Michael Rogers comments on the high-profile copyright lawsuit between Oracle and Google over Java APIs and its impact on alternative programming runtimes like Node.js.
Insight
Rogers: Unwelcoming popular open source projects fail to attract contributors
“The issue is that the competition for people's attention is really high, and so unless you're a nice place to come and contribute, people don't care. A lot of established contributors that are used to just people showing up because they're a popular project, T…”
Assertion Supported
Rogers: Node.js expanded core committers from 7 to 90 in 18 months
“And so, I mean, at the point that we, you know, that we had this disagreement, we were down to, you know, maybe a high of seven committers. Today, about a year and a half later, we have 90 committers.”
Assertion Supported
Rogers: 95% of Node.js core commits land without governance body approval
“95% of the commits that we get into core do just land without ever having to go to the CTC, which is the governance body.”
Insight
Rogers: Forking projects is too costly to replace healthy community governance
“Just the practical reality of forking a project is such a huge overhaul, and you don't necessarily have the right people to do it at any particular time. And what you actually want are the healthy communities that have healthy practices.”
Opinion
Rogers: Eric S. Raymond's open source developer incentive model is outdated
“Yeah, yeah, so, so the cathedral and the bazaar is, is a very, very old Ericus Raymond essay on, like, basically describing open source, especially early open source, and at one point he does get into, like, the incentives that people have, and the incentives …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Rogers: IPFS could eventually replace HTTP for web applications
“It's basically a way to in a distributed fashion, store files and serve them out, and eventually, potentially even kind of replace HTTP as a transport for web-like applications.”