Here's my take on all of this: https://www.sitepen.com/blog/2016/10/17/announcing-the-js-fo...

The feedback is interesting, but I think it helps to understand more of the history to get that most of the negative feedback here is overreaction. Some thoughts:

* No, the foundation isn't trying to dominate or tell people what to do. It's trying to support open source projects through their lifecycle. Running a project can be a rather lonely and frustrating experience at times, but can also be very rewarding

* Open source foundations provide legal protection to individuals and corporations that contribute and use open source software, and help ensure that one company or person doesn't turn evil and try to pull the carpet out from under the community (which has happened many times in the history of OSS)

* Regarding standardization, the foundation has members on TC39, W3C TAG, etc. Helping with standards is time consuming (and something I personally don't want to spend any time on), but it does help to gather ideas and have a way to contribute in a smaller way to the process

* As a foundation, we don't require any project to merge or conform with another. We have 3 testing tools (Intern, Mocha, and QUnit) which all have different philosophical approaches. But there are certainly things we could collaborate on, inside or outside the foundation.

* The foundation is not a place for projects to go to die. For example, many think of Dojo 1.x as old (because it's been under active use and development since 2004), but if you look at the work being done on Dojo 2 ( http://github.com/dojo/meta ), you'll see that it's on its way to reinventing itself as a modern TypeScript based approach to building web apps.

* Over the years we've worked with many large companies, and it's important to remember that companies are made of individuals. These companies have behaved on the OSS front in a very helpful manner (and I'm a huge skeptic in general). IBM has contributed as much over the years to JS OSS as anyone out there. The amount of help they provided in a11y and i18n is second to none, and they've helped Dojo, jQuery, PhoneGap/Cordova and others in significant ways.

* The list of founding members is smaller than we would have liked, but many times, you need to put something out there before people will join (it's more difficult to convince someone to sponsor something not yet announced than something fully baked). And just because you haven't heard of a company doesn't mean they don't do interesting and important things. The goal was not to just get a bunch of large companies to push their logos, but to get a group of people that care about the open web involved.

Overall it seems like the community loves to hate on things out of FUD (nothing new), but really we're just a group of people that create OSS that solves problems we have as developers. Really we just want to help, and a foundation is just one way to encourage collaboration.