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.

I'm sure the intentions were good, but the presentation was terrible. Also, it was only one of many factors, but its a catchy line so I chose to call that one out.

Other include:

  * Far worse benefits package and no attempt/willingness to make us whole in that regard

  * About half the team was told they would no longer be eligible for raises because their salaries were above the top of their IBM pay band

  * Several people lost large amounts of 401k matching because they missed their partial vesting date for that year (some by a few weeks) because the transition was done as being fired and then hired again

  * Likewise we were not eligible to start contributing to the IBM 401k for some amount of time

  * The IP agreement was Draconian (and we aren't in a state with nice moonlighting laws)

  * They took away our office's coffee budget, which seems small and petty but it was a damned nice thing to have

  * Two of the worst performers were promoted to be engineering managers because they didn't know what else to do with them....

CEOs of these large companies really need to step up and take control of these groups who develop an unreasonable amount of risk aversion due to a long history of dealing with issues that have a great deal of gravity for them even though they're fairly minor for the organization overall.

There are some companies that get this right, but a general shift hasn't happened yet and there's probably quite a few CEOs that can't justify the political expense and fallout without the backing of a major culture shift in businesses at large. It might be years or even decades before that happens and it's going to be sad to see small agile companies fall to it in the meantime.

As to the actual purpose, I think it's a similar deal to feudalism. Whatever waffle kings and nobles said, looking back it was pretty clearly about self-aggrandizement, filling one's pockets, taking revenge upon one's enemies, et cetera, ad nauseam.

I guess this shouldn't be surprising; primates gonna prime.

This caused the most of the problems during our acquisition. I'm still with IBM but we had a few people leave over the "IBM owns everything you ever do" clause.

> They took away our office's coffee budget, which seems small and petty but it was a damned nice thing to have

We had company lunch each Friday that had to end with IBM. It's a small thing but it really changes the culture and moral.

IBM most likely spent (speculating here) several millions of dollars on the acquisition, and they can't afford to pay the devs? This is completely messed up.

None of these exist in the US (particularly when you work for someone like IBM). Employees who think otherwise are simply misunderstanding the law :)

"Any provision in an employment agreement which provides that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of his or her rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time without using the employer’s equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information..."

http://www.weblaws.org/california/codes/ca_lab_section_2870

You forgot the super-important part, which are literally the words after what you quoted, which say: " except for those inventions that either: (1) Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer’s business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer; or (2) Result from any work performed by the employee for the employer."

#1 covers pretty much everything tech related that tech related people do. For example, if you work for IBM, i doubt you can find anything not related to IBM's business, or the R&D of IBM. Becuase it's not what you think IBM's business is, it's what IBM think it's business is. It also doesn't matter whether it's a secret project you don't know about, or historical, or anything.

It makes no difference what you do for the company either. If I work as an IP lawyer for Google, and Google builds self-driving cars (among other things), any work i do on my own time related to self driving cars is Google's.

Note also "related to", not "exactly the same as". So if it's in the same area, field, etc, you are screwed.

But you don't have to take my word for it, look at court cases in CA, which find the same :)

Now, maybe if you work for a small, super-focused company, you may be okay.

But good luck if you work for any mid or large sized tech company, which often have so many projects, strategic initiatives, and research that it covers pretty much everything in the world.

To wit: In every case an employee has come to me saying "well, we don't do that, so why would you own it", it has been a case that the employee did not know there was a team doing it. I have never had a case of an employee coming to me and it turned out "yeah, you know what, we don't really do anything in that area"

Good luck trying to prove that against IBM's lawyers and patent portfolio.

This might be an example: https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26551.wss

Also - Hi Greg!

The most popular IBM software we used was SameTime for instance messaging and it was actually not bad at all.

Lotus Notes is actually quite good when used properly and in moderation, but it really does not set a positive tone culturally.

You could write a decent Lotus Domino app that served up web pages, so users wouldn't have to use the awful Lotus Notes client.

Amusingly, in I think Lotus Notes 8, they revitalised the GUI by replacing it with... Eclipse RCP. Hrmm.

I did witness some monstrosities, though...

painful flashback! or, I guess, "trigger" in the parlance of today.

I worked for a biotech software company some years ago that wasn't even bought by IBM but as part of becoming an "IBM Business Partner" agreed to use Lotus Notes to replace a bunch of existing stuff we were using for email/collaboration/etc.

Notes isn't even bad or anything but it was no better than the tools we were already using for the tasks we were using them for, and because it is (or was? haven't used it since) a big all-encompassing "enterprise" system it took like a half-year migration period to get everyone to the point where we could do the same sorts of things we could before, not really any better or worse, just different and incredibly disruptive during the transition.

(also, is this mkozlows from qt3? haven't posted there in a long time, used to use the handle Coca Cola Zero).

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).

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/apache/spark/graphs/contributors

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

There's an article here: http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/15/ibm-pours-researchers-and-r...

disclosure: I run partnerships for Docker.

Some of these augmentations have been contributed back to the main projects.

IBM has a lot of working engineers at Cloud Foundry HQ in San Francisco. Last I checked IBM-CFers were the whole CLI team and they're doing great.

The problem here is the audience is clearly the developer community (which I'm also a part of). Developer communities have a right be skeptical about key acquisitions of their open source dependancies. It can have massive commercial implications on software design decisions, etc.

Open source is built on trust. Dubious communication does nothing but erode that trust.

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.)

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.

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.

It is a race to pass the buck.

Actually, System z (mainframes) still accounts for a quarter of IBM's revenue and about half of its profits. [1] At least, that was the case in 2012. I suspect that hasn't changed much with IBM's recent announcement of the LinuxONE. In fact, IBM contributed significant effort get Node.js (and thereby V8) ported to s390x. [2]

[1]: http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/09/ibms-mainf... [2]: http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/09/ibms-mainf...

I'm sure we'll be hearing the same crap in a decade while said crap is posted via a service that imtegrates with a COBOL app on a mainframe. ;)

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD05xx/E...

Your quip reminded me of the above quote from Dijkstra!

"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."

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/ [1]: 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!

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.

The process to get a new blade installed in one of our chassis took 6 months.

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.

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).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_acquisition_by_Oracle

https://github.com/hapijs/hapi

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

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.

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).

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

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

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