As of this past Tuesday, Marak Squires is no longer an employee of Nodejitsu. As one of the founding members of the company, Marak has been an integral part of what Nodejitsu has built so far, and changes like this are never easy.
Over the last two years, as the business and team have grown, the founders’ ideas about management and policy grew to be at odds. Starting a company takes passion and strong personalities, but eventually company disagreements spilled over into being too personal. In order to maintain a healthy, respectful work environment, we felt we needed to separate ourselves.
To clarify, Flatiron is a Nodejitsu initiative. While Marak has been one of its key architects and proponents, his departure from the company does not mean the end of Flatiron. Quite to the contrary, the Flatiron framework and associated tools are used to power many key parts of Nodejitsu’s cloud offering. Flatiron will remain open-source, and our commitment to free open source software with non-restrictive licenses remains steadfast. We will continue to collaborate with the node.js community to build and innovate Flatiron.js.
Marak’s contributions to Nodejitsu, as well as node.js in general, have been innumerable. His evangelism in the early days was instrumental to helping many people find and embrace node.js - including several key members of our team. Perhaps most importantly, his unique and outgoing sense of humor has been an important part of our team morale, as well as the spirit of the node community in general.
This has been a very difficult decision, but one which had to be made so that we could continue to build and grow Nodejitsu into what we believe it can be. We will always be grateful for Marak’s contributions and we hope the node.js community will continue to benefit from his talents.