The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - The Future of Node.js (Interview)

Episode Date: May 16, 2015

Scott Hammond, the CEO of Joyent, joined the show to talk about the history of Node, Joyent's interest in Node, how they've handled the stewardship of Node over the years, their support of io.js joining Node Foundation, the convergence of the code bases for a stronger more inclusive Node community. At the tail end of the show, just when you think it's over, keep listening because we got Scott back on the call to discuss the news that came this week of the io.js TC voting to join Node Foundation.

Welcome back everyone. This is the changelog and I'm your host Adam Stachowiak. This is episode 155 and on today's show I'm joined by Scott Hammond, the CEO of Joint, to talk about the future of Node.js. We talked about everything, the past, the present, the future, Node.js, IO.js, Node Foundation, the convergence, lots of history, lots of things going on there. We even had to come back and record more because the original part of this was recorded before IO announced this week, the IOTC announced joining Node Foundation. So we had to come back and record even more to cover that piece as well and great show today so just when you think the show's over stick around for an extra 10 or 15 minutes for even more with me and Scott talking about the

recent news of IO joining Node Foundation we have three awesome sponsors CodeShip, Tatao, and DigitalOcean our first sponsor is CodeShip. CodeShip, Tattow, and DigitalOcean. Our first sponsor is CodeShip. CodeShip is a hosted continuous delivery service focusing on speed, security, and customizability. You can set up continuous integration in a matter of seconds and automatically deploy your

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Hey everyone, Adam here with Scott Hammond, the CEO of Joyent. For those who know, Joyent has been the steward of Node.js for quite some time now. So we're talking to Scott today about the future of Node. Scott, welcome to the show. Thanks, Adam. It's great to be here. Well, Scott, when you're in front of an audience like you are today, just so you know, our audience is very nerd to the core, as my co-host Jared says. Very hacker. They're the people who are forking, committing, contributing, leading in many ways the technology itself and highly influencing the applications inside of companies that get built with Node.js and technologies like it. So when you're in front of that kind of audience, how do you introduce yourself? Great question.

So my sense of open source, I've been at Joint for just a little under a year now, and open source is the right model to go develop software now. So it's a great model for tapping into the energy and passion that people have to go get involved with projects and contribute new ideas and vet things in the public. And so I would maybe introduce myself as a huge advocate of the open source model, although I've only been at Joint now for probably nine or ten months. One of the first things that I did was work with the team and work with our board to take our entire software portfolio and open source it. So although most people in the open source community probably know

Joyent for our role and our relationship with Node over the last five years, we are all in on open source and really see that as the model for developing software going forward. Yeah, I know that I've heard that you're all in. So in what ways is doing it all in on open source? I mean, beyond the efforts and stewardship you've done of Node over the last five years, in what other ways are you breaking into open source? So we have the other part of our business. I'm not sure how familiar you are with the history of Node and

Joyent, but we started using Node. We met Ryan Dahl probably five years ago. People in Joyent started working with Ryan, loved the Node project. And at that time, we were looking for a new technology platform to build out our next generation cloud management platform. And we looked at a lot of different technologies, and Node was one that we just kept coming back to and really fell in love with and loved what Ryan was doing with it. And it turned out to be the perfect platform for us, the perfect technology for us to go write our next generation cloud management platform in.

So if you go to the joint public cloud, it's a infrastructure as a service public cloud platform. It's rolled out in data centers all around the world. That's all, everything you see there is written in Node. We also built a big data store, an object management store called Manta. That is a converged compute and storage solution that allows you to spin up your compute jobs in containers right on your object store, so you don't have to move your data all around. And that's written in Node as well. So those two platforms were proprietary software. You could use them, sort of pay by the drink, up in our public cloud. But we also took those and distributed those on memory sticks so people could deploy them on-prem.

So you could deploy a private cloud or you could deploy an object store on-prem into proprietary products, one called Smart Data Center, one called Manta. And in November, I think it was November 4th, we open sourced both of those products and all the related tools that go with them. So you can now go to GitHub and download those products and roll them up. And if you follow along those on Twitter, you'll see that a lot of people have done so. So we don't have anything that's closed source anymore. Everything that we do in the market today is open source.

So being all into open source now, the new efforts that you mentioned with your public cloud, is that because of the wins and strides of your Node stewardship and what's happened with the Node community over the years of this past year? Is it because of that progress that's sort of led you into believing that open source is the way? Certainly Node was a great example, but I think Node is one example of many of how most software now, most system software now, is being built in an open source model. You look at all layers of the stack, whether it's the database layer, you look at the OS layer, you look at the PaaS layer, all of that is now being written and delivered in an open source model.

And it's great to see a couple of forces come together to support that model. One is certainly the open source community. You get to tap into a broad set of individuals who share your passion on a specific topic area, and you can collaborate together, and they can contribute to the project in a lot of ways. They can contribute code. They can contribute ideas, contribute use cases, contribute with evangelism. There's a lot that can be done, and open source is a great development model that allows you to engage with a very energized community to help move the project forward. So that's one vector on sort of developing software. The other is from the consumer perspective or the user perspective.

A lot of people who are consuming technology are looking for an open source way. You have certainly some people in the market up into organizations that will always want to find a way to expend all energy to consume software in a free model. And they'll never pay for anything, but they will use the software they want to use it and they want to then contribute back. And then you have other organizations that will pay any amount of money to save time. And those organizations tend to buy enterprise licenses. They buy a lot of tooling around, services around. So you have two different markets there.

But both of them benefit from an open source model where it's much easier for them to consume technology and consume software. And then in most cases, they're not only consuming, but they're contributing back. So you see a big push on the side of developing the software by sort of energizing that community. And then you see a lot of pull from the consumer side, the customers and users who want an open source model. They either want a free version that they can then bring in and add on to, or they want an enterprise version that they can bring in and in a sort of free version evaluate. And then when they start to deploy, they want to buy the tooling and buy the enterprise grade functionality or enterprise level functionality that comes along with a set of other

tools and capabilities around it. So big push on both sides. Yeah, it's definitely, I mean, on the commercial side, you have a lot of ways where companies can start to take part and be a part of the community and support the community, not only financially, but also with paying developers to be a part of it. I know that both Isaac Schluter and Ryan Dahl, big contributors to Node, and obviously the evolution to NPM with where Isaac's at now,

that's all been because of companies like yours supporting those developers to be a part of it over those years. And you take that and you multiply it across other companies that have influences into Node and other ecosystems as well. This isn't a new thing, but it's definitely a trend across open source. You know, one thing, one reason why I wanted to have this call with you is that the title that I'm, at least the working title, and you tell me if you think this is a good title for it or not for this show, is I wanted to talk to you about the future of Node.js. So I thought it'd be good to call it the future of Node.js with Scott Hammond,

sort of break down what the history of Node has been, where your placement, you personally, as well as Joyent has been into Node's history, what your involvement has been over these years, how it's shifting and changing, where you see it's going. And I really hope to sort of pull out of this conversation a perspective for the community who cares about Node and then subsequently IOJS because of the fork most recently.

