Some great news for the Javascript community today. The popular and controversial fork of Node.js, Io.js today announced they had voted and agreed to joining the Node Foundation.
This means that we have avoided what I was worried could have been a serious fragmentation train-wreck in a year or two when both projects were so misaligned that we started seeing module incompatibilities and one or both of the projects suffering as a result of the incoherence.
Fortunately the Io.js fork is still quite young and I am just happy that we will eventually once more just build Node apps and not have to worry about any potential issues (especially modular authors). I also hope this serves as a warning not only to Joyent, but any other company maintaining an open source project that ensuring you keep the community happy and keep things democratic is an essential component of open source and the very ethos of which it was built in the first place.
In my opinion both Joyent and Io.js contributors who jumped ship because of the way things were are both winners in this situation. Lets hope the convergence process goes smoothly and Joyent have learned from their mistakes.
We will finally be getting some missing features from the out-of-date current Node version like promises without needing to use third-party modules hopefully quite soon after the convergence of the two projects is completed.
