GoDaddy, Groupon, Digital Ocean, Sauce Labs, npm, Famo.us, StrongLoop, and others join the Node.js Foundation

Jun 17, 2015 07:53 GMT  ·  By

Announced last February at the Node.js Summit conference, the Node.js Foundation has slowly but surely materialized from a simple promise on Joyent's part to a real-life legal entity that's ready to take the reins of all Node.js management and development operations.

Since February, the foundation went through a series of legal steps so it can be duly administered as an entity of its own, but Joyent has also lobbied it to the community and various companies, requesting their help in setting the proper management structure in place so future io.js-like incidents won't ever happen again.

The Node.js Foundation was in the works even before the io.js fork

If you're not familiar with the infamous "io.js fork," the events started in the Autumn of 2014, when community members became dissatisfied with Joyent's slowness in patching and updating the Node.js core.

This led to an official Node.js fork in January 2015, a project named io.js, that quickly reached stable 1.x and 2.x versions after a few furious bug fixing and feature adding sessions.

According to a blog post by Scott Hammond, Joyent's CEO, establishing a Node.js Foundation was in the works long before the io.js fork, which actually caught the company by surprise.

Nevertheless, a few weeks later, Joyent went on with its original plans and announced the Node.js Foundation at the Node.js Summit, where it also revealed it would initially work from under the Linux Foundation's tutelage.

New members arrive on the Node.js Foundation

The foundation was immediately greeted with praises from both the community and the large enterprises that deployed Node.js in their infrastructure, and soon after companies like Microsoft, IBM, PayPal, SAP, Apigeen, and Fidelity signed up as members.

Because of the Linux Foundation's backing, the io.js board also felt at ease with the direction Node.js was going, and in May 2015 also announced it would be joining the Node.js Foundation as well, planning to merge the io.js core with the Node.js source as soon as possible.

Yesterday was the first ever official announcement from the Node.js Foundation, announcement which also delivered some news about its future plans.

First off, the Foundation announced new members, which makes its current membership as follows: - Platinum members: Famous, IBM, Intel, Joyent, Microsoft and PayPal - Gold members: GoDaddy, NodeSource, and Progress Software - Silver members: Codefresh, DigitalOcean, Fidelity, Groupon, nearForm, npm, Sauce Labs, SAP, StrongLoop, and YLD!

Secondly, details about its open governance structure have also been revealed, the Node.js Foundation working as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project.

This means the Node.js Foundation will be independently funded, but will be overseen by members of the Linux Foundations until they deem it stable enough to manage their own affairs.

The Node.js Foundation will also be led by a Board of Directors which will handle business-related decisions, and by a Technical Steering Committee, comprised of the Node.js and io.js Technical Committees, in charge of the project's technical governance.  

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