12 ms·

Samsung Acquires Joyent

787 points by yunong 10y ago

ethbro 10y ago
So this is the moment where everyone with a sufficient device / install marketshare decides they need to buy cloud expertise? "Samsung will immediately benefit from having direct access to Joyent’s technology, leadership and talent. Likewise, Joyent will be able to take advantage of Samsung’s scale of business, global footprint, financial muscle and its brand power."
- smt88 10y ago
  Samsung is (and has been) terrified that their handset business will be slaughtered in the race to the bottom of the hardware industry. They tried to create their own OS to give themselves an edge over other Android manufacturers. Their fears have come true (and now it's even happening to Apple). Hardware is an incredibly difficult, risky business, and differentiation is now in the services/software arena. That's why Samsung, in particular, needs this acquisition (and others like it).
  - ethbro 10y ago
    One thing that I never understood was how the Android hardware ecosystem never saw contributing resources to developing more efficiently abstracted core Linux + Android support for their hardware compatibility challenges as a competitive advantage. Disclaimer: I'm not involved in that space, so maybe they've started?
- tracker1 10y ago
  Samsung is in a good position to utilize Joyent in Asian markets, better than most cloud providers, and given the "smart" features of most of their devices, and how much they probably feel they're leaving money on the table compared to even Android's Play Store, it makes sense... doesn't mean it'll work... but even if it only applies to Asia and Africa, where they leave the more firm Android in place elsewhere, it could be a significant boost. I don't expect to see Samsung take on GCE, Azure or AWS directly though... and would be really unsure if I were a Joyent customer right now.
brotherjerky 10y ago
So the biggest phone manufacturer now owns a lot of Node.js expertise. Hopefully that leads to more JS in mobile!
- wvenable 10y ago
  I had a friend ask why the Oneplus one 3 could possibly need 6GB of RAM. Thank you for providing a possible answer! :)
  - tracker1 10y ago
    Well, buffering 4K video, while running other active services in the background... finally broke down and installed FB messenger again, and it's definitely better, but there are a lot of consistent apps that tend to be very bloated as it is. Given how well React Native tends to work, and I have to be honest, I like the ecosystem structure better than most apps I've worked on in general, I can see it actually working out better in many cases.
    - fungi 10y ago
      > finally broke down and installed FB messenger again, Prob not great for more advanced messenger functionality but Face Slim (https://github.com/indywidualny/FaceSlim https://github.com/indywidualny/FaceSlim) does notifications and simple/group chats fairly well.
      - tracker1 10y ago
        What sucks is I was perfectly happy with fb web, until they started cutting features in mobile (can't post to a friend's wall, can't do a lot of things now). The biggest issue is FB the app didn't respect the environment/usability settings for extra large fonts.
- jankassens 10y ago
  They're definitely doing research for efficient JS on low end devices: - AOT compilation for a subset of JS: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2015/EECS-2015-13.pdf http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2015/EECS-2015-13... - "A JavaScript engine for Internet of Things": http://samsung.github.io/jerryscript/ http://samsung.github.io/jerryscript/
cpprototypes 10y ago
Samsung is a typical asian electronics company (has a hardware focused history and very good at it, but doesn't understand or respect software). I'm so glad that node.js is not under Joyent control.
- deleted 10y ago
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- wrong_variable 10y ago
  I am not sure what Samsung being Asian has to do with anything :) This is good news for node.js since what this means is more money gets poured into node.js development. For example Microsoft pouring money into JS seems to have lead directly to Typescript.
  - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
    Samsung does have a somewhat bad reputation in the valley; e.g. https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Samsung-Research-America-Reviews-E295294_P2.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Samsung-Research-America-R... This could just be clashes between US and Korean management culture, or perhaps just some instability in a new research lab.
    - wrong_variable 10y ago
      Seems like the average complaints people have working at BigCo. Compared to the kind of stuff that Microsoft, Apple have done in the past in the software world. And I do not see how this is bad, maybe Samsung is trying to learn why 'Western' engineering is so much superior to 'Asian' engineering by this acquisition ?
      - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
        Some of the rumors going on say that management back home is very provincial and are rigidly Confucian (hierarchical), which they enforce on their satellite operations. Also, your basic big corp in tech are quite internationalized from the start even at home; e.g. IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Facebook, Apple already employ those from many different cultures even in their home offices. I guess they are making efforts to work on this: http://qz.com/288923/samsung-is-trying-to-improve-its-corporate-culture-amid-crisis/ http://qz.com/288923/samsung-is-trying-to-improve-its-corpor... > And I do not see how this is bad, maybe Samsung is trying to learn why 'Western' engineering is so much superior to 'Asian' engineering by this acquisition ? It depends if you want to be part of their learning experience or not! Chinese companies have adapted pretty well to acquisitions and satellites, so it isn't an Asian thing. Japanese companies have been known to have similar problems in the past and even currently (though it really depends on the company, and many have had a lot of time to gain experience). Actually, Japan is another country that is notorious for not being as great as they should be at software, maybe there is a common thing going on?
mattbettinson 10y ago
Thought this said Joylent. Was confused.
- deleted 10y ago
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- bbcbasic 10y ago
  That would be spacex acquires joylent
- timjver 10y ago
  Haha, me as well.
- kobayashi 10y ago
  Glad I'm not the only one.
