I have been developing applications with Node.JS for a few years. I’ve also been following the progress of io.js. I am expressing my opinions anonymously not to involve the company I work for. I personally believe the arrival of io.js has been great for the Node community. It helped to revive the community. It also helped accelerate the process of moving the project from under a corporation to an independent foundation.

A single independent entity, the Node Foundation, controlling the progress of Node is a good thing for the future of Node community. Most people appeared to share this notion and support the reconciliation between Node and io.js. I think the community’s reaction can best be seen by reading the discussion at https://github.com/iojs/io.js/issues/1336.

Currently, io.js has attracted most of the core contributors. They are adding features and moving the project forward at a great speed. But there are many other things that needs to be done beyond just coding as @mikeal said “There’s also a ton of other horribly boring stuff the foundation does for the project we can’t do ourselves, like talking to analysts. This stuff might not sound important but it turns out that if you don’t do it you end up leaving a vacuum that other companies fight over and that causes a lot of unnecessary negativity around the project.” Node as a project is already beyond the stage that it can only grew by developer contributions. There are many “boring stuff” needs to be done to make it a platform accepted like Java, PHP, or .NET. These are the things the Node Foundation will do.

Node.JS has achieved so much over the past few years. But maintaining this momentum cannot only be achieved by community contributors. It requires money and an organization to promote the platform. Node Foundation can provide that. Major corporations like IBM, Microsoft, PayPal, Fidelity, SAP have already committed to becoming founding members of the foundation https://gigaom.com/2015/02/10/node-js-is-getting-its-own-open-source-independent-foundation/ and they are willing to pay significant sums of membership fees. This will provide the funding for many other things that needs to be done to expand Node as @mikeal pointed out: “Some new things you should expect the foundation to do: traditional marketing, public relations and analyst outreach, legal, contributor summit (in-person contributor meeting). Those all cost money and the board would be approving that spend.”

Having a single project under a foundation will remove the long-term concerns many corporations share against using Node. Node Foundation will help convince senior management that Node is a stable development platform supported and used by many corporations. @localpcguy summed it up really well “But a Foundation is absolutely needed in order to us in end-user land to be able to use Node for more than a development tool. Being able to point to corporations using Node is one of the best selling points when talking to a manager or CTO and trying to get adoption where people work. I know it should be judged on it’s own merits, but in many cases managers and CTO level folk aren’t going to care about the technical advantages/disadvantages of using Node vs. PHP/Ruby/C#/Python/etc.”

Adoption of Node by major corporations will also bring long term commitment of resources to the project. Developers from corporations like Joyent, StrongLoop, PayPal, IBM are already making significant contributions to project. As @anodeuser said “whether you believe or not node.js moves on. IBM recently dedicated the PPC team (highly capable on V8) and they are doing really well. Do you really think these companies dont have the resources to move node.js forward?” Existence of Node Foundation will further encourage development teams from other corporation to not only use but also contribute to the project.

Current situation of two projects developing and slowly diverging is not a healthy situation. The longer this situation lingers worse it gets for the community. Many developers are already confused about which project to use. As one of those developers @VirtuosiMedia said “As someone wanting to get into the ecosystem, I haven’t yet because of all the uncertainty. I don’t want to commit to one project only to find out that I have to rework everything shortly after. I suspect a lot of other people might feel the same.”I fear current uncertainly will push many developers to other platforms. So it is important to give the message to the community that both projects will merge under Node Foundation.

Recently stumbled into another Node.JS fork JXcore. I am very impressed with the abstraction they’ve implemented between the core and the JavaScript engines. What they are doing may work really well with the long term goals of the foundation. Seems like Node.JS is already available on every platform. @martinies said “I’m following both of the projects for a very long time. Forking an open source project for good reasons is not a bad thing. It may pay pack really good from time to time. i.e. jxcore does a really cool job on the mobile and packaging side. I’m really looking forward for a release.”It is common that a foundation hosts multiple projects at the same time. I don’t know if JXcore team would agree but I would like to see JXcore and similar projects under the foundation.

In summary, I believe the reconciliation is already happening and all the development efforts will merge under the Node Foundation. I hope it happens quickly and without diminishing the momentum of the Node community.