A lot of people speculated that this is part of a dance Joyent is doing to assert itself as a big cloud player. I don't know how much truth there is to that, but as a general spectator I feel like wanting to remark that Bryan Cantrill only fanned the fire here in all of this. And so perhaps there should be some weight given to the fact that a worker of a company that's a competitor to Joyent just quit, arguably due to Joyent's rough play -- if Joyent had approached the matter differently, carefully, sensitively, there likely would have been a different conclusion to this. But now it's done, and pretty much every participating party in this whole thing came out looking like a loser, Joycent, Strongloop, the whole nodejs scene. Here's hoping Ben now finds a workplace that appreciates him for his talents and respects him as a person.
https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015/files
Ousted the guy because he referred to "user" as a "he" in the comments? Are you fucking kidding me?
I'm all for gender equality, but the amount of drama that came out of this is just insane and disturbing for the hacker community. I can not see it as anything more than pure politics and gender issue as a convenient pretext.
Joyent has lost all credibility for me. And Ben has taken the place of the tech drama queen of the year.
http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/18/can-this-startup-steal-nod...
It is entirely possible that Joyent was getting a lot of blowback along the lines of "Do you guys really have a guy trying to keep gender-neutral language out of this project you control?" from people who didn't understand that Ben was not a Joyent employee, and thus Joyent felt pressured to publicly distance itself.
The way Joyent did this came across as pretty tasteless, but the idea that it was purely political seems to assume more than is really necessary to explain what we've seen. It seems more likely to me that they just wanted to make themselves look good by setting up Ben as the enemy and they did it in a rather ham-fisted way.
...makes Ben's decision to pull out of the project even more interesting though. Where does that leave StrongLoop?
I think that clears up the question of Bryan's intentions in writing that blog post.
Others have said 'judge Noordhuis by his actions not his intentions'. I don't believe this is a fair way to behave, and this demonstrates why.
If he's butthurt over such a tiny change (one that is entirely legitimate, all things considered) in documentation, they're right for calling him an asshole.
Seriously, go look at the diff that he had such an issue with:
https://github.com/alex/libuv/commit/1ff9d18d398fb9f35b72fa0...
He could have just smooshed the big green button and scored one for the "not pointlessly defaulting to masculine terms" team, but instead he had to turn it into an "omfg no this is stupid" debate.
Inequality doesn't change by embracing the status quo simply because that's how we've always done things. As much as Joyent look like turds here, they did the right thing.
If he'd worked for me, I'd have fired him for such assholery too. We're talking about a one-line documentation change of "him" to "they", for fuck's sake.
No specific change should be considered to be above the rules, and especially not those that have some sort of political agenda behind them.
I don't contribute to Node, but if I did, I would expect to follow all their procedures for accepting diffs, and Alex Gaynor's diff should have also been processed according to the same procedure. Why should his diff be more "special" than a one-line change I make in some code?
1) Ben is not a native English speaker, so as stated by Ben, he didn't realize it was a big deal.
2) The committer didn't sign a CLA yet.
I suggest you edit your comment to remove the offensive language and make it more inclusive to the Hacker News community.
You've expressed a thought, not an emotion. Please use "think" instead of "feel".
http://www.wildmind.org/applied/depression/distinguishing-th...
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/nodejs/mqSf47HhmyY/m8QpZE9mJ...
These are the guys in control of nodejs. They appear to be both immature and highly profit driven with far more interest in themselves than the platform. If this isn't a red flag for investing time in nodejs, I don't know what is.
I thought this was a forum about startups.
Because, well, they are programming, not working PR
But the amount of crap he got was totally out of proportion. The commiters should have been able to simply discuss this and decide to handle this better next time.
Maybe this fairly minor incident was blown way out of proportion because of the Joyent-Strongloop friction.
>Here's hoping Ben now finds a workplace that appreciates him for his talents and respects him as a person.
He didn't only refuse such a commit. He actively reverted it.
It hadn't been accepted, as far as Ben knew, by someone with the authority to make that decision, it didn't follow project guidelines, and the contributor hadn't signed a CLA. The revert had nothing to do with grammar and language.
So many people seem to be wilfully ignoring the facts and I can't understand why.
Can you explain?
Really, if there's one thing I thought feminists had taken to heart it's "no means no".
"I'm probably going to step back from libuv and node.js core development."
Did I miss something?
He'd better find one that respects him more than he appears to respect women.
What's oddest about this is the amazing volte-face Bryan Cantrill appears to have performed. It wasn't that long ago he was adressing gross deficiencies in Solaris' performance compared to Linux on SPARC hardware with snarky, personal, and rather sexist jokes: http://www.cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html
(On edit: added more about Cantrill's own background in this area...)
I've read his responses twice now, and i don't see, in either case, anything that makes me think he doesn't respect women. Can you please point it out? I'm genuinely interested. The guy said like 7 sentences none of which said anything like "i think what is being done here is wrong" (instead, he said "i generally reject trivial doc fixes for X reasons") and is being crucified.
From where I sit, you have to add a lot of implications and subtext to what he said to get anything like that.