deleted 10y ago
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vermontdevil 10y ago
Is this the same company that sponsored the development of Node JS?
- dmpk2k 10y ago
  Joyent funded most of node.js' development since 2010. Once node became popular and competing companies appeared, with the commensurate agitation and political fallout, Joyent became less involved with it.
bcantrill 10y ago
In case anyone's curious, I blogged about the backstory of the acquisition.[1] tl;dr: We at Joyent are elated, and we believe that this will be a huge win for our customers, for our technologies and for the communities that they serve! [1] https://www.joyent.com/blog/samsung-acquires-joyent-a-ctos-perspective https://www.joyent.com/blog/samsung-acquires-joyent-a-ctos-p...
- combatentropy 10y ago
  Thank you for not burying the lede! It's a lost art.
  - thinkloop 10y ago
    What does burying the lede mean in the context of hn?
    - taneq 10y ago
      It's the first sentence of the linked blog post, and the meaning seems pretty clear - instead of waffling on about how amazing an experience it's been and how much they've learned blah blah blah they just say "hey we got bought by Samsung."
  - ethbro 10y ago
    Never saw it as "lede". Thanks for my new thing of the morning! Wiki: "In journalism, lede is an alternative spelling for lead paragraph."
- nbrempel 10y ago
  Congrats Bryan! :D
- neom 10y ago
  Congrats my friend. :)
- supster 10y ago
  Thanks for all your work on Node.js!
hitr 10y ago
I always thought Microsoft/Google or the likes would acquire Joyent as it is good product fit. Microsoft chose linkedin instead :) For Samsung this is all about IoT .Samsung wants to own both the devices and backend. A good move IMHO
- smt88 10y ago
  > Joyent as it is good product fit. Microsoft chose linkedin instead It's a good product fit, but the fit is so good that Microsoft basically built a more-complete competitor in the form of Azure. They built Joyent instead of buying it. LinkedIn was different because Microsoft could never build LinkedIn itself.
  - hitr 10y ago
    Microsoft has good PaaS story when it comes to .NET stack. Especially product Azure App Service[1].All though it can technically host nodejs,java etc ,it still is based on IIS and windows stack. Joyent has more native offering for nodejs which could have been Paas for nodejs(Azure App Service for nodejs ) [1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/app-service/web/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/app-service/web/
- tracker1 10y ago
  MS already has Azure, with an infrastructure built on their windows core... Not to mention having more services... and while Joyent's Docker story is really nice, MS seems to be heading in a very similar direction with the Windows Subsystem for Linux as Joyent took with SmartOS/Solaris, it's a poor tech fit. I'm not sure where this will take things with Samsung, likely backend services to support their own "store" on their devices separate from Android. If it's internalized, I only hope they release more of their infrastracture tooling, which is very cool to say the least.
  - jen20 10y ago
    There is a world of difference between a new, untested implementation of Linux system call translation to a _very_ different type of Kernel on a desktop class operating system than the version on Illumos. The best thing Microsoft could do with their cloud is burn it to the ground and start again with Joyent's tech.
hoodoof 10y ago
I wonder how much for.
krakensden 10y ago
Good luck on your incredible journey.
- bigiain 10y ago
  Hmmm, not sure if you're being genuine or snarky... http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
- dang 10y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11913723 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11913723 and marked it off-topic.
ruffrey 10y ago
Luckily they did not acquire Node.js edit: I should have been more specific.. when an open source project is under a company's wing and it gets acquired, you don't know what can happen, even under MIT. Look at express recently. Since it's the under the Node Foundation now, this is not a big deal. Had it happened a short time ago, there may have been further turmoil in the community.
- dmpk2k 10y ago
  Given that Node.js has always been MIT licensed, that's impossible. That's one reason why it had a liberal license; just listen to Cantrill's Oracle rants sometime to get a better idea.
  - cyphar 10y ago
    Cantrill advocated the fact that CDDL was copyleft as a good thing[1] (it's a bad license overall, but the point is the same) specifically mentioning that the fact that Oracle couldn't use new DTrace and ZFS improvements from the community was a good thing. I agree (though I much prefer the GPL). So actually all of Cantrill's worries with Oracle exist with Node.js's license. I am sad when I see large free software projects licensed under MIT, we are doing ourselves a disservice by allowing proprietary software to take advantage of the free software we've developed. [1] It's part of his Fork Yeah! talk about the fork that is illumos.
    - Annatar 10y ago
      There are people out there like myself who are convinced that GPL is the most vile, fascist license out there. On the other hand, I have nothing against CDDL. I think the incompatibility of CDDL with the GPL is what saved the illumos community (even if inadvertently) from having their technology cannibalized by GNU and Linux. I'm happy that BSD is benefitting from illumos (and vice versa), but I'm even more happy that Linux isn't. <--- I do not represent anyone but myself, the position expressed here is my own and not of anyone else.
      - 10y ago
sintaxi 10y ago
Hats off Samsung. You have just acquired a truly world class Engineering team. Congrats to all my former colleagues who are absolutely amazing at their jobs and wonderful people to work with. Samsung looks like a very good match. Hope the transition goes well.
- thinkingkong 10y ago
  Same. Great working with the entire engineering team at Joyent.
Negative1 10y ago
Forgive my ignorance but can someone explain how Joyent's acquisition moves Samsung towards their strategic objectives? In other words, how are they going to exploit this technology (and brain gain)?
- ptio 10y ago
  Samsung generates a lot of sensor/IoT type of data (e.g. smart phones, smart TVs, medical, industrial). They'll need the infrastructure to process and store all these data.
- combatentropy 10y ago
