The drive towards MeteorJS Foundation!

Back just as @fredmaiaarantes was announced to be the new CEO of Meteor @alimgafar and others were working on a proposal to radically change how MeteorJS is governed. Given that those two events came together at an unfortunate time it was decided to keep things on the need to know basis until the time is right to start moving forward. That time is now!
As I’m posting this I’m announcing the main point at my Open Source Summit Japan talk about MeteorJS. But first let’s put into public the letter that started it all:

To summarize here is what is going on:

The undersigned (you can request the addition of your signature there as well), would like to move towards establishing MeteorJS Foundation that would:

  • Complement Meteor Software in supporting development of MeteorJS core itself
  • Formalize Impact as a community-driven annual event with Meteor Software having the option for premier sponsorship and keynote
  • Provide incentives to contributors to encourage them and others to participate more and decrease churn
  • Support community meetups, evangelism, marketing, and other community activities to maintain enthusiasm
  • Signal that MeteorJS is a credible OSS project (and not one compromised by any single commercial interest)

It will be a long way to get there, but I’m making connections at OSS Japan and hope to get some insights from the folks at Linux Foundation. We have many options and many things to work on, so consider this as a formal invitation to join in the effort, be it adding your signature, offering help or joining a work group to support MeteorJS’s development.

Do note that establishing a foundation will take time and money. We want to do this right, so we will take our time and we need your support and help! Please get in touch!

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Thanks for sharing, @storyteller.

As the proponent of the Meteor Foundation, can you share the overarching Vision/Mission of the proposed organization?

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It sounds like a great idea. Usually these kinds of companies start as open source foundations and go commercial, interesting to see it go in reverse!

Was curious to hear how the long-term future would be pitched in the wild, compared to “the letter” … a lot falls apart right here, but mostly between friends and colleagues. Code commits slow and then stop. Or if they continue, they are uninspired, trivial, sustaining; evolution and innovation end. The spirit of it is gone.

Was relieved not to hear even a speck of that, only historical context and eagerness to move forward. Loved the apparent flexibility with focus on prize; no white-knuckled devotion to “letter” versus “foundation” which is placeholder idea rather than an opinion of a hill-to-die-on. I also heard “lean” thinking in there, wanting wise agility to win and carry forward another decade+ rather than name-on-door or not-invented-here syndrome.

All the other */OSS entities are wrapped up in huge issues too so it is not wise to continue “what works” because that too is a Santa Claus and mostly lore+stamina. I feel like it is most realistic to even expect gravity might not take my wallet to the floor if I drop it, one day; just think about that word “wallet” itself now, as case-in-point. Everything stops working at some point. Understanding why is the key, and then not chasing but leading. It is not clique to say we already contain the future in our own dreams, and we have reality in our hands if we go beyond rubberduckies, hobbyists, professionals, and pool together our fates to some real extent. Based on a sound but dynamic foundation of sanity. I can give a lot of landmarks here for reference, but we already have many household names, all over the world. Meteor is on the brink of that kind of significance if we cultivate that spark.

I imagine there is a lot of intellectual and strategic power here to deal with that type of landscape, not just code monkeys or wall followers. We cannot get wrapped up in what the world thinks by default, or gets all excited about and starts yelling. If we had, none of this would be happening. People left the world behind and became programmers in the first eras, it was not normal. Totally abnormal then. Now? Welcome to Earth, powered by programmers… destroyed by one bad idea, but sponsored by the wildest dreams of every prior generation, while we now act as the future reaching back.

We do not want to chase the target. Always account for wind when shooting an arrow. Meteor itself is really a point in evolution, perhaps an edge. It feels like being on the seam between “awesome” and “light fantastic” … right there where the whole plot gets lost. I feel a lot of organic roots still alive here, but without that “self-limiting” aspect tending toward overly safe, soft, slow, weak, etc.

