What the IBM Acquisition of StrongLoop Means for the Node.js Community

https://strongloop.com/strongblog/node-js-community-ibm-acquisition/

by ijroth • 11 years ago

244 130 11 years ago

strongloop.com

kordless• 11 years ago

Congratulations Issac! Happy for you and the team.

ijroth2• 11 years ago

Woot thanks Kord. I'm excited for Node.

drderidder• 11 years ago

Hmm, that the acquisition would mean anything for node directly seems off. At least, the blog post seemed to indicate that this wasn't meant to be about IBM buying influence. I wasn't a customer and not particularly keen on the enterprise focus of strongloop but I thought you had a really good thing going with loopback. Not sure what to think of it now... I was in a startup that got acquired by a huge multinational and it was shocking how quickly we went from nimble to gridlock.

aikah• 11 years ago

Congrats , I know nothing about "modern" IBM but it seems like they are trying interesting things with Bluemix. Let's see what happens next.

frandroid• 11 years ago

JavaScript is eating the world, part XXIV.

rogerthis• 11 years ago

Once I worked in a project which IBM was also involved. And everything in IBM related to that project was slow, very slow.

astrodust• 11 years ago

It's a gigantic organization that makes hardware, software, and does consulting. Does one anecdotal story really characterize it?

ibmthrowaway271• 11 years ago

Exactly, it's why I held out on posting my single counter anecdotal story.

codingdave2• 11 years ago

It is not just one anecdotal story. I used to work for IBM, then have them as a client, then was a business partner, and have worked on their software for over 20 years.

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.

NDizzle• 11 years ago

Yep. Same here. IBM contract in one of our huge data centers. (This was for a large accounting firm.)

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

wslh• 11 years ago

Sorry for the joke but how many callbacks did they need to make this transaction?

robotnoises• 11 years ago

I promise it wasn't that many.

tothepixel• 11 years ago

async I saw what you did there.

dror• 11 years ago

Two: one to begin work, and one to commit.

meesles2• 11 years ago

This has some awesome implications for open source. If a huge company like IBM openly supports and dedicates resources to FOSS, I think we can expect these products to get way more attention and receive the full treatment of corporate testing and development which would really offset the ephemeral nature of projects like Node. Not saying the current foundation guys aren't doing a great job already, but IBM's expertise in software can only be a plus I think!

vezzy-fnord• 11 years ago

IBM have been a major Linux contributor since around 2000 (just as a more recent example), so they aren't exactly new to FOSS.

meesles2• 11 years ago

Never said so :)

vidarh• 11 years ago

IBM has been an open source supporter for a long time. Their first Linux kernel contributions came no later than '99 (when they started upstreaming changes to support Linux on their mainframes, available since 2000).

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

murukesh_s• 11 years ago

And Eclipse.. When it was open sourced, it was one of the largest project to be open sourced.

mkozlows2• 11 years ago

I realize this blog post is full of optimistic "nothing will change!" statements, but that doesn't seem super-IBM-like.

osullivj2• 11 years ago

I used to work with an old IBMer who used to say "it's no accident that IBM nearly collapsed at the same time as the Soviet Union did". Lou Gerstner famously rescued IBM from oblivion by turning it into a consultancy led company, and moving the focus away from mainframes. This is just a case of IBM snaffling up the latest cool thing so they can sell consulting services.

jsprogrammer• 11 years ago

What is the connection to the Soviet Union? Were they a large IBM customer?

prodmerc• 11 years ago

No, but the people who were afraid of them were :-)

lemevi• 11 years ago

Cold War funds for department of defense and other federal departments dried up.

osullivj2• 11 years ago

Both IBM and USSR were bloated, inefficient, slow moving, hierarchical, bureaucratic organisations. Gorbachev failed to save his org, despite heroic efforts. Gerstner did rescue IBM. Maybe if Gorby had saved the USSR Putin would still be working for the KGB in Berlin...

draw_down2• 11 years ago

Which is fine, people who build things need an exit after all.

throwawayaway3• 11 years ago

the Russian decision in the late sixties to develop as their next national computer series a bit-compatible copy of the IBM 360 —the greatest American victory in the cold war!—.

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

Your quip reminded me of the above quote from Dijkstra!

nickpsecurity3• 11 years ago

Despite my other comment, I do regularly post that one. Hilarious. Anyone that saw better architectures (eg Burroughs) knows that he's probably right that cloning 360 wasted a prime opportunity to kick IBM's ass with technically superior, state-funded product. There's a chance they'll make a come-back in near future, though.

aus_• 11 years ago

...moving the focus away from mainframes.

