Joyent is one of the few veteran companies with experience in the cloud computing field. The San Francisco based company was started in 2004 and pioneered public and hybrid cloud computing. Joyent created leading products and services, bringing innovation to another level through Triton, and Manta solutions. Besides this, and the reason why we’re writing this article, Joyent was the parent that nurtured Node.js not just into a popular programming language, but as a standard for web, mobile and IoT architectures.
Node.js was born and raised at Joyent, that’s its childhood home. Joyent is still one of the largest users of Node, the original corporate steward that guided and built Node into what it is today. Joyent is the place where the most Node experience exists, they’ve been running Node.js in production for almost 6 years, they have the experience and the production practices to create efficient and revolutionary Node solutions. And now they’re owned by Samsung.
Corporate acquisitions in most cases imply change, but, in this situation, the bought company gets to keep its structure and organizational aspects, while the new owner will be in charge of the big decisions. Joyent will be an independent subsidiary of Samsung, they will continue to operate and function as a separate entity, but as we said, an entity owned by Samsung. How will Joyent change? And more importantly for us, what will happen to the years and years of work put into Node.js at Joyent?
This acquisition could mean trouble for Node’s evolution and progress, but, thankfully last year Joyent (and not just) took the right steps to give Node a home to grow, develop and build further. The Node.js Foundation was created as a third party, an independent non-profit entity that will supervise the evolution and progress of Node.js. As such, Node.js went into the custody of the Node.js Foundation, a consortium led by the Node community and backed by the industry, IBM, Microsoft, Paypal, Fidelity, based on open governance. The Foundation was created also to heal the split between Joyent and IO.js, but that’s another story.
Node is safe in it’s new home, but Joyent is still a huge part of it’s life and future. This is a company that grew Node and that uses and develops Node on so many different levels. The Samsung acquisition may leave them with full independence when it comes to Node, or it may not, we’ll have to just wait and see. In any regard, Joyent will forever be a part of the Node story and we’ll just have to wait and see how Samsung will use it to compete in the cloud services arena.
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