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People like to make fun of JavaScript. "It's not a real language! Who, in their right mind, would use it on a server?" The replies are: It's a real language and JavaScript is one of the most popular languages of all. For years, the enterprise server side had been divided into two camps: JS Foundation and Node.js Foundation. This was a bit, well, silly. Now, the two are coming together to form one organization: OpenJS Foundation.

At the Open Source Leadership Summit in Half Moon Bay, CA, the Linux Foundation announced the long anticipated news that the two JavaScript powers were merging. The newly formed OpenJS Foundation mission is to support the growth of JavaScript and related web technologies by providing a neutral organization to host and sustain projects, and fund development activities. It's made up of 31 open-source JavaScript projects including Appium, Dojo, jQuery, Node.js, and webpack.

At the Summit Jory Burson, representing the JS Foundation, said bringing in "fresh new contributors from the Node. js developer community into our projects was quite a big benefit and no picture of the ecosystem is complete without Node."

Myles Borins on the Node.JS side replied: "From the Node. js perspective, we want to participate in a multi-project foundation. We had tried to do this before within our own foundation through an incubation process. And we're not super successful. We also wanted to share and refine some of the best practices in Node js. We've done a lot of work on open governance as well as new ways of being transparent in meetings [after suffering a near civil war due to leadership issues in 2017] and in communication. We wanted to take some of these best practices and share them with other projects. And most importantly, we wanted to find a sustainable approach and build the foundation that can outlast the project."

The two have been working towards this merger for over six months with weekly global meetings. It wasn't easy. They had to deal with some very "contentious subject matter." But, in the end, they were able to achieve consensus.

More than 30 companies, including Google, IBM, Joyent, and Microsoft, have come together to form this new open-source foundation.

I think this move will only benefit both JavaScript developers and users. What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

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