  From the CTO's blog post, it seems to me that Samsung became interested in Joyent not for its most famous product, Node.js, but for its new product, Manta, which is some sort of serverless, distributed, data-storage and processing service (https://www.joyent.com/manta https://www.joyent.com/manta). Manta might be well-suited for the new hotness, the Internet of Things. So that's how I saw it progressing. Samsung was looking into how to get in on the Internet of Things, stumbled across Manta, and it went from there.
  - ilaksh 10y ago
    Manta seems like they are throwing the kitchen sink at those problems, tons of containers, proprietary OS, proxies, etc. If you want to store objects in a distributed way, why not just use something like RethinkDB, which has proxying/sharding etc. built in? RethinkDB even has a way to execute code with 'js'. Or for serverless processing, why not AWS lambda or the crop of clones?
    - melloc 10y ago
      Manta doesn't run on a proprietary OS, but runs on SmartOS, a distribution of illumos [1][2]. In fact, almost everything at Joyent is open source, including all of Manta [3]. As for why not anything else, Manta has been around since 2013 [4], before other similar solutions, and allows you to run arbitrary programs on your data. As an example, some of our customers run ffmpeg on videos that they upload, to produce different variants to then store in Manta. [1] https://github.com/joyent/smartos-live https://github.com/joyent/smartos-live [2] https://github.com/joyent/illumos-joyent https://github.com/joyent/illumos-joyent [3] https://github.com/joyent/manta https://github.com/joyent/manta [4] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/25/joyent_object_store/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/25/joyent_object_store/
bobsil1 10y ago
This is John Gruber's nightmare :) (worked at Joyent before Daring Fireball)
- pazimzadeh 10y ago
  It looks like Daring Fireball is still hosted on Joyent, soon to be Samsung. https://twitter.com/gruber/status/560507384536498176 https://twitter.com/gruber/status/560507384536498176
alrs 10y ago
This is great news for on-prem object storage. I look forward to seeing how big Samsung is able to go with Manta.
sidcool 10y ago
I wonder what would Samsung gain from an IaaS kind of company. Do they have an IaaS product? Or is it for internal use?
corv 10y ago
"Joyent will operate as a standalone company under Samsung and continue providing cloud infrastructure and software services to its customers"
andrewwhartion 10y ago
Well done guys on staying solvent longer than the market could stay irrational!
subway 10y ago
SmartOS will be on ARM within 12 months. Calling it.
- Annatar 10y ago
  I sure hope so, but the high performance nature and intent of SmartOS is at odds with the low electricity consumption, low number crunching performance of the Acorn RISC Machines processor. SmartOS is optimized for CPU bursting and squeezing as many tenants at bare metal speed as possible, while ARM is designed not to consume lots of power at the expense of raw performance. That said, since SmartOS is based on illumos, and illumos is designed from the ground up to be portable, running SmartOS on ARM would be cool, since it would open the doors for illumos on embedded devices. I would so love me an illumos based, iPad Pro-like tablet...
- ranty 10y ago
  It's pretty much welded to x86 and it's entire design is server-only. It'd be much, much harder to port than just using Android.
  - e12e 10y ago
    Android on servers, like Linux? SmartOS on Arm servers would probably make a lot of sense, given that Samsung might then have a vertically integrated infrastructure: mainboard/chipset, cpu, ram, ssd and software all made by Samsung for Samsung?
a_small_island 10y ago
Joyent raised over $125M in venture [0], and no mention of a price? Wonder how the employees faired in this... [0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/joyent https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/joyent
knurdle 10y ago
Hey, maybe Joyent can finally afford to refund the people who supported it when it was textdrive and then went back on their word! Snarky I know but I'm still bitter about how it was all handled..
- lftl 10y ago
  As a fellow early textdrive supporter, I'm pretty happy with the value I got out of the deal. I'm still using my free strongspace account 10ish years later. I think there was some email about a free hosting account I could theoretically use with some company, but I never looked into it. Honestly, textdrive's hosting was never really of a quality I could use in a professional context anyway. I understand some bitterness, but any "lifetime" deal has to be taken with a pretty big grain of salt, and I'm pretty happy about what I got for the money.
  - darylfritz 10y ago
    > I think there was some email about a free hosting account I could theoretically use with some company, but I never looked into it. We were offered either one or three free years of hosting on a Joyent SmartMachine, depending on what your initial investment was. After this free trial, you would be converted to a regular customer. Adding my voice to the bitter-parade. Joyent wouldn't be where they are today without us early bootstrap investors. It was basically a Kickstarter campaign before Kickstarter existed. Not only do I feel like I failed to receive my early investor benefits, but WORSE off was how the whole situation was handled. We had to beg and plead to get our data back. The company essentially went dark to all of their oldest, most loyal customers.
  - knurdle 10y ago
    It wasn't about the money or the value I got out of it. For me, it was the way I felt like I was treated. It felt like, hey, we've pivoted the company but we still have to support these old users and they are becoming a pain, let's give them a credit on something that's kinda like what they paid for and be done with them. Then when enough people complained, then they tried to find some solution at the last minute and even that felt dubious. Let's try to cobble something together that's barely working for these people and make it someone else's problem. I totally take the "lifetime" deal with a grain of salt but it wasn't like the company folded because it ran out of money or wasn't successful. It was more like we got successful so we forgot about the little people.
bogomipz 10y ago
I'm sorry but how is this a good fit? What is the synergy here? This particular sentence is incredibly vapid: "By bringing these two companies together we are creating the opportunity to develop and bring to market vertically integrated mobile and IoT services and solutions that deliver extraordinary simplicity and value to our customers."
