The "we/you can just fork it" argument really doesn't work out. And when it's used by maintainers to justify something, it's a total cop-out.
The fact is that forking it will fragment the community, confuse users, slow down adoption, and generally have negative effects for years and years. Even if everyone eventually moves to the fork (best-case scenario!), the ecosystem will have lost tremendous amounts of momentum.
Re:Node.js and the Road Ahead
by steveklabnik on Thursday January 16, 2014 @08:02PM
(#7073623)
> The "we/you can just fork it" argument really doesn't work out.
Worked pretty well for MySQL.
Re:Node.js and the Road Ahead
by beaumartinez on Thursday January 16, 2014 @09:08PM
(#7073862)
Not really, MariaDB has nowhere near the adoption levels MySQL has.
Even so, MySQL was one of the biggest gratis databases, and it happened to be bought by a company that specialized in selling established enterprise database software. There was concern RE the support a gratis database would have under such a company.
The situation that created MariaDB is very specific, and very different to the one Node.js is in.
Re:Node.js and the Road Ahead
by mattmanser on Friday January 17, 2014 @08:16AM
(#7075548)
LibreOffice then?
Re:Node.js and the Road Ahead
by alecthomas on Friday January 17, 2014 @10:57AM
(#7076400)
I think the XOrg fork from XFree86 is the best example I can think of.
Re:Node.js and the Road Ahead
by tjholowaychuk on Friday January 17, 2014 @08:15AM
(#7075545)
I bet if we forked it people would migrate no problem, as long as most the major contributors were involved. IMHO Joyent doesn't add much value, at least that I've seen, if anything they seem to want to keep it fragile so you have to use their tools to debug it properly.
Node is open-source, and if Joyent act like assholes, it'll be forked.