Io.js is a fork of joyent/node and created by Fedor Indutny. Fedor Indutny is a long-time active node core team member, who responsible for some of the most important parts of the Node.js runtime. Io.js continues the work that was previously being done by Node Forward in the node-forward/node repository and the io.js team hopes to merge with the original Node.js project in the future. So what you think, is NodeJS splitting into two versions?

On October 9th, Scott Hammond told Mikeal Rogers that the node-forward/node repository was a violation of Joyent’s trademark on Node.js. Also expressed that he saw this is like a sign of bad faith and his efforts was undermining in the creation of an advisory board. Isaac Z. Schlueter brought up the issue again on November 20 in the Joyent Node Advisory Board(JNAB) meeting. Scott Hammond made it clear that releasing code based on Joyent Node.js is a violation of Joyent’s trademark, and their trademark was protected. He requested that anybody can choose a name other than “node” if he wants to make this project public. By that time, at the JNAB meetings all were clear about forward progress. So, io.js team had taken steps towards a consensus-based open governance model rather than dictated by any one corporation.

Joyent wants Nodejs to be very stable in a time when Javascript is undergoing a lot of surgery both cosmetic and in functionality. This means that Nodejs stays on an older version of V8 which does not support some new and attractive Javascript features such as generators by default. I have read that because of this, both core contributors and others have been frustrated when pull requests are not accepted. But io.js is going to land all changes to V8 as soon as they become stable and making all these features available to developers as soon as possible.

The community has been waiting for NodeJs v0.12 which was teased several times as being imminent to only be put off for later at least twice and waiting for the release for at least an year now. iojs wants to use semantic versioning and continuous integration. This is why iojs reached v1.0 before Nodejs did and will probably stay ahead of Node in this matter.
He also described the goals of io.js as following:

• Continuous integration
• 100% passing tests as a normal state of affairs
• Strict SemVer-compliant versioning
• Contributor ownership, outside of corporate control
• Transparent consensus-seeking governance
• Weekly releases
• Supported versions of V8
• Active development
• Predictable roadmap
• Community engagement