- JoshPersy 10y ago
  I completely agree with you. Would be interesting to know a little bit more about the company strategy.
unixhero 10y ago
Congrats Bryan. If anybody deserve it, it's you guys.
leommoore 10y ago
Best wishes to all at Joyent. Thanks for all your work in the community over the last few years, particularly with node.js. Hopefully Samsung will give you the resources and reach to go on to better things in future.
monatron 10y ago
As I toil away on a node based project that is interfacing with Samsung's Artik platform (both the Artik 10 board and Artik Cloud) I finally decided to call it a night -- check HN real quick -- and discover that Samsung is buying the original stewards of node. I almost thought the lack of sleep was putting me into psychosis...
byesurprises 10y ago
Congratulations Joyent on the acquisition with Samsung. Hope the customer experience will be taken to the next level.
JoshPersy 10y ago
No matter on which way I try to look at this, but I cannot find any good reason on Samsung company strategy to justify this acquisition. Any Ideas?
ClassyPuff 10y ago
Great news and good acquisition as well. Great work Samsung!!!!!
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ChrisArchitect 10y ago
wow, Joyent. Took me a bit to remember what they were doing in the early early days since we're multiple generations or pivots or focus-shifts on now......but it was Textdrive/Textile/Textpattern CMS. Ha. Different times. At least some of that still out there in OSS Land
urza 10y ago
Cloud orchestration, Container Orchestration, Kubernetes... I think I am getting old and starting to understand how my parents feel about technology. I am developer, but mostly work on desktop apps, or embedded devices or lataly on some MVC applications. But reading things like "A Container-Native Stack for Modern Applications and Operations Increase development velocity while simplifying operations." I have no idea what should I imagine and what is it good for... any good introduction or explanation into what is it they actually do?
- eliah 10y ago
  This might be more in-depth than what you're looking for, but I found this (long) slideshow useful: https://joshpadnick.com/2015/09/01/my-talk-on-choosing-the-right-framework-for-running-docker-containers-in-production/ https://joshpadnick.com/2015/09/01/my-talk-on-choosing-the-r...
- novaleaf 10y ago
  I always think (thought?) containers are good if you own your own hardware. I use 'micro' cloud vm instances for my deployments and don't feel the need to squish more functionality into a $5/month VM.
- moondev 10y ago
  For the most part if your application is developed 12 factor style: http://12factor.net http://12factor.net, you shouldn't have to worry about these things as a developer. Stuff like this is more in the ops space. Cloud orchestration: the logic for how your platform provisions and launches instances (think ec2) into your fleet of resources. Container orchestration: the logic for how your applications (containers) are distributed across your fleet of instances Kubernetes: Software that runs on your fleet and manages how/where/when container orchestration happens. There are many players in this space such as mesosphere, swarm, ecs and so on.
  - deleted 10y ago
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- bkanber 10y ago
crudbug 10y ago
Next up some SmartOS desktop / mobile builds
OhHeyItsE 10y ago
Can anyone shed some light (speculate, perhaps) on Samsung's strategy here? Just seems like an odd pairing to me.
beaugunderson 10y ago
One company with all-male board & management team buys another company with all-male board & management team.
d2ncal 10y ago
If anyone has a good background, what exactly does Joyent have that is so valuable? It seems that NodeJS has moved out of Joyent. They have hosted container support that seems to run on solaris, which seems interesting, but a bit too much of buzz-wordy from their website. I am not very familiar with this, so will be great if someone can explain a little bit. I read the comments around orchestration, but am more interested in Joyent's value proposition.
caffed 10y ago
Ok... Let's start on iojs 7!
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yangtheman 10y ago
As a Korean American who also has worked at Samsung headquarters, I think it's more of bad news than good news, no matter how Joyent wants to spin it. Its corporate culture only allows the most cunning, politically savvy person to stay alive and move up the rank, and thus most executives (all if I limit it to small sample of executives I've personally met) fit that model. And shit literally flows downwards, where goals/promises set by them would be pushed downwards and engineers have to take the burden. It doesn't help that Korean society is very hierarchal and based on Confucius principles, where you don't usually challenge older persons and/or someone higher in the rank. This is one example that describes serious problem - http://thediplomat.com/2013/07/asiana-airlines-crash-a-cockpit-culture-problem/ http://thediplomat.com/2013/07/asiana-airlines-crash-a-cockp.... For those of you who are intrigued and have time, I suggest watching Misaeng with English subtitles (https://www.viki.com/tv/20812c-incomplete-life https://www.viki.com/tv/20812c-incomplete-life). Samsung isn't as bad, but the same hierarchy, verbal abuse, social dynamics, and strict rules on paper format exist. The best outcome would be if they leave Joyent's management and culture alone. But I doubt it. I also have the first-hand experience of their applying the same "consumer electronics" mentality to completely different business which required high-touch sales. There is no denying success of Samsung - multi-billion, international corporation. However, Samsung is only good at generating quality hardware products at mass scale. There have not been success in any sort of software and services. Perhaps they are trying to expand beyond their strengths, and I applaud that effort and they actually do need it, since it's only matter of time Chinese companies will catch up and produce as quality products as Samsung, as Samsung did to Sony. I hope it bears fruits. I hope they can allow Joyent to succeed and thrive, and learn from that. I will see what happens next few years.
carapace 10y ago
(Thin sans-serif body text means you hate your readers.)
st3v3r 10y ago
Well that sucks. They had a good run, but Samsung's business culture is probably going to ruin them. Just check out some of the stories of their internal software engineering process.

