io.js spent part of December in a rapid incubation, and released in early January.

It's stable for me on several production applications, but what does 'stable' actually mean, vs 'beta'.

Their community started open, and remains open, and has a larger contributing base than node by more than triple. They have an open technical committee, with meetings that anyone can attending (and I have).

Here's the spade: You're wrong. Actually do your research, have facts that you can back up, and try again. Your tune will be very different when you have the facts.

> io.js kept mum until the last moment before their release, with an invite-only codebase.

This is factually inaccurate. Fedor Indutny created the iojs fork on November 26th. The 1.0 release came out on January 13th, significantly less than 6 months. The iojs repo was always public.

The project you're referring to was the node-forward/node repo, which was initially public and forced to be made private due to Joyent's trademark.

This history is all fully documented here: http://blog.izs.me/post/104685388058/io-js

I agree io.js has generated some of its own hype; that's why I'm surprised Joyent has distanced themselves from it. Node is coasting on a lot of previous hype, but io.js is poised to steal the proverbial thunder. "Node is stable," AKA "Node isn't going to change or disrupt anything," is meanwhile a powerful argument, maybe especially to Joyent's customers, but that isn't always a good thing (think IE6), and it definitely isn't a good way to build hype.