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.
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.
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).
> 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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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]
> 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!—.
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."
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.
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?
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.
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).
Despite both being big enterprise corporations, IBM is nothing like Oracle. Oracle is pretty much one huge ego trip swallowing everything like the Borg.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] rynop|10 years ago|reply
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|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rilut|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tracker1|10 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] mbesto|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] _delirium|10 years ago|reply
There's an article here: http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/15/ibm-pours-researchers-and-r...
[+] [-] nickstinemates|10 years ago|reply
disclosure: I run partnerships for Docker.
[+] [-] kitd|10 years ago|reply
Some of these augmentations have been contributed back to the main projects.
[+] [-] jacques_chester|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] draw_down|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbubb|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] beginpanic|10 years ago|reply
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|10 years ago|reply
It is a race to pass the buck.
[+] [-] osullivj|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aus_|10 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] throwawayaway|10 years ago|reply
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD05xx/E...
Your quip reminded me of the above quote from Dijkstra!
[+] [-] draw_down|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsprogrammer|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnward|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] funkysquid|10 years ago|reply
"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|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oneweekwonder|10 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] OldSchoolJohnny|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickpsecurity|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rogerthis|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NDizzle|10 years ago|reply
The process to get a new blade installed in one of our chassis took 6 months.
[+] [-] astrodust|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] aikah|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] athenot|10 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] emperornortonus|10 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_acquisition_by_Oracle
[+] [-] pluma|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cdnsteve|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rodgerd|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkozlows|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kordless|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ijroth|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aldo_MX|10 years ago|reply
https://github.com/hapijs/hapi
[+] [-] pluma|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacques_chester|10 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] codingdave|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ramigb|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cag_ii|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ijroth|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tg3|10 years ago|reply