787 points by yunong 10y ago

So this is the moment where everyone with a sufficient device / install marketshare decides they need to buy cloud expertise? "Samsung will immediately benefit from having direct access to Joyent’s technology, leadership and talent. Likewise, Joyent will be able to take advantage of Samsung’s scale of business, global footprint, financial muscle and its brand power."

smt88 10y ago
Samsung is (and has been) terrified that their handset business will be slaughtered in the race to the bottom of the hardware industry. They tried to create their own OS to give themselves an edge over other Android manufacturers. Their fears have come true (and now it's even happening to Apple). Hardware is an incredibly difficult, risky business, and differentiation is now in the services/software arena. That's why Samsung, in particular, needs this acquisition (and others like it).
- ethbro 10y ago
  One thing that I never understood was how the Android hardware ecosystem never saw contributing resources to developing more efficiently abstracted core Linux + Android support for their hardware compatibility challenges as a competitive advantage. Disclaimer: I'm not involved in that space, so maybe they've started?
tracker1 10y ago
Samsung is in a good position to utilize Joyent in Asian markets, better than most cloud providers, and given the "smart" features of most of their devices, and how much they probably feel they're leaving money on the table compared to even Android's Play Store, it makes sense... doesn't mean it'll work... but even if it only applies to Asia and Africa, where they leave the more firm Android in place elsewhere, it could be a significant boost. I don't expect to see Samsung take on GCE, Azure or AWS directly though... and would be really unsure if I were a Joyent customer right now.

brotherjerky 10y ago

So the biggest phone manufacturer now owns a lot of Node.js expertise. Hopefully that leads to more JS in mobile!

wvenable 10y ago
I had a friend ask why the Oneplus one 3 could possibly need 6GB of RAM. Thank you for providing a possible answer! :)
- tracker1 10y ago
  Well, buffering 4K video, while running other active services in the background... finally broke down and installed FB messenger again, and it's definitely better, but there are a lot of consistent apps that tend to be very bloated as it is. Given how well React Native tends to work, and I have to be honest, I like the ecosystem structure better than most apps I've worked on in general, I can see it actually working out better in many cases.
  - fungi 10y ago
    > finally broke down and installed FB messenger again, Prob not great for more advanced messenger functionality but Face Slim (https://github.com/indywidualny/FaceSlim https://github.com/indywidualny/FaceSlim) does notifications and simple/group chats fairly well.
    - tracker1 10y ago
      What sucks is I was perfectly happy with fb web, until they started cutting features in mobile (can't post to a friend's wall, can't do a lot of things now). The biggest issue is FB the app didn't respect the environment/usability settings for extra large fonts.
jankassens 10y ago
They're definitely doing research for efficient JS on low end devices: - AOT compilation for a subset of JS: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2015/EECS-2015-13.pdf http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2015/EECS-2015-13... - "A JavaScript engine for Internet of Things": http://samsung.github.io/jerryscript/ http://samsung.github.io/jerryscript/

cpprototypes 10y ago

Samsung is a typical asian electronics company (has a hardware focused history and very good at it, but doesn't understand or respect software). I'm so glad that node.js is not under Joyent control.

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wrong_variable 10y ago
I am not sure what Samsung being Asian has to do with anything :) This is good news for node.js since what this means is more money gets poured into node.js development. For example Microsoft pouring money into JS seems to have lead directly to Typescript.
- seanmcdirmid 10y ago
  Samsung does have a somewhat bad reputation in the valley; e.g. https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Samsung-Research-America-Reviews-E295294_P2.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Samsung-Research-America-R... This could just be clashes between US and Korean management culture, or perhaps just some instability in a new research lab.
  - wrong_variable 10y ago
    Seems like the average complaints people have working at BigCo. Compared to the kind of stuff that Microsoft, Apple have done in the past in the software world. And I do not see how this is bad, maybe Samsung is trying to learn why 'Western' engineering is so much superior to 'Asian' engineering by this acquisition ?
    - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
      Some of the rumors going on say that management back home is very provincial and are rigidly Confucian (hierarchical), which they enforce on their satellite operations. Also, your basic big corp in tech are quite internationalized from the start even at home; e.g. IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Facebook, Apple already employ those from many different cultures even in their home offices. I guess they are making efforts to work on this: http://qz.com/288923/samsung-is-trying-to-improve-its-corporate-culture-amid-crisis/ http://qz.com/288923/samsung-is-trying-to-improve-its-corpor... > And I do not see how this is bad, maybe Samsung is trying to learn why 'Western' engineering is so much superior to 'Asian' engineering by this acquisition ? It depends if you want to be part of their learning experience or not! Chinese companies have adapted pretty well to acquisitions and satellites, so it isn't an Asian thing. Japanese companies have been known to have similar problems in the past and even currently (though it really depends on the company, and many have had a lot of time to gain experience). Actually, Japan is another country that is notorious for not being as great as they should be at software, maybe there is a common thing going on?

mattbettinson 10y ago

Thought this said Joylent. Was confused.