I hope to sort of get a snapshot of Joanne's perspective and your feelings about where Node is going and your participation in making that happen and letting go in areas where you need to and supporting other areas. Do you think that's fair to say that's what this conversation should be about? Yeah, I think that's great. And the timing is perfect. This is a big transition period for Node and a lot of questions out there. But we have some pretty good answers that we're forming with the help of the community and a lot of help from the community around the direction, the future of Node. So the topic is perfect.

So what do you know then about the history, and only just to mention it, not so much to go deep into it, but the history of how Ryan and how things got started with Node and then Duyant's support of that and then ultimate stewardship of that and then even some of the copyright parts of that. What do you know about Julian's history in Node's history? You know, I know a decent amount, but I wasn't here firsthand. So I have secondhand reports in a fair amount of detail. But as I said, about five years ago, we started working with Ryan and believed in Ryan and believed in his vision around Node

and loved what he was doing around this real low latency platform. So when we started using it and building out our products internally using Node, we decided that we really wanted to sponsor Ryan and sponsor his vision. So we hired Ryan and we provided a lot of funding, a lot of resources, a lot of additional headcount and resources to invest in him and his vision on where he wanted to take Node. And that really began the chapter of Joyent as the steward of the project and really let him go drive the direction of Node and provide support and resources and technology to help him go drive that.

Do you think it's safe to say or fair to say on your part what you know with the history? Do you think Node would be where it's at today without that event, without joint support? You know, it's hard to say because I wasn't here, but I would say there was a good intersection there that we bought in. We believed, we bought in, and we believed in Ryan's vision. And I think our sponsorship and the funding and resourcing that we provided really was a good assist for Ryan. You know, if we weren't here, maybe he would have, the project was great, so maybe he would have found another organization to provide the resources that we provided. That could be hard to tell, but certainly I know that we did play a big role in helping him get established

and helping the project get built out and really get liftoff. So I'd like to say we played a very positive part in that. We feel really good about our contribution there in support of Ryan and getting that project going. So you took the CEO role while you were, I guess you didn't take it. You were invited to take it, right? And then you said, yeah, I'll take it. Sure, why not? At Joyent.

So last year, June 2014, almost a year ago, just shy of a year, you took over the CEO role at Joyent. At what point were you exposed to Node? At what point were you exposed to what Node meant to Joyent? And then at what point were you thinking about the stewardship, the direction? And at what point did you sort of deal with, I guess, the – let's start there. We'll kind of cover some other things after that. Well, I'd say before I came to Joyent, I was well aware of the popularity and the success of Node in the user base. The organizations and individuals who are using Node love it, and they love to talk about it, and they're having huge success. So I was well aware of that. What I was not quite aware of was some of the challenges that Node was facing and sort of had been facing for really ever since Ryan moved off the project.

So I had a pretty fast ramp on once I got to Joint and really dove in to see what was going on. Some would say, well, I don't know if it would be some, I think it would be pretty much a majority, but Ryan stepping away was mainly because of burnout. And that happens a lot. We've talked about burnout as you go back and listen to the history of this show and maybe pick some.

Capistrano reminds me of some burnout. We talked about that. I think it was Lee Hambly was on that show there. But now with Node being more popular, it's spread across more people. It's sort of taken this new life, so it's less likely for people to be burnt out. But I have conversations with Michael Rogers or others in the community. I can just see them. I can feel their pain with how much effort they're putting in towards the fork of Node, which is IOJS, and then ultimately the reconciliation, this Node Foundation. So I want to get into some of that here in a bit. You came on board in June.

At what point did IO forkO. fork Node and become? That was about nine months ago, right? No. No, I.O. Fedor forked right at Thanksgiving time, so end of November. Okay, so we're. About six months ago. Yeah, okay, you got six months ago. So that was, was that a surprise to you?

I think it was a surprise to everybody. So yeah. Why do you think it was a surprise? So when I, when I, when I first came to join it and first started to get steeped in into what was going on with node, I spent a lot of time talking to everybody I could in the community, big customers, small customers, the Node-specific vendors, developers,

people who were starting to push this agenda around a Node-forward organization, which were some early discussions around a different governance model for Node. I really spent some time with them and said, all right, there is some strife in the community. I think the best thing to do is let's get everybody together. Let's get a group of people together who can broadly represent the different constituents, the users, the developers, the vendors, other contributors, other open source people. And so I started the Node Advisory Board and got that group together. And we've been meeting

once a week or every other week ever since probably the middle of October. And it seemed like like at the time, everybody was very much opposed to a fork, that they were concerned that a fork would create a lot of disruption in the market. It would create a lot of risk in the eyes of the users. It would fracture the community, that there would really not be any good come from it. So that seemed to be a fairly unanimous opinion. So when the fork did happen, I think everybody seemed to be surprised. And we had an advisory board meeting right after that. And everybody certainly was surprised. So it seemed at that time that we were on a path to work through a whole set of items together that were going to really understand where the issues were and then go address them, go make the right changes.

As I said, I came in fairly late in the Node game after Node has been out for about five years. So I had a set of fresh eyes to bring to the problem, to bring to the situation. I wasn't encumbered by any of the maybe emotional issues of the past or relationships or actions or anything in the past. So I felt like I could be pretty objective. And it was clear to me that I wanted to get a group of people together that broadly represented the community and work with them to go drive a bunch of changes. And it seemed like we're on that path. We work through governance issues, we work through community issues, we work through IP issues, and we come up with some really good recommendations

on that. So it looked like we're headed down the right path that ultimately has led to a foundation, but it seemed like we're on a good path to all work together to go do that. So when Fedora hit the fork button and then IO went off, that was a surprise to me. It was a surprise to everybody, I think. So Fedora hit the fork button back in December. And from the community's perspective, there's two sides of this. You got, as you mentioned earlier, the vested interest, the interests of open source and how these communities prop up and technologies move forward is that you've got company interests. You've got the, you know, sort of the bare metal level interest, which is the developers moving things along. And some of those developers are sponsored by companies, though they are the developers' interest putting them into place. When you see Fedora hit that fork button and I.O. get a lot of –

I would say right away the biggest thing they started to do was to organize the community and actually submit some releases to move things forward. They adopted the next release of V8 pretty quickly, and various things started to happen. And the reason why they had done that was mainly because of stagnation. And with Node being stewarded by Joyent, how was Joyiant leading Node? Was Node being led by Joiant or was Node being led by the community whenever that fork button was pushed? So when Ryan started the project, it was run, he ran it as a typical BDFL model.

