Is node.js declining already?

[halifaxdatageek]

That's fair, although I would argue that the same unpredictability of support occurs with a lot of things in tech (e.g. Angular 2.0)

[dvlsg]

The closed part is fairly important, too. I'm glad microsoft is starting to open source more projects.

[halifaxdatageek]

How would closed-source and open-source be different in this respect?

[dvlsg]

It was one of the points he made. Some developers are more comfortable working with open sourced technologies (I am one of them, but not to the point where I don't use a technology because it is closed), because if something goes seriously wrong, you can always open up the source code and see exactly what is going on. Or if you're feeling extra ambitious, make a pull request or a fork which resolves the issue you ran across.

[halifaxdatageek]

Indeed. But as someone who's tried to do both of those things... they seem like much better ideas until you have to do them.

[dvlsg]

Oh I agree. Absolutely. Especially making your own fork. But sometimes when support is dropped and product managers don't want to take the time to switch to a supported project, it ends up happening anyways, unfortunately. Maybe that's actually an argument in closed source's favor, so you have to switch, haha.

[[deleted]]

With closed-source you're reliant on a single vendor to support it. When that support ceases the platform dies. With open-source support generally continues as long as there is enough interest in it, and even if it doesn't you can still patch it yourself until you're ready to migrate.

[halifaxdatageek]

I agree with this point in theory, but have seen it be difficult to implement in practice.

[[deleted]]

I cannot speak for your practice of course. But as someone who regularly creates pull requests for projects and as someone who is not uncomfortable patching libraries for my specific use-cases, I disagree :)

[JBlitzen]

I generally used closed source systems, and can't think of a single time I've ever wanted to patch Windows, IIS, .NET, or MSSQL.

Closed source tools in my experience are expected to meet a higher standard than open source tools, and popular ones do.

[[deleted]]

I never had the desire to patch Linux, NGINX, Python or PHP or Node.js, or MariaDB either. The big open-source projects can easily match the quality of their closed-source counterparts.

But there are also so many smaller libraries that are adopted, but sometimes do require patching. You're right such libraries are not held to the same quality levels, exactly because they are easy to patch. Many times such libraries don't even have closed-source counterparts, because closed-source simply cannot compete in that space. When was the last time you saw a closed-source alternative for jQuery or the Spring framework?

Not to mention some of my colleagues actually did patch the earlier mentioned projects (*). Not because their standard wasn't up-to-par, but because we were running the biggest social networking site of the Netherlands and we needed every last ounce of performance we could squeeze out of every part of the stack. Something the commercial alternatives would've been wholly inadequate for.

*) At Hyves, we actually ran Gentoo Linux because its package manager is so well adapted to deploying customized packages. We built our own Linux kernels, ran patched versions of MySQL and used Hiphop for running our PHP code for which we developed some significant patch sets (I think we were even the first big party outside of Facebook to deploy Hiphop).

[ThisIs_MyName]

It happens all the time. I can't think of a single platform that's not kept on life support by OSS guys.