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bbcbasic 10y ago
That would be spacex acquires joylent
timjver 10y ago
Haha, me as well.
kobayashi 10y ago
Glad I'm not the only one.

deleted 10y ago

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vermontdevil 10y ago

Is this the same company that sponsored the development of Node JS?

dmpk2k 10y ago
Joyent funded most of node.js' development since 2010. Once node became popular and competing companies appeared, with the commensurate agitation and political fallout, Joyent became less involved with it.

bcantrill 10y ago

In case anyone's curious, I blogged about the backstory of the acquisition.[1] tl;dr: We at Joyent are elated, and we believe that this will be a huge win for our customers, for our technologies and for the communities that they serve! [1] https://www.joyent.com/blog/samsung-acquires-joyent-a-ctos-perspective https://www.joyent.com/blog/samsung-acquires-joyent-a-ctos-p...

combatentropy 10y ago
Thank you for not burying the lede! It's a lost art.
- thinkloop 10y ago
  What does burying the lede mean in the context of hn?
  - taneq 10y ago
    It's the first sentence of the linked blog post, and the meaning seems pretty clear - instead of waffling on about how amazing an experience it's been and how much they've learned blah blah blah they just say "hey we got bought by Samsung."
- ethbro 10y ago
  Never saw it as "lede". Thanks for my new thing of the morning! Wiki: "In journalism, lede is an alternative spelling for lead paragraph."
nbrempel 10y ago
Congrats Bryan! :D
neom 10y ago
Congrats my friend. :)
supster 10y ago
Thanks for all your work on Node.js!

hitr 10y ago

I always thought Microsoft/Google or the likes would acquire Joyent as it is good product fit. Microsoft chose linkedin instead :) For Samsung this is all about IoT .Samsung wants to own both the devices and backend. A good move IMHO

smt88 10y ago
> Joyent as it is good product fit. Microsoft chose linkedin instead It's a good product fit, but the fit is so good that Microsoft basically built a more-complete competitor in the form of Azure. They built Joyent instead of buying it. LinkedIn was different because Microsoft could never build LinkedIn itself.
- hitr 10y ago
  Microsoft has good PaaS story when it comes to .NET stack. Especially product Azure App Service[1].All though it can technically host nodejs,java etc ,it still is based on IIS and windows stack. Joyent has more native offering for nodejs which could have been Paas for nodejs(Azure App Service for nodejs ) [1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/app-service/web/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/app-service/web/
tracker1 10y ago
MS already has Azure, with an infrastructure built on their windows core... Not to mention having more services... and while Joyent's Docker story is really nice, MS seems to be heading in a very similar direction with the Windows Subsystem for Linux as Joyent took with SmartOS/Solaris, it's a poor tech fit. I'm not sure where this will take things with Samsung, likely backend services to support their own "store" on their devices separate from Android. If it's internalized, I only hope they release more of their infrastracture tooling, which is very cool to say the least.
- jen20 10y ago
  There is a world of difference between a new, untested implementation of Linux system call translation to a _very_ different type of Kernel on a desktop class operating system than the version on Illumos. The best thing Microsoft could do with their cloud is burn it to the ground and start again with Joyent's tech.

hoodoof 10y ago

I wonder how much for.

krakensden 10y ago

Good luck on your incredible journey.

bigiain 10y ago
Hmmm, not sure if you're being genuine or snarky... http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
dang 10y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11913723 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11913723 and marked it off-topic.

ruffrey 10y ago

Luckily they did not acquire Node.js edit: I should have been more specific.. when an open source project is under a company's wing and it gets acquired, you don't know what can happen, even under MIT. Look at express recently. Since it's the under the Node Foundation now, this is not a big deal. Had it happened a short time ago, there may have been further turmoil in the community.

dmpk2k 10y ago
Given that Node.js has always been MIT licensed, that's impossible. That's one reason why it had a liberal license; just listen to Cantrill's Oracle rants sometime to get a better idea.
- cyphar 10y ago
  Cantrill advocated the fact that CDDL was copyleft as a good thing[1] (it's a bad license overall, but the point is the same) specifically mentioning that the fact that Oracle couldn't use new DTrace and ZFS improvements from the community was a good thing. I agree (though I much prefer the GPL). So actually all of Cantrill's worries with Oracle exist with Node.js's license. I am sad when I see large free software projects licensed under MIT, we are doing ourselves a disservice by allowing proprietary software to take advantage of the free software we've developed. [1] It's part of his Fork Yeah! talk about the fork that is illumos.
  - Annatar 10y ago
    There are people out there like myself who are convinced that GPL is the most vile, fascist license out there. On the other hand, I have nothing against CDDL. I think the incompatibility of CDDL with the GPL is what saved the illumos community (even if inadvertently) from having their technology cannibalized by GNU and Linux. I'm happy that BSD is benefitting from illumos (and vice versa), but I'm even more happy that Linux isn't. <--- I do not represent anyone but myself, the position expressed here is my own and not of anyone else.
    - 10y ago

sintaxi 10y ago

Hats off Samsung. You have just acquired a truly world class Engineering team. Congrats to all my former colleagues who are absolutely amazing at their jobs and wonderful people to work with. Samsung looks like a very good match. Hope the transition goes well.

thinkingkong 10y ago
Same. Great working with the entire engineering team at Joyent.