IE Do you not take him at his word for why he rejected the changes?
Or do you believe the very act of not being interested in these types of trivial doc fixes, when some of them change gender pronouns, makes him disrespectful of women?
(I've belonged to plenty of open source projects that would reject trivial comment/doc fixes like this when done en-masse, regardless of whether they were to fix spelling or gender pronouns or whatever, so i'm willing to take him at his word)
What am I missing?
edit: it wasn't that long ago? 16 years ago I was in elementary school. That's like 3 tech aeons ago.
Have you ever kissed a girl?
- Bryan
But of course that was long ago.
I don't think it at all appropriate to criticize what was clearly an honest mistake with a call for his employer to fire him. I would expect that of the masses on Twitter and commenting on the PR, but not of Joyent or Cantrill.
The number of people I have heard saying stuff like "It was a politically sensitive PR, of course it should have been merged" is surprising. In fact, I would strongly recommend rejecting all such politically sensitive PRs on the basis that they are deliberately controversial, and asking the submitter politely to put their changes in a PR with more significant contributions that they submit to the project.
Relevant links:
[1] Original pull request: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015
[2] Bryan's "I am going to fire Ben, even though he isn't my employee. Fired. Did I say fired yet?" blog post: http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun
[3] Issac Roth's "We'll fire Ben if he doesn't learn grammar. Haha, j/k." blog post: http://strongloop.com/strongblog/collaboration-not-derision-...
> Ben made a mistake by not understanding how important the gender pronoun change was in the pull request. But he was trying to interpret the commit rules...
WTF? Any commit should be according to commit rules. And changes which do not actually affect how the code runs are actually unimportant from a core committer's point of view. Couldn't Issac Roth have empathized with that worldview a little more?
> But people deserve a chance to correct their mistakes and improve.
"You enforced standard commit policy, but because the extreme feminists didn't like it, I am going to give you a chance before firing you."
...aaaand
> If Ben can’t learn, we’ll fire him. [Edit: See comment below. This is not meant literally.]
"If Ben can't learn, we will fire him. Don't worry, only figuratively fire him. Work out how we can figuratively fire him, good day!"
Drama for drama's sake is and should remain a firing offense.
If someone creates drama about something all the time I may not want to continue to work with that person. But if after years of working well together, mistakes are made in one particular conflict that gets out of hand, I'm not going to delegate the matter to Catbert's office right away.
Yes, documentation should be gender neutral. But no, one argument about this should not lead to a core developer leaving.
@bnoordhuis if you're reading this, I've never used libuv as a developer, but you obviously worked hard on the project. I'm sorry you had to felt forced to give it up over some blog post from a company I once believed to be reputable.
[1]: http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun [1a]: mirror: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/3051faface454d516929/raw/3...
Personally, I would love to see Joyent reliquish control over the project over their pettyness in this whole fiasco. They have proven themselves to be a poor steward of the project.
My comment was pertinent to drama and the community, it sort of got reinforced a bit more now so I'll just repost. Sorry for anyone who already read it already.
---
My understanding of Node.JS and libuv community is as an outsider. I don't follow what's going on unless it is on the front page of HN once in a while and other forums.
But one impression I get from Node.JS and its surrounding community is arrogance and immaturity. This is from top to down -- companies sponsoring it (Joyent) and many of its vocal proponents. I see plenty of energy, enthusiasm, but mixed with immaturity. "We don't know what are doing, but darn it! we will be very vocal and do it with lots of enthusiasm".
One guy doesn't want to commit a trivial change. It blows up into a media shitstorm. Reverted commits. Joyent's reaction is what surprised me -- "While we would fire Ben over this". This guy doesn't even work for them. Hypothetically firing people, hmm, so committed to Women's Rights, they are hypothetically hiring, and firing this person on the spot. Have they talked to him in private? StrongLoop, a company I never heard of until this point, is a bit more mature, that's good to see, but even they couldn't resist the veiled threat.
What is sad, as a whole this episode just reinforced the (hopefully wrong) stereotype I have of the community. Joyent instead of helping the community (which I think they thought they did by writing that blog post), are hurting it. Buying into and spending time and money learning a platform/language is also an implicit buy in/participation in the community. So far it screams to me "stay away". Hopefully it will grow up at some point.
---
s/Node\.JS/javascript/;
But let's "please respect [their] wishes to let this issue rest", because it's not like we need an apology or any sort of reassurance from the company that owns a rising star of technology that we're supposed to invest our time and money in.
Good luck finding a replacement.
Seriously, what does this contribute to the discussion?
I am a big fan of Node.js (though I spend as much time or more with Clojure/JVM these days). Over the past year+, I've been very impressed with the tech coming out of Joyent and the engineering team/s led by Bryan Cantrill.
Without intending to be inflammatory, I must say that I found Bryan's blog post regarding pronouns and assholes to be unprofessional and disturbing.
I asked Mikeal Rogers[1] about his thoughts regarding the ethical limits of "unacceptance" policies/campaigns within developer communities and workplaces[2], and I would be interested to read the HN crowd's feedback as well.