The fact Tiny went public also resets the strategic landscape to totally different physics. Am very glad to be arriving at this particular point. And glad to have had not quite a year to just dream about it and imagine surviving migrating over, which is a huge investment, even an existential-threat level of faith.

In growing fruit trees sometimes you have a very special set of genetics to do, but it cannot survive certain environmental factors. In that case you take a relative from earlier in the history of that “general fruit” and then graft the designer genetics onto the “wild roots” … I feel like Meteor is “wild roots” and what was DONE in the last decade has itself become something which stands next to or above the original code. And being able to win again and make a tradition rather than a codebase only, having a community that can see and spark eras… that is beyond priceless and cannot be manipulated into place. Being able to outdo yourself, with the will to adapt and evolve and let the paradigm shift, then do it all over again… that is something quested after by the best to have lived, not just since 1970. Meteor stands to level the playing field in that context, I believe, again, but much more deeply this time. And some fresh wind in the sail will go very far, like putting in subs when the first string is very tired, then the first string comes back and now we have 2+ A-teams.

There is a lot to say here but I feel like it is a >1 year conversation sparking, and not for the purpose of talk only, but of establishing governance among the parties already involved, especially independents and self-owned corporate entities. We can at any time change the landscape itself with a bit of help from our friends, or even go solo-unicorn if really driven. I have to clap at the diplomacy and the actual “ambassador” role being played there, pending seeing the talk itself. Even eager to find a way to put my shoulder into it and am thinking through specifics on alternatives and options to consider.

:clap: @storyteller … the proof is in the pudding and no letter can walk the walk. Being a real person and having depth is what allows people to connect at all, then they get into the details because they care >0% … And being an outstanding community involves flexibility+drive+chill… What a relief to not see a trainwreck in step 0. I feel like there was a huge fatal fall avoided right there, at the most vulnerable time… ( before birth )

And now for the next world.


P.S. Not a huge fan of the name, now. Branding and colors “look sexy” but its substantial concept “space rock hitting planet” as distinguished from asteroid ( “space rock not hitting planet, orbiting; somewhat debris” ) … are outdated now. Assuming it was originally relevant and not just “cool sounding” … it has been landed for >10 years. That previously stellar rock would be cooled off now, and easily mistaken for a boulder native to the planet ( with a crater that gives it away a bit, but soon all the overgrowth will have taken up that evidence too ) … notice how the metaphor holds on branding, but not in our favor right now, though eerily :100: :dart:

I start from the brand pathos now and reason as to what we are even doing. So we landed. NICE! Now what? What are we doing? Galaxy strains the metaphor already dead a while ago, and does not connect. Meteor and Galaxy have no “actual” connection, at least not more than Hand and Galaxy … somewhat celestial? Somehow massive? Otherworldly? We cannot carry forward a name with no relationship to what it is, at least not for long. And, killing a name is a way to signal real change, if it is more than changing a text field only … if it is true art. I feel like all the elements needed to leap are here, and probably reading this thread.

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Had a talk with @alimgafar and @jkuester on this topic and also provided more historical information:

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Have not watched this, and eager to see things in writing, since the letter is very weak compared to the message itself. Feels like the air is leaving the balloon faster than it is added still.

  1. What are the goals ( and @rjdavid question :dart: ) vision?
  2. How is this better than the way it is now?
  3. Why this leadership team?
  4. Why not make Meteor Software more successful and write a regular contract?
  5. Why not directly make an offer to Tiny with something motivating in the business world?

I could keep going but it seems like there is this “because real life is hard we need to be special” and that is different from the F/OSS way. The F/OSS way talking about the word Free meant primarily free as in speech, not free as in beer. The free as in beer portion matters if the free as in speech portion is going on, and I see no desire to do that in the foundation conversation yet, in writing, with documents that matter more than a letter.

MIT licensing tells me Meteor Software still has actual guts and I do not feel a need to smack them on the hand or take control just because of the rodeo of the past I was not a part of. Why care today?