Negative1 10y ago

Forgive my ignorance but can someone explain how Joyent's acquisition moves Samsung towards their strategic objectives? In other words, how are they going to exploit this technology (and brain gain)?

ptio 10y ago
Samsung generates a lot of sensor/IoT type of data (e.g. smart phones, smart TVs, medical, industrial). They'll need the infrastructure to process and store all these data.
combatentropy 10y ago
From the CTO's blog post, it seems to me that Samsung became interested in Joyent not for its most famous product, Node.js, but for its new product, Manta, which is some sort of serverless, distributed, data-storage and processing service (https://www.joyent.com/manta https://www.joyent.com/manta). Manta might be well-suited for the new hotness, the Internet of Things. So that's how I saw it progressing. Samsung was looking into how to get in on the Internet of Things, stumbled across Manta, and it went from there.
- ilaksh 10y ago
  Manta seems like they are throwing the kitchen sink at those problems, tons of containers, proprietary OS, proxies, etc. If you want to store objects in a distributed way, why not just use something like RethinkDB, which has proxying/sharding etc. built in? RethinkDB even has a way to execute code with 'js'. Or for serverless processing, why not AWS lambda or the crop of clones?
  - melloc 10y ago
    Manta doesn't run on a proprietary OS, but runs on SmartOS, a distribution of illumos [1][2]. In fact, almost everything at Joyent is open source, including all of Manta [3]. As for why not anything else, Manta has been around since 2013 [4], before other similar solutions, and allows you to run arbitrary programs on your data. As an example, some of our customers run ffmpeg on videos that they upload, to produce different variants to then store in Manta. [1] https://github.com/joyent/smartos-live https://github.com/joyent/smartos-live [2] https://github.com/joyent/illumos-joyent https://github.com/joyent/illumos-joyent [3] https://github.com/joyent/manta https://github.com/joyent/manta [4] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/25/joyent_object_store/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/25/joyent_object_store/

bobsil1 10y ago

This is John Gruber's nightmare :) (worked at Joyent before Daring Fireball)

pazimzadeh 10y ago
It looks like Daring Fireball is still hosted on Joyent, soon to be Samsung. https://twitter.com/gruber/status/560507384536498176 https://twitter.com/gruber/status/560507384536498176

alrs 10y ago

This is great news for on-prem object storage. I look forward to seeing how big Samsung is able to go with Manta.

sidcool 10y ago

I wonder what would Samsung gain from an IaaS kind of company. Do they have an IaaS product? Or is it for internal use?

corv 10y ago

"Joyent will operate as a standalone company under Samsung and continue providing cloud infrastructure and software services to its customers"

andrewwhartion 10y ago

Well done guys on staying solvent longer than the market could stay irrational!

subway 10y ago

SmartOS will be on ARM within 12 months. Calling it.

Annatar 10y ago
I sure hope so, but the high performance nature and intent of SmartOS is at odds with the low electricity consumption, low number crunching performance of the Acorn RISC Machines processor. SmartOS is optimized for CPU bursting and squeezing as many tenants at bare metal speed as possible, while ARM is designed not to consume lots of power at the expense of raw performance. That said, since SmartOS is based on illumos, and illumos is designed from the ground up to be portable, running SmartOS on ARM would be cool, since it would open the doors for illumos on embedded devices. I would so love me an illumos based, iPad Pro-like tablet...
ranty 10y ago
It's pretty much welded to x86 and it's entire design is server-only. It'd be much, much harder to port than just using Android.
- e12e 10y ago
  Android on servers, like Linux? SmartOS on Arm servers would probably make a lot of sense, given that Samsung might then have a vertically integrated infrastructure: mainboard/chipset, cpu, ram, ssd and software all made by Samsung for Samsung?

a_small_island 10y ago

Joyent raised over $125M in venture [0], and no mention of a price? Wonder how the employees faired in this... [0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/joyent https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/joyent

knurdle 10y ago

Hey, maybe Joyent can finally afford to refund the people who supported it when it was textdrive and then went back on their word! Snarky I know but I'm still bitter about how it was all handled..

lftl 10y ago
As a fellow early textdrive supporter, I'm pretty happy with the value I got out of the deal. I'm still using my free strongspace account 10ish years later. I think there was some email about a free hosting account I could theoretically use with some company, but I never looked into it. Honestly, textdrive's hosting was never really of a quality I could use in a professional context anyway. I understand some bitterness, but any "lifetime" deal has to be taken with a pretty big grain of salt, and I'm pretty happy about what I got for the money.
- darylfritz 10y ago
  > I think there was some email about a free hosting account I could theoretically use with some company, but I never looked into it. We were offered either one or three free years of hosting on a Joyent SmartMachine, depending on what your initial investment was. After this free trial, you would be converted to a regular customer. Adding my voice to the bitter-parade. Joyent wouldn't be where they are today without us early bootstrap investors. It was basically a Kickstarter campaign before Kickstarter existed. Not only do I feel like I failed to receive my early investor benefits, but WORSE off was how the whole situation was handled. We had to beg and plead to get our data back. The company essentially went dark to all of their oldest, most loyal customers.
- knurdle 10y ago
  It wasn't about the money or the value I got out of it. For me, it was the way I felt like I was treated. It felt like, hey, we've pivoted the company but we still have to support these old users and they are becoming a pain, let's give them a credit on something that's kinda like what they paid for and be done with them. Then when enough people complained, then they tried to find some solution at the last minute and even that felt dubious. Let's try to cobble something together that's barely working for these people and make it someone else's problem. I totally take the "lifetime" deal with a grain of salt but it wasn't like the company folded because it ran out of money or wasn't successful. It was more like we got successful so we forgot about the little people.

bogomipz 10y ago

I'm sorry but how is this a good fit? What is the synergy here? This particular sentence is incredibly vapid: "By bringing these two companies together we are creating the opportunity to develop and bring to market vertically integrated mobile and IoT services and solutions that deliver extraordinary simplicity and value to our customers."