Joyent has royally fucked up there, and if I was buying services from them, I'd have stopped now.
They didn't have to like his opinions, but this could have been handled much more amicably (maybe some "agree to disagree" and "we overrule you on this specific issue, no hard feelings").
Instead they chose the nuclear option, not only publicly blogging about how wrong they think Ben was, but actually fantasizing about firing him.
This is what happens when you're flat-out denying the Holocaust here in Germany. But for standing on the "wrong side" of how to handle gernder pronouns? Please...
All I have to say is Node community is fool enough to lose a talent like Ben.
I've got $250 credits from Joyent as a gift for Node Knockout. I will never it and never suggest any of my clients to choose Joyent.
Sidenote: In Ben's native language, using gender neutral pronouns is considerably more contrived and artificial, and therefor not a regular subject of debate when it comes to gender equality.
I encourage Cantrill and Joyent to think about their obligations as founder and employer to their own employees. Ben was not one of their employees, but the callous remarks, the callout culture, the threat of immediate firing over something so trivial speaks to a deep misunderstanding of the modern role of employer and employee.
Cantrill's remarks were shameful. That Joyent didn't walk them back egregious.
One phrase I remember from Cantrill re: Oracle & Solaris was that "People Innovate, not companies". Commits contribute, blog posts rarely do.
I haven't heard of Joyent before this whole thing started. And to be honest, I still don't know what they do, but I'm pretty sure I don't want to do any business with them.
I for one will not be recommending them or using their services in the future.
This was such of little consequence, honestly. This wasn't some massive, elaborately planned, misogynistic plot. This was a matter of few pronouns in a random software project.
Stupid crusades like this do damage. We all need to pick our battles carefully. And not doing as much should collectively be viewed as a bad thing.
If you were mounting up on a crusade about this little issue, let me be clear: you should feel bad.
I love tech's progressive thoughts on individual rights and respect and firm adherence to equality, but sometimes the tech industry loses sight of the forest for the trees, and we should collectively rally against that habit.
Now, we lost an amazing Node contributor.
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/nodejs/mqSf47HhmyY/Wl8Od9vb1...
You can get flamed just for making code public [1]. Contributing to someone else’s project and missing the bar for quality is one thing, but this person _shared some potentially useful code_ and several Internet-famous people took a dump on her project. Wrapping your head around software is already hard enough without having to worry about getting trolled or potentially destroying future opportunities.
Or the case we have here: a couple of actions get taken out of context and have meaning read into them where there wasn’t any, and now people think you’re a misogynist.
Why contribute and deal with all of that potential noise, when you can do _just about anything else_ and not have to worry?
I guess Joyent got what they wanted. Hope it was worth the bad taste it leaves in people's mouths.
[1] http://werd.io/2013/gendered-pronouns-in-software-a-quick-pr...
[2] http://strongloop.com/strongblog/collaboration-not-derision-...
As said in [2]:
If Ben can’t learn, we’ll fire him. [Edit: See comment
below. This is not meant literally.]
Rather than actively work towards fixing the big issues in gender inequality (which requires society as a whole to change, and consequently will take decades of slow improvement), they choose to take the easy route and fill themselves with self-righteous indignation over an open source maintainer who reverted a commit for a trivial documentation change that he thought violated commit procedures. Obviously he is a rampant misogynist and needs to be crucified.
The real irony here is that the people with the pitchforks are generally more sexist than those they choose to lambast, seeing as they feel so compelled to defend poor defenseless women from all aggressors (real and imagined).
However, that's not a necessary criteria. Substitute "he" for some other term, say "white person", and I doubt you'll see the need for a specific member of the excluded segment to speak up.
The real argument is around the second part of your comment. Which can be recast as whether male as the default gender, when used in texts, is a matter of concern for the development/opportunities of women. I think so. Along with salary differences, etc. We do not have to reach to Simone de Beauvoir to make that point... here is a link to a current analysis/view: http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/gender-sensitive-langu....
Quote:
> Moreover, these issues are important for people concerned about issues of social inequality. There is a relationship between our language use and our social reality. If we “erase” women from language, that makes it easier to maintain gender inequality. As Professor Sherryl Kleinman (2000:6) has argued, > > [M]ale-based generics are another indicator—and, more importantly, a reinforcer—of a system in which “man” in the abstract and men in the flesh are privileged over women. > > Words matter, and our language choices have consequences. If we believe that women and men deserve social equality, then we should think seriously about how to reflect that belief in our language use.
They're just the expected outcome of Jezebel/Tumblr Internet feminism. I'm not agreeing with them, but I can see how they may feel like they've been backed into a corner.
Please do the classy thing and have Isaac create a NodeJS organization on Github and move the project to that organization under his stewardship.
With great power came great responsibility and using the Joyent corporate blog to excoriate one of the community's most valuable contributors is the path to the dark side.
Sure, please don't talk about this anymore since it can harm to Joyent's reputation and business.
Why does the guy who wrote the blog post still have a job? That is the most unprofessional post I've read on a company blog.
