Ben Noordhuis's Departure

http://blog.nodejs.org/2013/12/03/bnoordhuis-departure/

by clloyd • 13 years ago

208 224 13 years ago

blog.nodejs.org

kirinan• 13 years ago

This is so sad on many different levels. A guy who clearly liked working on this module has to make a choice to walk (which is his choice) because people get offended by pronouns. I seriously don't like where all this is headed: where he, she, they are all NEEDED so people don't get offended. This is the whole christmas thing all over again, and it needs to be enforced by society that just because you don't like something and it "offends" you then it doesn't mean that people can't/won't do it. in this case, a very popular project loses a great contributor but how long before other things like this starts happening because people are "offended" by little things. Good job on Ben for standing on for whats right, and hope more people take his route and say enough is enough.

sneak6• 13 years ago

No, this is trivial and his stand was just him being pointlessly argumentative. It's entirely unproductive from both an equal rights standpoint as well as a technical one.

Drama for drama's sake is and should remain a firing offense.

veemjeem• 13 years ago

If you read the github thread, you'd see that Ben actually never participated in the drama/discussion until it blew up. Ben essentially rejected the pull request, then a giant PR nightmare blew up overnight with blog posts from Joyent & Strongloop. He decided to leave because of the whole ordeal from the companies.

fauigerzigerk• 13 years ago

I guess in big corporations general rules like this may be useful to consistently deal with several such incidents per month. But in the context we're talking about, language like "firing offense" is itself needlessly dramatizing.

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.

adamnemecek• 13 years ago

'Donglegate' 2.0. Also this submission will not be on the front page in less than 30 minutes.

DanBC4• 13 years ago

Because threads like these are tainted by hateful mra idiots who joined HN in droves about 8 months ago.

jcromartie2• 13 years ago

hateful mra idiots

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.

phaed• 13 years ago

I'm in support Ben's decision 100%.

Myrmornis4• 13 years ago

Me too

vbtechguy• 13 years ago

Indeed on Ben's side in this but personally, I don't think Ben should of stepped aside/left.

arunoda• 13 years ago

This is the same thing I'd do if I've faced something like this.

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.

cliftonk• 13 years ago

Joyent's decision to publicly shame one of Node's largest contributors with a passive-aggressive blog post instead of approaching him privately speaks volumes about their maturity.

Lazare8• 13 years ago

I dunno, I'd label it more as outright, actively aggressive.

IsaacSchlueter4• 13 years ago

How do you know that no one approached him privately?

fit2rule• 13 years ago

It does speak volumes, and personally I will be staying the hell away from Joyent in the future. Their management seem to be more willing to make political points than technical assets.

selmnoo2• 13 years ago

For those who don't know what's going on: Joyent made a blogpost calling Ben, (one of _THE_ most prolific contributors to nodjs), an asshole (http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun) and said they'd fire him if he'd been working for them, because he refused to take a commit making language in some part of the code gender-neutral. Here's Ben's last response to the whole ordeal: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568...

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.

mseepgood• 13 years ago

because he refused to take a commit making language in some part of the code gender-neutral

He didn't only refuse such a commit. He actively reverted it.

Lazare8• 13 years ago

On procedural grounds.

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.

Zikes5• 13 years ago

Semantics. It's the same as saying "no", and then saying "no" again.

Really, if there's one thing I thought feminists had taken to heart it's "no means no".

mcantelon• 13 years ago

He claims he reverted it because the commit was pushed through without going through the required process. My guess is the whole affair was the boiling over of tensions that existed long before the pull request.

waterlion2• 13 years ago

Can you explain why you are ignoring the fact that he was following the procedure (i.e. had no choice, the committer wasn't in the Committers file) and clearly didn't realise that the commit had been accepted by someone else?

So many people seem to be wilfully ignoring the facts and I can't understand why.

Can you explain?

jbigelow76• 13 years ago

    >Here's hoping Ben now finds a workplace that appreciates him for his talents and respects him as a person.

Did Ben leave strongloop as well? Reading between the lines regarding stepping away form Node.js vs just the responsibilities that come with being a core contributor looks ambiguous.

selmnoo2• 13 years ago

That was the impression I got from some idle IRC chat, but after checking for myself I can find no concrete evidence verifying if he's parted ways with Strongloop or not.

xs_kid6• 13 years ago

That was Joyent defending their control over to project, remember that Ben & StrongLoop were a menace for Joyent:

http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/18/can-this-startup-steal-nod...

Lazare8• 13 years ago

That explains a ton, I imagine. It might even explain everything.

...makes Ben's decision to pull out of the project even more interesting though. Where does that leave StrongLoop?

waterlion2• 13 years ago

I've read this elsewhere. Joyent appears to be threatened economically by StrongLoop. And there's a suggestion that Bryan Cantrill was annoyed up by Ben Noordhuis in the past.

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.

chc7• 13 years ago

I think that's attributing malice where a simpler explanation is available. You would be amazed how often people misunderstand the relationships between organizations. People blame Apple for poorly designed Mac and iPhone apps. People blame Google for problems with websites. People blame independent website operators for Google ranking algorithm changes. People will call up and chew out the receptionist at a newspaper for positions taken by its competitor.

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.

sneak6• 13 years ago

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. 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.

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.

jonpaul• 13 years ago

You're forgetting two key points:

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.

Zikes5• 13 years ago

"butthurt" is slang for rape.