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...

nickpsecurity3• 11 years ago

It's too painful for people to check their facts before declaring mainframes dead or something IBM is leaving. As you said, they're incredibly profitable. Same thing happened with OpenVMS, which turned out much profit for HP despite little investment. Next they'll be telling us Group Bull, Unisys, and Fujitsu are similarly scraping by in the mainframe business. And NonStop and IBM i are on verge of cancellation. And blah blah blah.

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. ;)

johnward4• 11 years ago

Mainframes still bring in a lot of money. I actually think of IBM as being led by finance people.

mbesto3• 11 years ago

And it’s not just Node.js. Maybe you haven’t looked at what IBM is doing with open source lately. I was surprised when I dug in. For example, did you know they are leading contributors to:

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.

draw_down2• 11 years ago

What is it about these posts that bring out the HN contingent who think themselves firebrand skeptics? This is basically a marketing piece, what good is fact-checking it

robertfw• 11 years ago

A little more honest marketing would do the world some good. I'm all for having someone check and call out bs where it is found.

vog• 11 years ago

This is basically a marketing piece, what good is fact-checking it

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.)

mbesto3• 11 years ago

I've done a fair bit of PR writing myself so I'm happy to be skeptical and understand the line between marketing speak and reality.

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.

_delirium• 11 years ago

It looks like IBM's Spark-related work is planned to be here initially: https://github.com/SparkTC

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

kitd• 11 years ago

IBM are working on the runtimes for things like Node, Spark, Python, Docker, and augmenting them to perform well on IBM platforms and integrate with IBMs enterprise monitoring and diagnostic tools.

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

mbesto3• 11 years ago

That sounds great, but where is the source?

jacques_chester2• 11 years ago

On Cloud Foundry they are a major contributor; only Pivotal donates more engineering effort (disclaimer: I work for Pivotal Labs).

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.

nickstinemates• 11 years ago

Speaking just about Docker and not commenting on this post in particular: IBM employs at least 5 people who dedicate their time to working upstream. Duglin, as an example is #11 on the contribution graph in your list

disclosure: I run partnerships for Docker.

oneweekwonder• 11 years ago

Recently I got heavily into node-red[0] after playing with a ti sensortag[1], and I'm really amazed at what it can do, and that it is open source and actively used by IBM in bluemix.

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!

funkysquid2• 11 years ago

If you're trying to relieve fears, the first paragraph does not help.

"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."

gshx• 11 years ago

Seems like too much fluff - both the acquirer generating it and the acquisition itself. It would be helpful to see why/where one would use node.js when other platforms support many more workloads well than just pure I/O bound ones. In the "enterprise middleware", going native (C++) or managed (JVM/CLR) brings with it a much richer ecosystem alongwith a more robust runtime that can better support other workloads that entail for example cpu binding. It's hard to see a real need for node.js as it seems to not do anything significantly better than other platform options.

atorralb• 11 years ago

guess i will move to php

oluwie• 11 years ago

said no one EVER

OldSchoolJohnny• 11 years ago

IBM recently bought out Softlayer hosting and support went from great to glacially slow and all but uncaring in about 28 seconds.

nickpsecurity3• 11 years ago

Damnit! That's one of the companies I found searching for a physical version of cloud hosting. Looked promising. Now they're IBM. (sighs) Going to have to delete them from my bookmarks...

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.

rynop3• 11 years ago

former IBM dev here (6 years in different areas). I hope they let you work on an island and don't force you to use their tooling/approve listed of open source software.

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.

kodablah• 11 years ago

Current IBM dev here (but only speaking anecdotally for myself and my project), can confirm that when we were acquired they let our product and policies remain and did not "blue wash" the project. I would assume the same will occur for StrongLoop and their software practices will probably continue mostly unfettered.

granos3• 11 years ago

I hope it works out for StrongLoop. When a company I worked for was purchased by IBM, about 3/4 of the engineering staff left once we heard about "Work Life Integration (tm)". It's really hard to work inside Big Blue when you are used to the freedom provided by a small company.

mkozlows2• 11 years ago

Were you really left alone, though? As in, not even forced to use Lotus Notes? Because even that kind of small-bore enterprisation can destroy the culture of a small tech-focused company.

rynop3• 11 years ago

Curious - how long ago did they acquire you? Your software get rolled into an IBM product or is it self standing? They let you continue to use your productive tools (asana,github,slack etc)?

rilut• 11 years ago

Sorry, what is work on an island?