And then when he turned over the reins to Isaac Schluter, Isaac continued to run that in a BDFL model. And then he left, went over to NPM, and then TJ took over as the BD. TJ is, so I say, while Joint has been running it, it was a fairly typical BDFL model. TJ really started to relax the constraints around that last summer and started to really make sure he had buy-in from people of what people wanted to do, what the different contributors wanted to do. But I think at that point, most of the people in the community had determined that it was going to be a BDFL model forever. And I know that was some of the frustrations of some of the developers who were trying to get changes in and didn't feel like they were getting them in as fast as they wanted to get in and didn't feel like they really had a strong enough voice in the direction of the project.

So, yeah, I think that's how the project was run. That was one of the things that we started to address immediately with the advisory board. I'd say that was the biggest issue that was on the table was how to open up the governance model and the organization model to make it easier to bring more collaborators into the project and to migrate away from a BDFL model and migrate into more of a consensus-driven model. And there was a working group in the advisory board that spent a bunch of time hashing through that and came up with some really good recommendations. And we've started to adopt those recommendations.

That model, that's what IO has gone on to start with and then iterate on. And then ultimately, I think if your audience has been following along with what's going on on GitHub with the foundation, we've had a lot of discussions and iterated around the governance model and the dev policies that we're going to deploy and we're going to use in the foundation. And that's all based on that same thread. So we came up with some good ideas in the advisory board. Then the IO guys, the IO team iterated on them. And now that became the initial basis for what the foundation is going to use. So

that's been a big push to allow a broader contribution and broader input from the community around the direction of the project so it truly is community-driven. That's probably a good place to take a break real quick. We'll take a break, listen to a sponsor, and then when we come back, we'll talk a bit about the deeper parts of Node Foundation and what's happening there as it becomes potential reconciliation with IO joining that. I know there's an invitation out there, so let's break real quick.

When we come back, we'll talk about that. You've heard me talk about TopTile several times in this podcast, and TopTile is by far the best place to work as a freelance software developer. Well, they have this term elite engineer, and that defines the kind of software developer that works at TopTile.

I had a chance to sit down and talk to Brendan Benesha, the co-founder and that works at TopTile. I had a chance to sit down and talk to Brendan Beneshot, the co-founder and COO of TopTile. And I asked him, Brendan, what is an elite engineer? Take a listen. An elite engineer for us is somebody who satisfies all the technical requirements that you would need in a great developer if you're working at like a Google or Facebook. But then at TopTile, you have to add this extra layer on top of it to make sure that people are mature enough and professional enough to be totally self-directed. And so making sure that they take a tremendous amount of pride in their work and that they're accountable and very, very communicative because in remote

freelancing, that's sometimes just as important as being technically competent. All right. If Brendan got you excited about being an elite engineer at TopTile, head to TopTile.com slash developers. That's T-O-P-T-A-L.com slash developers to learn more and tell them the cheese load sent you. All right, Scott, we're back. So Node Foundation, whose idea was the foundation?

So I started talking to the Linux Foundation last summer. Jim Zemlin reached out to me and we sat down and started talking about what a foundation would look like. I met with the IBM team last summer. I met with some folks from PayPal last summer. to me and we sat down and started talking about what a foundation would look like. I met with the IBM team last summer. I met with some folks from PayPal last summer and all of them started really advocating that we consider a foundation. So I spent some time starting to work with Jim Zemlin to come up to speed with it to see what it would look like, to understand the impact on the project. And I spent a lot of time working through the fall. It was probably last December where I felt comfortable enough with it that I recommended it to our board of directors

and then started working with the advisory board on a path to go get that set up. But we looked at a couple different options. It wasn't always a foundation. You know, foundation can be good. It can be bad as well. I wanted to make sure, I personally had some reservations that I had to get over. To me, it was very important that we wind up in a place where it's not a pay-to-play model where the technical direction of the project is truly driven by the people who are using the project and the people who are contributing to and developing your code on the project. So I want to make sure that the project direction was being driven by the technical direction and the market direction,

not by a vendor direction or people who are the sponsors. So I want to make sure that we could set a model up like that. Some foundations have managed to adhere well to that and others haven't, so I had to make sure that there was a way for us to do that. I also want to make sure that there's a model in place where we could make sure there was not only strong technical independence, but we're really having a function that is very close to the market and what the users want to have. So not only technical input, but market input to this. Most software organizations, you have product managers who sort of play that role. They understand the use cases and the pain points and the market opportunities, and they provide a lot of input and guidance around where the product should go. They work very closely with the engineering team, who's obviously bringing technical

innovation to play, and that tends to be a good partnership. So I want to make sure that we have those functions in place in the foundation. I think that's the only way to drive a healthy project. If you look at OpenStack, OpenStack has been very successful getting vendor support. There's a lot of contributions around it. But they have really struggled with having a vision and a product management vision around it. I think there have been some blogs. Randy Bias has put some blogs out around that. They've really struggled with how to make sure they get that singular vision to drive the project forward.

So that's very important to me, and I'm sure everybody else who's really engaged with the project. So it sounds like Joanne's efforts will be to continue to be at the forefront of what Node is. Is it at all a desire to step back as the core steward or the you know the stewardship of node is that part of any plan as you move into a foundation effort is it something where you know joint will still play a part and still play a role of course but it you're sort of like handing it off to the foundation and and playing a part in the foundation rather than uh being the core steward as you have been over these last years? Because Joanne's name has pretty much been synonymous with Node and it's because of the stewardship that you've done.

Is that a plan to step back from that as part of this? Yeah, no, great question. So we love Node. And when a project is early, like Node has been over the last few years, it's important to have maybe a tighter reign around the project direction and where it's going and how it's going. It's been very important for us as well to make sure that we have stable releases. Because we're a little different than most open source companies with respect to Node.

