Disclosure: I am one of the StrongLoop founders.
If John Lennon was born half a century later he'd probably be famous for the following words:
"Life is What Happens On The Internet While You’re Busy Making Other Plans"
Something was said on the Internet that warrants a response.
Let me paraphrase a conversation I have a couple of times at every conference I attend. It has happened at Nodeconf and Nodeconf.eu this year, and I am certain it will happen again next week at lxjs.
me: << explains what I'm doing for a living >
other person: So you're working at joyent, then.
me: No, I work at strongloop
other person: Oh? So when did you leave joyent?
me: I never worked there.
other person: Ah. So have you worked for microsoft?
me: ...
Of course you all know better because you are in the "inner circle" of people involved with node. You are the exception.
The truth is that nobody knows me or Ben or StrongLoop. 99% of the people that use node think it was written by Ryan Dahl and Isaac Schlueter. And if not then at least it must have been someone at Joyent.
Those people are not crazy. Anyone visiting nodejs.org without further background information would think that.
For the past couple of years this never bothered me the slightest. The only time it did was when someone(*) who never contributed a single line of code got on stage and claimed to have ported node to windows.
When we founded StrongLoop in January we planned on doing consulting besides other things. That meant that we had to show the world our ticket of expertise, which is: we (me and Ben) put a significant amount of work in node core. We know it inside out.
This is challenging because we didn't write node-core on our own either. Also, as Mikeal and many other point out, node-core is not the only project that matters. If we had written Request or Express we'd have bragged about it but unfortunately we didn't so that wasn't an option.
The goal was and is not to downplay Isaac's work or anyone elses. I can understand that it comes across like that with people that are under the assumption that Isaac wrote the whole thing bare handed. Most readers of this article already probably know better, but again, you are the exception not the rule.
Does that mean that Isaac is unimportant, or less important than us, or that he didn't do great things? No, of course not. It's also not what we're saying. It also doesn't make him or Joyent the enemy.
Too bad for us Ms. O'Dell (archive footage with my former boss Paul) decided to write an article to make us look bad. The storyline must have been sitting in her drawer for weeks, because if you look at what we actually announced last week it has barely anything to do with node at all. We announced funding, plus an mBaaS (mobile backend solution)! You'll have a hard time now finding any statements about our relationship to node on our website or in our press materials because it's all about mobile.
But if I must let me state this loud and clear: we're not trying to "steal" Node and/or the community (whatever it means to steal a community) and nothing's up for grabs.
On a final note, I don't really understand why everyone seems to hate Red Hat so much. Luckily it's also not that relevant. It's true that I personally have mentioned Red Hat (and even more so, Typesafe) as an example of how our business model might work, but we're not trying to somehow become Red Hat because Issac Roth's previous company was bought by them. In case you're wondering, we're also not starting a newspaper just because Ben used to work at NRC.
So what are we up to then?
- Focus on a popular use case for Node: building mobile backends.
- Make node better and continue making it better after 1.0 is released!
- Make it easier to develop, scale, debug, and monitor Node apps.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask me.
Bert (@piscisaureus)
(*) People who know me, and those who were there know who I am talking about.
I tried to keep my response to addressing specific quotes made by Roth in the article and not be a response to the tone and story the article presents. If the actual quotes in the article attributed to Roth are incorrect or taken out of context it would be great for someone at SL to say so.
I would never write something trying to refute or downplay yours and Ben's contributions, which are numerous. Nor would I write a similarly detailed response to the contribution graphs SL posts on a semi-regular basis. You and Ben should be proud of your contributions and the community should encourage you to make them known, especially if you feel you aren't being represented accurately.
I take no issue with and agree with everything you just said. It's just that, there is a mile between your statement here and the comments attributed to your CEO in that article.