Right now it feels like there are three currents in the community: People doing actual work and getting no press, other than other people doing actual work bring it up so we know, or the same person doing more work to tell us. People feeling extreme v3 pain ( I waited to implement versus migrate v2 code ) … and now an unclear message about a foundation. I put it like this as a devil’s advocate, since I am asking myself a lot: What can be LTS about v3 and do I prefer it be maintained by Meteor Software or influenced by Tiny … or not? I do not see a “HELL YEAH!” here I am extremely interested in seeing that, and growing in support.

Since my last message, I got very deep into a design pattern shift to fit the actual situation real life requires in this era. It has that feeling of Event Horizon where in order to travel from one end of the universe to another by allegedly bending space-time ( holding back comments on physics and nature of reality ) they actually ended up taking a short-cut through “hell” and one cannot miss that feeling.

I love F/OSS. I was a full-time F/OSS developer for many. many years. And I want to love Meteor … but where is this going? Someone does the chores on schedule? So that people do not take away what is already MIT licensed and we could just improve already without needing to be compensated because we make a living with it already? I cannot see the logic yet. I want to see the logic and as I said, I am extremely glad there is not fixation with a particular way to get there… but where is “there” and is “there” mostly about sponsorship?

What is the main thing?

This not being my first rodeo, I would flesh-out "why in writing" a bit more:

  • Thought is hard work
  • Improvising is not design
  • Meteor itself has that flaw

If I were to request one thing, it would be sanity. If we have that, we can do everything else. If we surrender some sanity to get something… now we are insane, or unsane. Writing helps protect that, or it would, if people did it. I cite Black's Law Dictionary for example, in our dependent worlds: As crazy as the legal world is, and therefore the financial world and visa versa, the dictionary work is a lot of the real innovation as well as a history lesson. It is written by people who really write. The digital world is not special and allowed to be lazy. We are the world holding up the other worlds so their maximum is our minimum.

Where is the sane, adult, professional, well-reasoned, original, perhaps even imaginative, inspired, intuitive, and I dare say necessary version of this in writing? Since there has been >10 years for that document it seems weird to not have “vision” answered in the first document, and for all progress to be talking-head in format.

Right?

Going to put this on solid ground a bit more:

  • Who in leadership has legally defended their strategy and formations?
  • Who in leadership has negotiated with serious contenders on their own terms? ( That is reality, now. )
  • What is the key or series of if/then/else arguments to make it work for everyone better than now?

From what I know of Meteor right now it does serious work in the wild. If that level of quality and performance is not done in the planning and execution ( better than Meteor Software already, and better than Tiny because they are a partner, which means they bring more than just money and deserve more than control; i.e. advice, positioning, opportunities, collaboration in the field, IPO notwithstanding ) we ought not presume “other people did cool things and it was rad!” is going to do more than be competition for attention and passions of the same people who might be doing something other than Meteor at all, since hopefully they do a lot of thought here already, and presumably do not also get a return more than code.

We are not in an era of hopes and dreams. That is awesome. Our dreams became reality already and now we are all up in that. Messier, but more control. It requires seriousness I have not seen yet. And whereas reading a long forum post or an email might take a few extra minutes or maximum an hour, taking the wrong course wastes years/life and a lot more than “just time” … so while I have no deep loyalties yet other than to ninjas who design and write and maintain code, and I can afford to be different, I shift to: Show me serious.

What is necessary? Why this? What is the main thing? How is this besting not only “our” own prior best, but like the code itself ( which all ought speak for, but ought to speak for itself also ) … what is best in the world here? Like I said it comes down to the legal and financial portion. But we are their platform. Where is that speaker?

Being invited to care for >10 years is a big ask.

Toward “writing” and distancing from weaker positions in rhetoric, I put out a third lane:

There is not just for-profit, and non-profit only. And there is not necessarily need for governance, but integrity, based on the real value brought, and in way more forms than code, or chores getting done. There are many established models for this but I did not go into solutions yet, I worked to swim away from */OSS pitfalls.