We're not the Node company, to say. We don't sell an enterprise version of Node. We don't build a bunch of tooling around Node that we go sell around Node. We don't have the typical business model that other open source companies do who tend to be the stewards of projects. We do provide support services to companies who also have adopted Node, but we're not in the business of building this tooling or selling enterprise versions of Node. So we have a little bit of a different perspective or a different role.

So Node is important to us and will continue to be important to us because our products are based on Node. Our public cloud, our object store, that's all based on Node. So it has to be highly performant. It has to be production grade. It has to be low latency. It has to be highly scalable. So that's very important to us. And in the early days of the project, you know, with those constraints or those objectives, it was very important for us to maintain sort of tighter control around that so we

could ensure that we could run our business on it. But really, that was it. And now I think with the success of Node, it has transcended, you know, any individual. Certainly when Ryan moved off the project, that was proven. It's transcended any individual and it's clearly transcended, individual. Certainly when Ryan moved off the project, that was proven. It's transcended any individual, and it's clearly transcended any individual organization or company as well. So it's really time for the next stage of maturity around the project. And one of the things that was very obvious to me is there is a very energized community around Node. The customers, the users of Node, the developers, the contributors around Node, the vendors of Node, they're very engaged. They feel a very strong sense of ownership, and they want to contribute. They want to be engaged. They want to have a say.

They want to contribute value back to the project. And so I think this is a really good time in the project's life cycle to now help the project move to another stage of maturity. And let's bring in, let's sort of loosen the reins, if you will, and let the project be really driven by the community and open it up to collaboration and contribution by a much broader set of people in the industry. Let's make it more community-driven where we can have a good balance of great innovation and high-quality, stable releases. And the foundation is the best way to go do that. The state of the foundation, is it in place now or is it still in formation?

So the, great question. So the foundation is in the formation stages. We announced at Node Summit that we were forming a foundation and that we were going to work with the Linux Foundation to help us go do that. You can either roll your own foundation, you can join an existing one,

or in this case, the Linux Foundation, they have a foundation as a service where they know how to run these community-driven projects and they know how to work with the community, they know how to run the infrastructure and provide financial management and legal advice and organizational structures and documents. So they have a lot of expertise and a lot of, you know, great track record with what they've done with all their projects. So we're working with them. And so a group of organizations stood up and said, yeah, let's go move this to a

foundation. We're in support of it. Let's go do it. So that was in probably February when Node Summit and what we announced was it would take several months to go stand the foundation up. And in terms of the legal work, getting the bylaws together, getting the membership agreements together, getting the IP policies in place, and then set up the organizational structure. So you have a board of directors that works on the business and legal issues. And then you have a technical steering committee that drives the technical direction of the project. And we've spent a lot of time, and I can send you the links if you want to post them on your site, to the GitHub discussions on GitHub, where we have iterated through the dev policies, the governance model,

and it's not just us, but it's members from the Node community, members from the I.O. community, people who sit in both communities, vendors, your customers, your users who've contributed a lot of thinking to this. So it's sort of formalizing that, documenting it, getting input and direction from the community on how that's going to be run. And so we've been moving down that path. And so all those documents are up for public comment and feedback. And the goal would be to officially publicly announce that the foundation is up and running probably the last week of May or first week of June, I think, is the current time frame. And then we'll hold the first board meeting by the end of June and get everything sort of ratified and the different positions voted on and in place. You have to go through a period to get that sort of stood up as well. So that's the status, and there's been a lot of work by a lot of people to get all those threads and all those tracks pulled together.

You mentioned IO in that mention there, and we've talked about it a bit during the call so far, but I'm curious to know what your thoughts are on not just the fork itself, but both the good and what you might think the bad might be that came from essentially fracturing the community, forking it. There's a lot of good that came from it. I'm curious to know what you think the good has been and what potentially you think the bad has been from this IO fork

and how it's sort of forced Node to change. So, yeah, I think there's both, as you say. So the good is that group of people have done a really phenomenal job of iterating on and running a model, a governance model and a contribution model that has been pretty innovative and allowed for a lot of new innovation, a lot of new contributions, a lot of new collaborators to come into the project. So they've done a phenomenal job of engaging the community

and driving some pretty interesting innovation. And we'll learn from that. And I think if you dive into the dev policies and the governance model that we're going to use in the foundation, we're taking lessons directly from that. And I think if you dive into the dev policies and the governance model that we're going to use in the foundation, we're taking lessons directly from that. So we want to bring that community engagement and the community interaction and leadership positions into the project and the foundation. So there's a lot of great stuff done there. On the bad side, I think the feedback that I get from a lot of organizations, and I've actually got a blog

coming out on this over the next few days, if you look at the enterprise market, and a lot of people, a lot of different market segments use Node. You see it in IoT. You see it in the robot space. You see it in small organizations. You see it in large enterprises. And the enterprise users have been pretty vocal in that they want a foundation because they want to de-risk the project. Right. foundation because they want to de-risk the project. And if you're, I was just talking to

one of the big node user yesterday, I said, you know, one of the issues here is if you personally are betting your career on a technology that you're bringing into your organization to roll out a whole bunch of applications on and potentially be the next platform for your new applications, you want to de-risk that. You want to make sure that it's de-risked from the imperatives or goals or financial model of any individual company. So they don't want to be tied specifically to Joyent. They also want to make sure that there's no risk around the project itself. They want to make sure that any strife is gone. They don't like to see infighting. They don't see bickering. They don't like to see dilution of

technical resources. This whole fork has been a big boon in it then, huh? I mean, this fork of Iowa has been basically like, oh, we got got to stop this from all sorts of angles. It's been frustrating. And they were very – the users were very vocal before the fork through the advisory board meeting saying, yeah, don't fork. Please. We just make – find a way to sort of unite the community and get the community more engaged. But a fork would be terrible. And so there's been a lot of – so I'd say that's the fallout,

is that it injects a lot of risk into the project. And if you are in the enterprise segment of the Node community, that's problematic. And what it does from the project's perspective is it makes the project itself risky, and that opens the door for other projects to come in and take its place. Who knows what the next cool server-side JavaScript platform is that somebody's working on right now that could come to bear. When you saw Oracle, Sun buying MySQL,

then Oracle buying them, and that created a lot of, you know, angst in the community. And then you had MarioDB fork and go out, you know, that was supposed to be, you know, the savior. But in reality, it just created a lot of angst in the market, and then Postgres came out. So, you know, I think, you know, we need, as looking broadly across all the communities we're in to Node, we need to be very cognizant of that and find a way to work together and have an energized project that is de-risked for, if we care about the enterprise market, which I think most people do, then we've got to find a way to de-risk it for them and find a way to

innovate and deliver quality, stable production code and engage the community so that they're really driving the project. That's what my hope is and my goal is in the foundation. Answering the good side was that there's a lot of innovation, a lot of progress, a lot of adoption, a lot of bringing the community in and sort of bolstering the progress of the project and organizing their tech to the committees and different things to sort of bring the community better in stewardship, to use that word, because that's where Duane

has sort of been sitting for it. And that's why the fork happened was sort of to take the stewardship back from you to sort of give it back to the community and better drive it with new releases and things. And then the bad has been this confusion that's put in the marketplace of Node, the Node marketplace, and I guess the fear that some companies might have. Is that fair to sort of summarize what you just said there? Yeah, sure.

