Why is Node being forked?

As of October 9th I learned that Node is being forked!

I asked someone close to this, "what is the reason for the fork?"

It turns out that some contributors* are forking because Node is currently run by a Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), and these contributors are interested in running it by committee.

Here is a video on the subject, where these contributors discuss the effort:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNW_tu2QnpA (37 mins; re-uploaded)

Interesting notes from the video:

they are considering hiring a full-time person to triage bugs on Node

they wish they could share bug-closing and bug-management abilities on the joyent/node Github (but Github itself does not make this easy without giving direct commit access),

For the near-term, they are considering spending 3 hours per week doing bug triage.

Here are the leaders of this, with their names and their rank as a contributor to node:

#2 Isaac Schlueter (and former BDFL)

Isaac Schlueter (and former BDFL) #3 Ben Noordhuis [Mikeal pointed out that I forgot Ben, thank you Mikeal!]

Ben Noordhuis [Mikeal pointed out that I forgot Ben, thank you Mikeal!] #4 Bert Belder

Bert Belder #5 Fedor Indutny

Fedor Indutny #7 Trevor Norris

Trevor Norris #27 Mikeal Rogers

As a bystander to this, I hope that when the dust settles, Node's stability and progress have not been adversely affected. I know for a fact that all of these people have better things to do than forking node (running their businesses for example). I have no doubt that this whole thing is a big headache for everyone, and hopefully the headache goes away soon (they would not be forking if they didn't have good reasons).

Have a good day,

David Trejo

More information

Here a video of the previous meeting (25 mins; re-uploaded): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5PtRHjUO1U

Here is a link to the node fork: https://github.com/node-forward/node