Node.js: The Documentary An origin story

Yesterday on the Honeypot channel came out hour-long documentary The history of Node.js.

The story begins in 2008 JavaScript was the technology for writing code on the front and executing it in the browser. But then there was the Google V8 engine and Ryan Dahl combined the idea of non-blocking services, JavaScript and running it in V8. That's how Node.js came about. It grew and developed under Ryan’s leadership, but at some point Joyent Inc decided to offer Ryan money and buy out the rights to trademark Node.js, as well as start running this open source project. Ryan agreed and successfully worked at Joyent until he got all the promised buns, and then he transferred the project to Isaac Schlueter, who once created npm, the package manager for Node.js. Then this story began to spin and led to a situation when the community of early contributors node.js decided to fork the project to develop it in parallel with Joyent. And how this story ended you will learn from the film itself:)

P.S. This is an interesting story about the dynamics of relationships within open source projects. It is often difficult to strike a balance between the desires of core contributors, the requests of the community, and the company from which the open source product came or which bought it early. As a result, with a careless development of events, it is easy to catch a split brain and get a bunch of individual forks instead of unity, which effectively leads to a drop in the popularity of the technology and the speed of innovation in mainline technology. (Because innovation is now piecemeal distributed among forks.).

#OpenSource #Management #Leadership #Engineering #Software