So just yesterday, kind of coming into some currents, we talked about Node Foundation, where that's at. It's still in progress. It's not quite there yet. It's probably in the final stages of it, considering the governance, working groups, development, and convergence policies being ready now. Just yesterday, Michael Rogers, who was recently on the show, episode 139, and this was back in January 30th, and that show was titled The Rise of IOJS.

Just to put a note on there. So he said IO is, you know, in a recent article, he just said IO is growing up and it needs a foundation. He didn't say it needs node foundation. So I'm curious to get some thoughts on your side about that. But some other things he mentioned in this article that he posted on Medium, we'll put in the show notes. Are you familiar with this article by any chance, Scott? I saw an article about a new release, V2,

but I didn't see any comments about the foundation. Yeah, this one here is specifically called Growing Up, and it's subtitled IOJS Needs a Foundation. And he's laying out a couple things. I think he's talking specifically to the IO community, not so much that it doesn't include the Node community, because they both converge at some point. But one thing he said is that it's owned the IO community, not so much that it doesn't include the Node community because they sort of both sort of converge at some point. But one thing he said is that it's owned by the community,

but that requires a legal entity, and it's hard to do things without the formation of a foundation, which I know you're aware of because you've been talking about all this. And then something else he said was we need to end the split and confusion in the community where it's still torn between IO, JS, and Node.js. So you see this change there, and you've got the Node Foundation sort of in place, the governance model, the working groups, development, convergence policies are all in place.

Is there an open invite to IO, and is it your desire, is it Joy's desire, is it Node Foundation's desire to have IO? Obviously they've been a part of it, but is it their desire to have them join? Yeah, absolutely. We do want to have one unified, energized community. When we first started, actually after the fork first happened, I was at a Node Day event in the Valley here, and Disha from NodeSource and I were both on this panel. And that was one of the questions was, you know, will this fork heal?

You know, do both groups want to come back together? Is there a path? And I think that was probably the first time that question was asked. And I think we both at that time believed that the right path is to have a single community working around Node for all the reasons I just articulated a few minutes ago. with a lot of people from the IO community on this foundation and making sure that they have a lot of input into it around the dev policies, the governance models, the, the, the org structure. So yeah, I think, I think we, we, the foundation will be the right vehicle and I think it would make a lot of sense to to, to unite the community and the foundation.

Something else I think that should be mentioned too is just that the policies, and this is just pulling some thoughts right from Michael's article. He said the policies of the foundation, meaning Node Foundation, because he's talking about that in the article, are designed to preserve the progress we've made in IOJS. So that means that, and he also goes on to say that they're pretty much taken verbatim to back up what IOJS has sort of built

and some things you've credited them for earlier to sort of provide that progress that IOJS is already doing. So they seem like they want to as well to sort of reconcile and finally become back to the mothership, so to speak. So what is that process? How does that change things for you guys? When can we expect this to happen?

Do you expect this to happen? I do expect it to happen, but what's going to happen or maybe how the next steps are going to unfold is Michael's role, the number of collaborators and the role of collaborators and contributors. And they've done a great job around innovating in some new areas. So I love that stuff. That's great. And I want to make sure we're bringing that into the foundation. And when we first got together to set up and start to define what the starting point would be for those policies and governance models in the foundation. Michael just submitted everything that he had been working on, he and the team and the community in Iowa has been working on and iterating on.

And that was the starting point. Right. Yeah. So I think that trajectory, I'm sure that trajectory will continue. So that was the starting point. Right, yeah. So I think that trajectory, I'm sure that trajectory will continue. So that was the starting point. And then a lot of people joined in to iterate and refine and lessons learned that they had and some other ideas that other people brought to the table. So that was sort of the starting point. So in the Node Advisory Board, we meet every other week, and we have an open public session there.

Michael has been attending the last few advisory board meetings, and we've been talking a lot about updates on the foundation, the progress, and then what the position is of I.O. and the I.O. community, what they want to do. And I believe, and certainly Mike will be a better source, but I believe that there have been a lot of discussions around this in the I.O. community around whether or not they should come and join the foundation and what that would look like. And there have been some good, healthy discussions on that. And I believe that there's going to be...

Are there open discussions on that right now? Like, are there actual open discussions between what is Node Foundation? Because they're obviously being a part of putting it together in terms of planning and what they've been doing and all. But is there an open conversation about the reconciliation process? Yes. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. A lot of questions, people not sure what it means, and you're having a lot of questions and really trying to get that answered. So, yeah, that's all up. I think there's a whole very long thread that probably Rod Vag started a while ago, but it's up on GitHub. And so good conversations. And I believe that Michael made a motion to sort of formally discuss it in their TSC and then move towards a vote on whether the TSC wanted to come join the foundation. And I'm not sure how the rest of the working groups are organized or how that broader decision would be or whether, I'm not familiar with all the details of that, but it's my understanding

is it's heading toward a vote in their technical steering committee. So since we're also being current with what's going on, I guess as of yesterday with that article I mentioned from Michael, titled Growing Up, TJ Fontaine, some news came out today, just a couple hours before this call, actually, that TJ Fontaine is stepping away from Node. He'd given a lot of congratulations to those who've been involved and sort of painted a picture for what the next chapter of Node is. He talked a lot about

how it's a good place, it's a good time for Node, and we mentioned that earlier in the call too with the foundation. Even though there's the fork of IO, there's a lot of progress happening, a lot of good direction, and that this is a really good time for Node. What do you think about TJ stepping away?

Were you surprised by this? What else can you add to that? Yeah, TJ will be missed. TJ has contributed a lot to the project over the last year, probably a year and a half. So he's technically very strong. You talked about the burnout factor earlier about project leads, and certainly you speculated around that with Ryan.

