a failure to acknowledge that other open source projects under Sun's stewardship did a lot of mistakes that ended up killing them (OpenSolaris and OpenOffice, to name a few). In any case, as much as corporate America wants to be seen as a faceless entity, Sun was made of its employees and so is Joyent.
Meh, I'm not buying this "yeah, we were going to make node belong to the community all along" when there are lawsuits threats over trademarks and what not.
To answer your question: no, I was not overruled -- it's been clear to me for quite some time that node.js would be best served by a foundation. That said, getting the mechanics of that foundation established has taking (is taking) a long time (and, it must be said, involves a lot of hard, thankless work from a lot of people). Foundations might feel "easy", but they aren't: 501(c)(3) organizations are highly regulated entities that require not just a lot of groundwork and forethought but extensive maintenance. Fortunately, we have made great progress (and we have built a terrific collection of founding members), and we are getting the node.js community what it needs: a foundation that can assure the consensus-driven advancement of the technology, in perpetuity.
[1] http://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/corporate-open-source-an...
[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhgXQFk9noI
[3] https://www.joyent.com/blog/sdc-and-manta-are-now-open-sourc...