JoshPersy 10y ago
I completely agree with you. Would be interesting to know a little bit more about the company strategy.

unixhero 10y ago

Congrats Bryan. If anybody deserve it, it's you guys.

leommoore 10y ago

Best wishes to all at Joyent. Thanks for all your work in the community over the last few years, particularly with node.js. Hopefully Samsung will give you the resources and reach to go on to better things in future.

monatron 10y ago

As I toil away on a node based project that is interfacing with Samsung's Artik platform (both the Artik 10 board and Artik Cloud) I finally decided to call it a night -- check HN real quick -- and discover that Samsung is buying the original stewards of node. I almost thought the lack of sleep was putting me into psychosis...

byesurprises 10y ago

Congratulations Joyent on the acquisition with Samsung. Hope the customer experience will be taken to the next level.

JoshPersy 10y ago

No matter on which way I try to look at this, but I cannot find any good reason on Samsung company strategy to justify this acquisition. Any Ideas?

ClassyPuff 10y ago

Great news and good acquisition as well. Great work Samsung!!!!!

deleted 10y ago

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ChrisArchitect 10y ago

wow, Joyent. Took me a bit to remember what they were doing in the early early days since we're multiple generations or pivots or focus-shifts on now......but it was Textdrive/Textile/Textpattern CMS. Ha. Different times. At least some of that still out there in OSS Land

urza 10y ago

Cloud orchestration, Container Orchestration, Kubernetes... I think I am getting old and starting to understand how my parents feel about technology. I am developer, but mostly work on desktop apps, or embedded devices or lataly on some MVC applications. But reading things like "A Container-Native Stack for Modern Applications and Operations Increase development velocity while simplifying operations." I have no idea what should I imagine and what is it good for... any good introduction or explanation into what is it they actually do?

eliah 10y ago
This might be more in-depth than what you're looking for, but I found this (long) slideshow useful: https://joshpadnick.com/2015/09/01/my-talk-on-choosing-the-right-framework-for-running-docker-containers-in-production/ https://joshpadnick.com/2015/09/01/my-talk-on-choosing-the-r...
novaleaf 10y ago
I always think (thought?) containers are good if you own your own hardware. I use 'micro' cloud vm instances for my deployments and don't feel the need to squish more functionality into a $5/month VM.
moondev 10y ago
For the most part if your application is developed 12 factor style: http://12factor.net http://12factor.net, you shouldn't have to worry about these things as a developer. Stuff like this is more in the ops space. Cloud orchestration: the logic for how your platform provisions and launches instances (think ec2) into your fleet of resources. Container orchestration: the logic for how your applications (containers) are distributed across your fleet of instances Kubernetes: Software that runs on your fleet and manages how/where/when container orchestration happens. There are many players in this space such as mesosphere, swarm, ecs and so on.
- deleted 10y ago
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bkanber 10y ago

crudbug 10y ago

Next up some SmartOS desktop / mobile builds

OhHeyItsE 10y ago

Can anyone shed some light (speculate, perhaps) on Samsung's strategy here? Just seems like an odd pairing to me.

beaugunderson 10y ago

One company with all-male board & management team buys another company with all-male board & management team.

d2ncal 10y ago

If anyone has a good background, what exactly does Joyent have that is so valuable? It seems that NodeJS has moved out of Joyent. They have hosted container support that seems to run on solaris, which seems interesting, but a bit too much of buzz-wordy from their website. I am not very familiar with this, so will be great if someone can explain a little bit. I read the comments around orchestration, but am more interested in Joyent's value proposition.

caffed 10y ago

Ok... Let's start on iojs 7!

deleted 10y ago

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yangtheman 10y ago

As a Korean American who also has worked at Samsung headquarters, I think it's more of bad news than good news, no matter how Joyent wants to spin it. Its corporate culture only allows the most cunning, politically savvy person to stay alive and move up the rank, and thus most executives (all if I limit it to small sample of executives I've personally met) fit that model. And shit literally flows downwards, where goals/promises set by them would be pushed downwards and engineers have to take the burden. It doesn't help that Korean society is very hierarchal and based on Confucius principles, where you don't usually challenge older persons and/or someone higher in the rank. This is one example that describes serious problem - http://thediplomat.com/2013/07/asiana-airlines-crash-a-cockpit-culture-problem/ http://thediplomat.com/2013/07/asiana-airlines-crash-a-cockp.... For those of you who are intrigued and have time, I suggest watching Misaeng with English subtitles (https://www.viki.com/tv/20812c-incomplete-life https://www.viki.com/tv/20812c-incomplete-life). Samsung isn't as bad, but the same hierarchy, verbal abuse, social dynamics, and strict rules on paper format exist. The best outcome would be if they leave Joyent's management and culture alone. But I doubt it. I also have the first-hand experience of their applying the same "consumer electronics" mentality to completely different business which required high-touch sales. There is no denying success of Samsung - multi-billion, international corporation. However, Samsung is only good at generating quality hardware products at mass scale. There have not been success in any sort of software and services. Perhaps they are trying to expand beyond their strengths, and I applaud that effort and they actually do need it, since it's only matter of time Chinese companies will catch up and produce as quality products as Samsung, as Samsung did to Sony. I hope it bears fruits. I hope they can allow Joyent to succeed and thrive, and learn from that. I will see what happens next few years.

carapace 10y ago

(Thin sans-serif body text means you hate your readers.)

st3v3r 10y ago

Well that sucks. They had a good run, but Samsung's business culture is probably going to ruin them. Just check out some of the stories of their internal software engineering process.