When Ryan moved off the project, then Isaac moved on, he was on the project for about a year and a half or so, and then TJ following him. So that position is a pretty challenging position, and its role is changing. So as we move into the foundation, there is no BD. The Technical Steering Committee is a group of developers and contributors and collaborators who will be driving the tactical direction based on a consensus model. So there's no longer that role going forward.

So we'll definitely miss TJ's tactical contributions, but the project's changing and the project is maturing to the next stage of its growth. Not that there ever is a good time for anybody to leave the project, but if there is one that's better than others, this is actually a pretty good time for TJ to move on as we're really changing the way the whole project runs and move it to a foundation. I guess really the future of Node.js is really pinning around, I would think, the convergence, the reconciliation of these two, the fork and mainline, so to speak. Although there's been some progress on the fork ahead of the mainline,

which would be considered Node, what do you think Node would gain from the reconciliation process? What do you think it would gain from I.O. and Node reconciling, and how could that reinstate some trust and reinstate some security back into the marketplace of what is Node? Yeah, great question. So I think it would be a big win for everybody from the macro level. Certainly, you want to have a healthy project. So you want to have a very satisfied and successful user base. You want to have a vibrant community of ecosystem partners who are building tools and services that surround the project.

Then you want to have a large, energized group of developers and contributors who are writing the code and contributing to the project. So from the user perspective, the users want to de-risk the project. So from the user perspective, the users want to have, they want to de-risk the project. They want to have a single project. They want to get the confusion out of the way. They want to have a single community working together, sort of pulling the oars in the same direction. The vendors certainly want to have stability. It's much easier for them to support, you know, a single project than multiple and not have to be in a position of trying to explain and help position, you know, different forks in the win to have a single energized group of people working together to drive Node in the future for the future direction. So I think it's a big win all around to have a single combined project. As I said to somebody, when this topic first came up around

the fork last fall or potential forks, there's been discussions of forks for several years now, I said I'd rather have a slice of watermelon than a whole grape. If we can work together across all constituents in the community, then we can really accelerate the adoption of Node. We can drive it forward. We can innovate. We can serve multiple market segments. We can do great things for the project.

And we're barely scratching the surface around a lot of the market segments where Node has a lot of success today. So I think we can build a really big market and a real broad adoption across a lot of different segments. And that kind of success will be very gratifying for everybody. And that's really what I'm after.

Let's take a break real quick. We'll come back for a couple more final thoughts as we taper off. But we'll take a quick break. We'll come right back. Digital Ocean opened up a brand new European region in Frankfurt in Germany, FRA1. So when you're creating new droplets, if you need support for European locations, FRA1 is now opened up to you. They announced the new German region about five months ago. And after about a month of build out, they're finally excited to open up FRA1 so you can use it today. And due to its placement on the German Commercial Internet Exchange, which is the largest internet exchange point worldwide by peak traffic, this region also serves Germany's neighboring countries with unparalleled connectivity and speed.

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dollar hosting credit enjoy all right scott we're we're back talked a lot about the future, the past, reconciliation, putting some faith back into the community, both from those companies who would invest by building their applications on top of Node, the foundation, obviously. What does it take to run a foundation successfully? You said you talked to Linux Foundation about putting this together. Aside of just organizing it, running it, these things cost money. And you said there's no pay-to-play model. How will Node function as a foundation? Where does the money come from?

How does that work out? And what part does joint play in that? Right. So there are two organizations. There's the board of directors and then there's the technical steering committee. And the board of directors is responsible for the legal aspects, the financial aspects. Those are paid seats, right? Pardon me? Board of directors. Board of directors are paid seats. So you can join the foundation. You can become a member of the foundation. Either you can be an individual community member who can join the foundation. You can also join at various funding levels. So we have a platinum level member, then you, with your annual sponsorship of the foundation, you automatically get a seat on the board. With the silver members, the silver membership as a group gets together and elects members, board members from the silver membership.

And one, a third of the silver members will be elected on the board. And the gold level, the same thing, they get together and vote as a group and a tenth of the gold members will have a seat on the board. Also on the board of directors will be a representative from the technical steering committee. We're also just discussing now, I'd love to get some feedback on it, of potentially having a seat on the board for a general community member. So we want to make sure that we engage the community at this level, too. Might not be the most interesting things to talk about. And we're certainly not talking about the technology or, you know, latest releases or roadmaps, so that might not be interesting to a lot of people, but it's more of, you know,

overall sort of business and financial legal management side of the foundation. So the funding comes in from people who join at various paid levels, and, you know, based on what level you're in, then you are either voted on you're voted on to the board of directors and then that funding is used to then fund the project and that funding has a lot of value to the technical team to the to the project in the whole so that's used to fund the website hosting it's used to fund technical education, training, skill development. It's used to fund paid work that needs to be done to build out even more rigorous test harnesses, build out API testing and API management, additional platform testing, and all the

infrastructure that's required to go do that has to get paid for. So that gets funded for that. We'll also be organizing the trade shows. If you look around, your Linux Foundation is a trade show. You see other foundations like OpenStack and Cloud Foundry and other projects like that have their big meetups as well. So we'll be doing those as well. So we'll also fund at least one full-time technical person to go sit independently on the technical team or full-time, you know, write code for the project. Often you find there's work on the project that's being done.

People come in and the contributors, collaborators, have in mind something specific that they want to do, and they go build that and submit that as a pull request or go put that in the project. There's other work that, you know, just needs to be done and needs to be funded that may not be sponsored by individual customers or users or members of the community. So we want to make sure that the broader community,

by contributing to the foundation, can then go fund some full-time developers to go build out additional work that needs to be done in the project as well. Oh, great. I'm certainly looking forward to the future of it. I'm looking forward to the day when IO and Node actually reconcile. I know that some of the ways you mentioned funding will be used, there are some actual pain points that Michael has mentioned, either in articles or in passing, Michael Rogers being the person that's sort of helping lead most of what IO is doing. Not so much the leader of it all, but he's been sort of the main spokesperson to sort of give an update back to the community and sort of helping lead things. So one thing he's mentioned,

I think in that article actually in growing up, was the fact that they can't spend any money to send a developer to a conference and represent I.O. or do any advertising. That's sort of things that requires an organization. And he's talked about how I.O. needs a home and the neutral organization that can support it is the Node Foundation and how that can sort of play back. I can see how obviously having money coming into it is going to pay people to be there, legal fees, things like that, hosting, and then also just in general marketing. Everybody needs marketing. There's always some level

of cost that come into play. And until you have an actual organization to fund these things, you can't do it, right? That's right. Marketing, community development, training, trade shows, technical meetups. You want to have – Even stickers. Stickers. I mean, something simple like stickers you can't get. Well, Scott, I guess in closing, let's taper off the call.