EncaitarUK2• 11 years ago

A euphemism for being left to do things the way you used to do things before you were bought.

geniium• 11 years ago

Dislike

mhd• 11 years ago

Well, at least it's not Oracle…

ramigb• 11 years ago

Just a question -might be dumb- is the merger of io.js and node.js which happened a couple of months ago related to this news in anyway? Anyways IMHO this good news and I hope it will make node.js much better, who knows maybe replace V8 with something even better.

cag_ii• 11 years ago

I can't imagine it wouldn't be. This kind of decisions aren't made very quickly. I'm more curious if the IO team was aware of this...

actualprogram• 11 years ago

HA! Hahahaha. hahaa.... wheeze

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).

Aldo_MX• 11 years ago

If IBM screws ExpressJS up (wishfully not), Hapi[1] is a good alternative.

https://github.com/hapijs/hapi

pluma3• 11 years ago

Considering the development history of Express mostly consisted of cutting down on features and streamlining the core, it should be easy to notice whether the acquisition has any effect.

cdnsteve• 11 years ago

If anything this is a strong validation of Node.js in the enterprise space. This is actually good news for anyone working within the enterprise trying to use a different technology set. It makes selling Node to a CTO a bit easier (even if you choose not to use StrongLoop).

rodgerd• 11 years ago

"Enterprise" is already using node.js This is IBM tryng to stay in touch with their customers.

tracker1• 11 years ago

As much as I fear this will drag StrongLoop, I feel that this is an excellent fit. StrongLoop has been focused on building "Enterprise" tools and module around node, as well as working on whitelisting/reviewing various modules... This is a good fit for IBM and their clients who are inclined to also want to have "approved" or "certified" modules to be able to use separately from the rest of npm.

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).

athenot• 11 years ago

This announcement fits along with Node.js 4.0's release containing a commitment to an 18-month roadmap in giving Node.js a greater maturity.

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).

emperornortonus2• 11 years ago

Anybody?

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

pluma3• 11 years ago

Despite both being big enterprise corporations, IBM is nothing like Oracle. Oracle is pretty much one huge ego trip swallowing everything like the Borg.

emperornortonus2• 11 years ago

You clearly have never dealt with the Professional Services & Consulting arm of IBM.

codingdave2• 11 years ago

It is hard to say what this means at this stage...

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.

curiousjorge• 11 years ago

so how much was it acquired for?

utuxia2• 11 years ago

3 souls and a rabbit.

amelius• 11 years ago

What node.js needs is a better way to manage packages. Right now, upgrading can fail with no way to roll back. Also, reproducibility is missing. E.g, it is not easy to download sources, and deploy those exact same sources on different machines.

tg3• 11 years ago

npm is now its own company, so I think there is hope that serious work is being done to fix those issues.

ijroth2• 11 years ago

Please check out slc build and slc deploy from StrongLoop which attempt to solve exactly this issue and are being used by major deployments.

ilurkedhere• 11 years ago

IBM Nodesphere.

potch• 11 years ago

I imagine it doesn't mean much beyond some more b2b uses of Node. Node has its own independent governance and nothing about this acquisition changes that.

jacques_chester2• 11 years ago

Making sure that Node.js is a first class citizen on Softlayer and BlueMix

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

mbubb• 11 years ago

From the customer side - I dealt with Netezza and Softlayer before and after IBM acquisition. In both cases an almost palpable drain in support and intelligence. I hate to say it like that as i know that there are brilliant folks in IBM (Watson, etc)

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.

beginpanic3• 11 years ago

I hear you on the support side. I used to work for a company that used a product that was bought by IBM. Before that, you could pick up the phone and talk to the lead developer. After, you opened a support ticket online and waited 24-48 hours for a response from someone in Costa Rica or India. Now I work at IBM with this same product, and even I as an employee who supports the product, even I have to go through the same Level 1 tech support crap.

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.

benjarrell• 11 years ago

I completely agree and add that I always find support saying, "Oh, I only support 'X', you need to call for support on 'Y'."

It is a race to pass the buck.

nnain• 11 years ago

What's a good book to learn about the new stuff? Async et al..

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

What the IBM Acquisition of StrongLoop Means for the Node.js Community

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