There's something missing here, timelines don't align... So TJH sells express in 2014; Doug ploughs on for two years, with zero contributions from StrongLoop (?). Then IBM takes over and assigns two devs to actually do some work, and Doug quits...? Stating a problem of trust. So what happened? Did SL promise something that is not going to happen now that IBM is in charge? Did SL promise him a job or something?
Sure, Doug should be thanked for his tireless job; but the post is simply lacking or omitting important details.
I think what happened was that he (Doug) was trying to push SL into helping out more and to get some issues fixed, Doug felt like he was getting somewhere, but then SL was sold to IBM all conversations had to be started again. There is a github issue titled 'Is Express dying?' [1] that contains all of the events, issues and comments from Doug, TJ, SL and IBM.
Doug is a great guy and super helpful. He has personally responded to many issues on Express as well as the ecosystem of Express middleware. He is truly a treasure. Doug - if you ever read this I personally really appreciate you.
Express is alive and well, I just developed two new middlewares for it in the last week. Koa has been straddling 1.x to 2.x rewrite for quite a while. In the meantime Express chugs along powering 1000s of websites. The performance difference is negligible and Express still beats Hapi by a long shot.
If you're talking about TJ I don't think anyone said he was "evil" or "dickish". The selling of a repo on Github is questionable however it is no more questionable than Ryan selling NodeJS to Joyent. But frankly nobody really believes IBM gives a damn about Express, so people should move on and use something else, because it ain't gona be maintained seriously . For them Express is just PR for their platform Blue mix as they try to attract businesses based on NodeJS.
I'm not an active Java programmer but my exposure to the JDK has left me with the impression that it was more important to make it academically correct over practical. When I looked at the Java spec I thought to myself, "What the hell is this? This isn't the nasty Java I've been dealing with. This is actually fairly clean."
I spoke with a some people who were high up in Sun back in the day (direct reports to Scott McNealy high) who said the JDK mess happened after IBM "adopted" Java.
So whenever I hear of IBM embracing a new technology I shudder. I've been learning Swift and it seems quite nice but to hear IBM has decided to go all in on it makes me very, very worried. I haven't used Express in a few years but I can only imagine what they've done to it since.
Sure, Doug should be thanked for his tireless job; but the post is simply lacking or omitting important details.