StrongLoop & Express
I understand this won’t clear my name, and that’s not the intention of this post. I want to put the facts out on the table because people are pretending they know them.
I have chatted on and off with the guys at StrongLoop about improvements to Node for quite a while, and they approached with the idea of “sponsoring” Express, aka compensation for effectively owning the “brand”, not the source.
My intent was to share said compensation with Douglas since he has been the primary maintainer on Express lately. I signalled that intent by emailing him:
Hey man, StrongLoop wanted to “sponsor” (aka put branding on expressjs.com etc) and I figured why not haha, I trust them since they’re the only ones working on node core that actually care about making it user friendly, other than that I don’t think it’ll really mean anything, they plan on improving the site by adding more guides etc.
Anyway just wanted to send over some $$ since you’ve been hacking on it lots, do you have paypal?
I do trust the guys at StrongLoop and I think it’s obvious that the only way StrongLoop succeeds here is if they improve Express. If I didn’t think StrongLoop was a good fit I wouldn’t have been interested.
I know Douglas wants to stay out of things and I respect that so don’t bother him about it, but to get the facts out his response was:
Hey TJ,
Sponsoring seems fine to me. More guides and user-friendly stuff would of course be amazing.
If you really want to, I do have a PayPal account associated with this email account, though I’m not 100% interested in receiving money, so do not feel any obligation ☺
Did I consult every contributor that there has ever been on the project? No, maybe I should have? Ultimately I don’t see this as the huge problem that everyone else does, the two primary contributors benefit, the community benefits by having full-time employees improve a project, the company benefits from being closely associated with the project.
So those are the facts, I guess you’re entitled to think what you want, but writing articles about me being a “dick” without the facts is just as dickish.
