I sure hope not. NodeJS is a FOSS project under the Linux foundation (via OpenJS) and is not driven by profit, while Deno is developed by a for-profit company (Deno Land Inc) which has bunch of closed sourced projects to fund the company.
Hopefully, NodeJS learned from the whole Npm Inc history and tries to remain more independent from for-profit companies.
The whole io.js thing was a very different thing than Deno. Contributors tired of slow pace of NodeJS forked NodeJS into another FOSS version, with no for-profit motives, which meant it could eventually be merged back once the people behind the two projects reconciled.
Very good points. Deno is first and foremost a cloud business who happens to offer a Javascript runtime of its own making.
It made us see a world where javascript can be (much more) secure and typed without a compilation step, and this is an important contribution I would like to still acknowledge.
Now the fact that NodeJS is learning from Deno and making strides to support capabilities (are you related? lol) is extremely exciting to me and it will surely improve the state of the Javascript/Typescript ecosystem and pull along a lot of projects/devs who would never have moved to something like this purely due to inertia and dev cost. One can dream.
While I wasn't aware that Deno was owned by a for-profit company, Deno itself is MIT licenced. Is there any particular reason why everything you just said cannot also be true for Deno?
I'm not exactly what I said about NodeJS that could apply to Deno.
> NodeJS is a FOSS project under the Linux foundation
Deno is not maintained by a non-profit organization, and Deno Land Inc are unlikely to want to let someone else control their project, that'd be kind of suicidal.
> is not driven by profit
The organization who maintain Deno is explicitly for-profit, meaning it has to be driven by profit. If they give the project to the Linux Foundation, I guess that could change, but again, unlikely they'd do something like that.
> NodeJS learned from the whole Npm Inc history and tries to remain more independent from for-profit companies
Deno arguably did learn from that story and did package management differently. They didn't avoid the whole for-profit angle, as again, the maintainers are working for a incorporation.
> Contributors tired of slow pace of NodeJS
As far as I can tell as an outsider, Deno seems to be moving forward at a decent speed and I haven't seen any noise in their community about a possible fork because of slow development pace.
> Deno Land Inc are unlikely to want to let someone else control their project
But it shouldn't matter whether or not they want it. You can fork Deno right now, change nothing but the name, and sell it as a commercial product. The MIT licence permits that. iirc SQLite is a private organisation that produces a public domain product. Should we quake in our boots and boycott SQLite? Nothing is stopping the proverbial io.js from drawing a line in the sand, forking Deno or SQLite, changing the name, and taking it from there.
EDIT: Similarly, React and React native are open source but controlled by Facebook. Swift is an open source programming language that's controlled by Apple. .NET Core is open source but controlled by Microsoft. Docker is open source but controlled by Docker Inc. MongoDB is open source but controlled by MongoDB Inc. GitLab is open source but controlled by GitLab Inc. OpenJDK is open source but controlled by Oracle. Redis is open source but controlled by Redis Labs.
Hopefully, NodeJS learned from the whole Npm Inc history and tries to remain more independent from for-profit companies.
The whole io.js thing was a very different thing than Deno. Contributors tired of slow pace of NodeJS forked NodeJS into another FOSS version, with no for-profit motives, which meant it could eventually be merged back once the people behind the two projects reconciled.