Is ‘corporate open source’ an oxymoron? Not where Node is concerned

When Joyent became the corporate steward of Node.js, we wanted to find a way of monetizing Node.js that would serve to strengthen the community instead of dividing it. That is, we want to lead the project for its own best interests while still being able to fund that effort with a viable economic model. We started with our current business, something customers would rightly pay for — high-performance cloud infrastructure-as-a-service. Operating with the given that people were already paying for these things, we asked ourselves: Can we use open source to make our public and private cloud offerings more appealing and differentiate them in the market?