I think we've definitely covered as much as I want to cover, but is there anybody that you want to personally thank for the work done at IO, the work done at Node, wherever, in the foundation, things that are taking place? Is there anyone you want to call out that we haven't mentioned today that definitely needs a pat on the back or some encouragement that they're doing a great job? Anybody you want to highlight? Boy, there's a long list. I think that the folks who, the team that is continuing to move Node.js forward

are doing a phenomenal job. It's great to see the innovation around everything from technology to governance models over at IO. And there are a lot of people who've been involved there. As we've been moving towards the foundation, it's been very helpful to get the Linux Foundation engaged. IBM has been very helpful.

Denise Cooper, who's over at PayPal, has been helpful. She spans a lot of projects over a lot of time, so she's been a great source to help bounce ideas off and provide perspective of how other projects have evolved over the years. So there's a long list of people, but I think the community is moving in the right direction, and I'm excited to see how the next couple of years really grow for Node. And so for those who want to sort of, I know you mentioned there's topics on GitHub, there's comments on GitHub. Where is a central place we can send some people

to sort of keep up to date with what's happening? Is it Node.js.com or where is it? .org, isn't it? Yeah, so it's Node.js.org. Yeah, my bad on that one. We're putting up another page on Node.js.org that should be coming up online. I've seen drafts of it coming together. And that will be kind of a one-stop shop, a one-stop location for updates on the foundation. And there are links there from there

to blogs, to the dev policies, to all the governance models, to all the foundation documents we've been iterating on. So I would point people to that, and that will be right on the nodejs.org website. There's also a website called the Note Advisory Board that Chris Williams put together, and that has all the updates on the advisory board. It has the schedule for upcoming meetings and how to join in and how to engage, the Slack channel. It has a compilation of all of the notes from all of the prior note advisory board meetings, and there's a wealth of information there. And then, as I said, the ongoing conversations. So really, I invite everybody to come in and view and participate and express your opinion and be you know, be heard and, and then engage and act on the future. Well, all right, Scott, well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me through this.

I know that the last several years have been a rollercoaster, especially this last six months with Node. And we've been closely watching things here at the changelog to, to keep up with what's going on there. Certainly looking forward to the future. Yeah, thanks for coming on the show. And I guess now's a good time to say goodbye. So let's say goodbye.

Great. All right. Thanks a lot for having me on the show. No problem, Scott. Thank you. All right, as promised, I got Scott back on the line. You know, I was kind of bummed because we did the show last Friday. So the record date for the show was May 8th. And the planned release date was May 15th.

We usually have a week-to-week schedule for the show was May 8th and the planned release date was May 15th we usually have a week to week schedule for the show and I was kind of bummed when yesterday you know when yesterday occurred so May 13th yesterday we're recording this right now on May 14th um I was kind of bummed happy you know for the news but I was like man I we speculated so much in that conversation with scott that i was like we may not be able to release that episode it may just be obsolete or stale but having edited it and having listened to it it's a great show a lot of details in there shared about joint and node and node's history and io and io's history and this convergence that's speculative. And now, as of yesterday, is going to happen. So IO has agreed and their TC meeting, they've agreed to join Node Foundation.

And so take a listen. This is me and Scott diving deep into that news from yesterday. And it's just great. So take a listen. So, Scott, we're back. Those who are listening to us right now, just listen to roughly an hour of me talking about Joyent, I.O., Node, the history, and a lot of speculation about some recent news, whether I.O. would converge with Node.js and ultimately join Node Foundation.

So what do you think about the news we just got yesterday? Well, I think it's great news. We've spent a lot of time working on the foundation, and I think the foundation has been the vehicle, probably the best, maybe the only vehicle for providing the neutrality and providing the open governance policies and sort of a neutral ground to get the communities working together again. I think one of the things I said earlier is I've been very focused on doing the right thing for Node.

And even if that means that Joyent as a company has to compromise on some things around how the project was run, it's a small compromise that we have to make in order to benefit the greater community and the project in the whole. The project has really transcended any one company and any one individual. And it's a very energized, very passionate community out there. And it's split into two. And one of the reasons why I wanted to get the foundation together was to establish a vehicle to give probably the best option and the best path to having a single community working together on a single project. And I think the vote yesterday from the IO community showed that they see sort of a similar perspective. Michael and Bert and the rest of the folks who are really helping to work on the foundation and then help evangelize that and explain the value and the benefits to the IO community.

They did a great job communicating with that group and lots of notes and lots of issues, lots of conversations on GitHub going through a lot of details to help explain that to everybody. And I think they did a great job of that. And now I'd say an early win for the foundation in validating that the foundation is the right thing to go do. And so I think it's good news. It's a good vote, a good outcome. And we're now moving forward on the right path. And for those listening, just to establish some timelines here, we originally recorded the call that they just listened to on May 8th.

We have a week-to-week schedule when we release episodes, so we were planning on releasing this on May 15th, and May 13th comes around. And, you know, good news, of course, but you and I weren't quite sure when it would happen. Maybe you had a bit more information than I did, but nonetheless, today is may 14th and so just to kind of establish some timeline there for people to kind of catch up with

um back and forth there but so yesterday may 13th uh the iojs tc voted to join node foundation and i think um some questions that probably come up initially maybe you have some answers to these and maybe you don't but uh what does it mean for IOJS? Does it mean that they'll join and operate under Node Foundation as Node.js and sort of begin this convergence process? I know there's a convergence repo, the two individual repos now, and there's lots of conversation happening there. But what ultimately is happening right now as of this vote to join Node Foundation? So, you know, great questions. Funny, we had an all-hands meeting inside Joyent this morning, and those exact questions came up.

I say, well, you know, some of them we have answers to, and some of them we'll all work together to figure out the right answer to and then go execute on them. But from a high level, you know, the idea is that the foundation is set up so that we have one community. We have a unified project that's here to help establish the neutrality, establish the openness, really broader engagement with the community, great neutrality for vendors. It's very important we have a healthy ecosystem of vendors to provide additional tools and technologies and services around Node to accelerate its adoption and increase the value of it. really do want a single project and want to be able to have a trusted foundation that they can turn to to help you find the right outcomes for all the different members of the community. And so I think as we move forward, we do have a community that's working together now under the Node.js foundation. And so we'll all be working together under that umbrella.

