> 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
