This is a hilariously out of touch move by Joyent.
The major concern most people have with node.js is the governance model - the fact that a single corporation controls it makes a lot of people uneasy.
This thin ploy really highlights exactly the kind of company that Joyent is and really validates those concerns. They're not interested in working together with io.js, they're interested in using their corporate muscle to squash what they see as a competitor.
The worst thing is the incentives they're using are barbed - really they're just offering you a discount on their products in return for locking you in to them.
To be fair - they have an incubator program they're already running to encourage NodeJS adoption:
"The company's Node.js Incubator Program is designed for companies, startups, and individuals doing interesting things with Node. Members will receive Joyent’s training and support, $25,000 worth of services in Joyent Cloud Hosting, tools and debugging, access to Node project leader Timothy J Fontaine, plus marketing and networking opportunities."
I can totally understand why they'd not want to _pay money_ to people who switched.
That said since Node and IO are compatible I don't get why they'd want to slow progress like that - they're hooking people on their cloud services (which will work just fine in IO code) their ecosystem (the package manager NPM works on both IO and node) and their services. They could totally at least make a more reasonable statement than "What's IO".
obligatory mention that 6to5[0] lets you use all this stuff, and more, today. I've been using it for 3 months now and it has totally transformed the way I write JS applications, it's awesome.
When I started to use the web there were campaigns like best viewed in any browser, and the browser wars were just starting. I didn't realize that sharing my sentiment would be perceived as complaining. I know how to disable noscript.
The times had changed. Semantic Web is dead. Nobody anymore gives a damn about that, everyone's drunk the kool-aid of webapps.
Everyone used to hate Flash, but it's perceived as normal when the pages are bundled a good chunk of rendering/layout engine to run inside your browser engine. Can't track you and serve you advertisements with plain hypertext documents, duh.
The issue here is not GP's browsing experience. It's the fact that they failed to address such an elementry UX usecase that should not have occured in the first place; eithrr degrade gracefully or use a noscript tag. This failure is unacceptable if they are the same folks who are working on the web browser, seeing that its UVP is mostly UX.
