People in the Microsoft camp still have to adapt to the Open Source mentality.

If the maintainers of a project don't manage the project properly and other people think they can do a better job, Open Source gives you the right to fork. And this social contract is an incentive for the maintainers to do a good job in order to not lose control.

On the other hand the maintainers have no contractual obligation to keep supporting the project.

When maintainers stop supporting the project, the code is still there to be picked up if there's enough interest. That's powerful, but also distributes the responsibility to all interested parties.

If no new maintainers show up to fork the project, then maybe it's OK for the project to die.

sounds like any other piece of software except that with it being open, someone can fork it. Software dies sometimes. That's kind of life. But it is better for them to go this new track than to push out closed items that people legitimately stake their livelihoods on and then kill it off when something else comes along.

When Windows Phone 7 was the new thing, I went to one of the Microsoft dev camps for it. I vividly remember someone in the audience, standing in the walkway berating the guy on stage talking about Windows Phone 7 development because he had been focused on some Microsoft technology (Silverlight? WPF? I can't remember) and they had basically relegated it to the past by switching over to this new framework. At the time, I was kind of just mind blown, but in retrospect I can see his disappointment. If it were open source, either another entity could champion it or it would still go in the heap of bygone frameworks, but at least then it stood a chance.

And I'm fine with Microsoft playing around with something, open sourcing it, and then they decide there is something else out there they want to work with. Mostly in cases like this where it isn't a "product" they're attempting to market. Seems to be an okay process and perhaps someone can look at what they left in their wake to gain some kind of insight from it.

> How do you know if they are still using it internally? It could have wide adoption inside Microsoft.

> They built this to scratch an itch, then they opened the source, but that's still not enough?

I'm honestly not sure where this question is coming from. The issue I linked is on a port of Redis to Windows done back when Microsoft Open Technologies was temporarily spun out as a subsidiary, and is one of many there reflecting frustration at Microsoft's mismanagement of the project, especially lack of communication regarding long-term support. It serves as a recent example of how Microsoft drops a low-priority open source project.

Microsoft is building a strong track record with open source projects that they completely control, but less so when they don't. I believe this is relevant here because of Napa.js's tight coupling with Node.js.

The entire goal for the fork was to try to convince upstream (antirez) to eventually merge the needed changes for a better experience for Windows users. Just as any other distro doesn't want to long term maintain a fork and prefers to merge changes upstream as much as it possibly can. In the case of redis, the fork didn't entirely meet upstream needs/considerations and the Windows distro didn't have the resources to continue a long term fork.

Microsoft Open Technologies had some successes here too: off the top of my head NodeJS and Git both have gotten much better on Windows as a result of work that Microsoft Open Technologies started in forks and eventually got merged upstream. The NAPI work to support both V8 and ChakraCore continues at a reasonable pace precisely because there is upstream engagement, upstream merging, and NodeJS-ChakraCore is less of a full fork more like a distro-specific build flag.

Plus, the priority on things like Redis for Windows shifted with the Windows Subsystem for Linux; there was less need to get open source projects to treat Windows as a supported distro directly when Windows can piggy back off of Ubuntu (or SUSE or Fedora) distro work.

None of that solves lack of communication about the forks left on the vine, and it is a shame there isn't strong redis support on Windows, but everyone has priorities, including antirez, and even if those priorities aren't communicated fully, they seem to at least be somewhat transparent to this humble developer from the outside of either work.

I'd like to see something come out of their OpenSSH fork to support AD and PSRemoting/WinRM.

So what is your prediction on the long-term viability of Napa.js? Also, any feedback on the timeline would be appreciated, specifically how long to wait before evaluating the probability of long-term support from Microsoft.

In my mind, it will have to attract a strong enough community to survive without Microsoft's financial support which will probably shut down in a year or two. It's interesting because if it does hit critical mass that increases the likelihood that it will continue to be funded.

That's a good question. Ignoring past headaches you've had with Microsoft's support of open source, how do you evaluate any open source tool for use in production and/or for long-term viability?

In the NodeJS world, sometimes "long-term" means 9 months it feels like. In open source, sometimes "support" means "file a PR if you care so much about that bug" or "fork it yourself". Are you perhaps expecting a longer term or more support because it is Microsoft behind it?

It looks actively maintained right now, but its published semver is 0.x. There are a lot of 0.x libraries in active use in NodeJS, but it's still semver-obvious grain of salt from the maintainers to keep in mind when considering it for support.

The README tells us that it was directly built to support a production need in Bing today. That seems like as big of a vote of support confidence as you might get from an open source project that a team has vested interest in it.

On the other hand, Bing isn't inside Microsoft's developer division, so they have fewer vested interests in supporting outside developers long term. It's also possible that at some point in the future they get internally sold on a developer division or Windows division or Azure alternative that Microsoft has financial or marketing reasons to commercialize.

If I had a production need for something like Napa.js I don't see any particular red flags to avoid it, it looks like it should be easy enough to migrate to something else down the road if necessary, and would probably consider it.