And then as we move forward, then the technical details that everybody's working through is I think we have a pretty good handle now on the development policies and the governance models and all that's still open for a public comment. A lot of good work and comments have come in under that, but I was looking for more. And then it's getting down to the, what do we do with the code base and the code bases? And we're still working through a lot of that, but we want to make sure that we come up with the right outcome that really benefits the users of this, that they get healthy innovation and they can get access to the latest and greatest, but also certainly heard loud and clear from the enterprise customers that they want a slower release cadence. They want, let's say, a six to nine month release cadence, sort of faster than what we've seen over the last few years, but they want something maybe once a year or six to nine months.

They want a new release. They want a publicized LTS policy. They want good visibility around testing and API compatibility and backwards compatibility and EOL. So we are hashing through all of that now and absolutely want input on those issues. So we capture user requirements and customer and user issues into that. So I'd say we've done a lot of work, but there's still a lot of work ahead of us.

And now we have an opportunity to work together to get the details right. And it's going to take a while to work through those, but I'm optimistic we're on the right path to get them solved now. We have a developer-centric audience that listens to this show quite a bit. So at least one of the questions I have and the questions we tend to have

tend to be the questions of the community. Not all of them, but some of them. Right now, Node lives at jolient slash Node on right now node lives at joint slash node on github and io lives at io.js slash io.js well will node ultimately since it's now node foundation will it move from under joint to its own organization in terms of are you privy to that information or is this too early to tell that kind of information? No, that's moving out from under Joyent Node, and that's going to be the Node.js Foundation. Okay.

So I think there's already a repo set up for that, and we'll be moving stuff over there. I've seen one from, I think it was Jason Snell? Is that the fellow's name? There's so many names. James. Yeah, James Snell. There's a Jason out there, I'm sure. But James Snell. Sorry about that, James.

Yeah, James has a fork right now. It's the convergence repo. I think they're sort of testing whether or not they're going to do a git rebase or do a straight up merge and do cherry picking back and forth to sort of bring the repos together. So behind the scenes, code-wise, there's some things happening that I'm curious about. And so I see that, but I haven't seen an organization on GitHub emerge yet that I'm aware of. So I wondered if you knew about that.

Well, the foundation hasn't been technically stood up yet um but you know it it will be i think we'll announce that as i said before sometime end of may early june uh when it's officially formed uh and come it comes to stand up as an official legal entity uh and and so uh you know we'll see we'll see those repos come together and this stuff as we work through that timeline. So what we can expect now is essentially a unified front when it comes to Node. The IO name may or may not be akin to MIRB

as it is to Rails for those who followed that saga probably five years ago, just before Rails 3 came out. In our call before this that everyone just listened to, you and I speculated when it might have happened, when this joining of the Node Foundation might or might not happen. And as I said, you probably have a bit more information that you can't maybe share during the previous call. But was this a surprise to you? Were you expecting this to happen sometime soon? I know I was pretty surprised that it happened. I mean, obviously, we're back on this call again, and I don't want to release the episode until you and I had this conversation.

So I wanted to make sure that the community that listens to the changelog understood that we like to stay fresh and new. So we had to get you back on the call, Scott. Yeah, this is about as fresh as it happened. I don't think the ink is dry on that announcement. But usually you make your predictions in January and you don't know. You're back on the show the following January. You get a year to see how things play out. But in this case, things are moving pretty fast. We talked last Friday. Today is Thursday. So we've had six days. A lot has happened.

And I don't recall exactly what the prediction was. But at that point, my expectation was that it was going to be sometime over the next two weeks that there was going to be a vote in the IOTSC to see where people sat on this topic and what they wanted to do. And so it looks like it happened in the very early part of that time frame. So I was expecting it probably more likely to be next week than this week, but it looks like they went through the vote next week. In fact, I think what I told you is when I got your note today, I was in the middle of editing a blog post that was supposed to go out tomorrow about why the foundation makes a lot of sense for the IEO community and to help solve some of the issues

that we've seen over the last couple of years in the Node.js community and the way the project was run. And I'm busy editing it, so we'll see how that turns out for my blog post tomorrow. We certainly appreciate you taking the time to come back and just play a little catch-up here. I know that your opinion matters, so I wanted to make sure that it's just proof how fast open source moves.

Our tagline around here is open source moves fast, keep up. And it just proves how fast it moves because six days ago, this news we had was just stale. So I was concerned that our show just would be obsolete, but it wasn't. Went back and listened to it during the edit process and it's a great show. So I really enjoyed going back and taking a deeper listen to some of the things

that you had to share about Joanne's history and the history with Node and just how much is involved here. And I think people can't quite grasp that. And even sometimes Joanne takes a black eye sometimes because of the history of Node. Not so much, maybe not a black eye, maybe a little punch here and there. You know, something like that, that you kind of get the bad name,

but really all this while you've been supporting Node and the community and just wanting the best that Node could be. Yeah, you know, it's hard to please everybody. And we definitely took some body blows. And there was a lot of frustration in the community. The release, the frequency of releases really slowed down. You know, there were a lot of people in the community who wanted to participate more than they were. And there was a pretty rigorous, it was pretty hard to get onto the core team. There were a lot of, you know, pull requests that, you know, weren't getting the responses that some people wanted to get and weren't getting responded to as quickly as people wanted. So, so, you know, there was definitely some criticism coming joints way. And, but yeah, I don't know. You can't, you, you cannot please everybody. But as I said earlier,

I, you know, I've only been a joint now for about nine months and I really want to do the right thing for node. And this, this, I I've believed since I first started working with our board of directors last October, November time frame to convince them that this was the right thing to go do, that it really it was the right thing for the project. And it's truly transcended joint. And I think this is the right thing. And I think we're starting to see that play out. I think the vote yesterday to have the IOTSC vote to work with the Node Foundation is, I call it an early win for the foundation and the motivations behind it

to rally the community together and seek that common ground. So I'm happy. It's great validation that the strategy is playing out and getting some early wins for the overall project. You can definitely see that the future is getting more straight and more narrow for Node and a lot more clear and a lot more accessible to those who felt like outsiders definitely having the governance and all the things we've talked about in place.

But thank you so much, Scott, for taking the time to come back and have this quick chat. So let's, let's end here and let's everybody, I don't know, this may have been roughly an hour and 25 minutes. So thanks for listening, everybody.

And we'll say goodbye. Thanks a lot, Adam. Take care.