I suggest you edit your comment to remove the offensive language and make it more inclusive to the Hacker News community.

parennoob3• 13 years ago

He could have just smooshed the big green button and scored one for the "not pointlessly defaulting to masculine terms" team

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?

res0nat0r• 13 years ago

He gave a perfectly reasonable explanation why he did what he did: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568...

tks21033• 13 years ago

+1 for defending women's rights while using the term 'butthurt'.

salehenrahman2• 13 years ago

You're missing one very important detail: the person issuing the pull request didn't sign a CLA.

GalacticDomin8r• 13 years ago

I feel like wanting to remark that Bryan Cantrill only fanned the fire here in all of this.

You've expressed a thought, not an emotion. Please use "think" instead of "feel".

http://www.wildmind.org/applied/depression/distinguishing-th...

patcon3• 13 years ago

I'd never heard of Ben before this whole ordeal, but he unfortunately projected like an asshole, with zero damage control instincts and no apparent sense of urgency for reconciliation. If you can't contribute to a positive space, you should probably find a less public project where you're free to exercise your lack of emotional intelligence.

patcon3• 13 years ago

Having said that, he didn't deserve a public shaming by the sponsoring organization. Unfortunately, that seems like it was political :/

towski• 13 years ago

I think most of the biggest core contributors are unable to project that kind of emotional intelligence.

Because, well, they are programming, not working PR

yawboakye• 13 years ago

Do you realize the gravity of losing someone like Ben on a project like Node? I know you'd never get around to improving/contributing to Node but how does what you said get us closing to anything?

mcv2• 13 years ago

Ben didn't handle it well, and certainly could have explained himself a bit better. And I disagree with him on the commit; minor language improvements that make the language more inclusive are still valuable, and rejecting them means you're rejecting part of the community.

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.

rohamg• 13 years ago

He did explain himself a day later: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568...

vor_2• 13 years ago

Ben isn't a native English speaker and was following the repo's rules. Joyent publicly shaming him and saying they'd fire him over a gendered pronoun in the documentation is an absurdity. There is prior history between these folks as rivals that explains Joyent's animosity toward Ben.

rodgerd• 13 years ago

Here's hoping Ben now finds a workplace that appreciates him for his talents and respects him as a person.

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...)

jacalata8• 13 years ago

I don't think he appears to really disrespect women. I would say that he is, as are most guys in tech, ignorant of issues around sexism and arrogant enough to believe that if he is not aware of an issue it does not exist. Having read his responses, I think he seems like a reasonable guy who could stand to understand the world better.

edit: it wasn't that long ago? 16 years ago I was in elementary school. That's like 3 tech aeons ago.

DannyBee3• 13 years ago

"He'd better find one that respects him more than he appears to respect women."

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?

ssafejava• 13 years ago

You have to admit, that responding to a very informative message comparing and contracting Solaris's networking stack with Linux's with

  Have you ever kissed a girl?
  - Bryan

is incredibly tasteless.

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.

centrinoblue3• 13 years ago

Ben's a good person. The community bears responsibility for this loss

RyanZAG2• 13 years ago

Just a note:

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.

IsaacSchlueter4• 13 years ago

You say "profit driven" like it's a bad thing.

I thought this was a forum about startups.

gotofritz2• 13 years ago

the post you link to seems quite sensible, I don't see what's the problem with it

znowi• 13 years ago

Jesus. Take a look at this "patch":

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.

jacalata8• 13 years ago

No, it was not because the original documentation used "he". It was because of his rejection of a suggested update, followed by his revert of the update when committed by another guy.

ebrescia• 13 years ago

Absolutely agree. As a woman in tech, these types of discussions make me sick to my stomach. What an absolute waste of time and energy (except for those using it for political gain, I suppose, but they rarely achieve that through these types of shenanigans.)

centrinoblue3• 13 years ago

Did Ben actually confirm he was leaving? If you read hist post on the subject he says:

"I'm probably going to step back from libuv and node.js core development."

Did I miss something?

smrtinsert• 13 years ago

Joyent looks better to me honestly.

rdtsc• 13 years ago

The last time this was discussed the story was buried pretty quickly.

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.

---

sneak6• 13 years ago

But one impression I get from Node.JS and its surrounding community is arrogance and immaturity.

s/Node\.JS/javascript/;

nostrademons• 13 years ago

That's not true at all. There are a number of prominent members of the Javascript community - John Resig, Erik Arvidsson, Glen Murphy, Paul Irish, Alex Russell, etc. - that are very mature and a pleasure to work with. The problem is that Javascript is a very large language and has spawned a number of subcommunities, and as is common with communities, the ones with the most drama attract the most attention.

Zikes5• 13 years ago

Joyent called Ben an asshole and said they wanted to fire him over a minor grammatical preference. [1]

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.

[1] http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun

goldenkey3• 13 years ago

Holy crap, what a read. You have to wonder... What feminist muff is he puffing? I can't stand white knighting especially when it befalls other men in armor. Ben, you've got my sympathies and support, sorry you have to hear this immature politico-feminist-fascluckery from Joyent

rosser2• 13 years ago

What feminist muff is he puffing?

Seriously, what does this contribute to the discussion?

jacalata8• 13 years ago

I can't stand white knighting especially when it befalls other men in armor what does that even mean?

Myrmornis4• 13 years ago

Agreed. Perhaps injudicious to fan the flames with a word like "muff" but I also 100% support this guy Ben Nordhuuis's response. Gender inequality is a real and important issue, but that does not mean that people writing code have to accept pull requests from busybodies piddling around with pronouns in comments.

aabalkan• 13 years ago

For those who don't know the background of the story:

[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.]

that seems like the result.

goldenkey3• 13 years ago

They also call him an asshole.

http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun

chc7• 13 years ago

Ben wasn't "fired" — he voluntarily resigned from the Node and libuv projects because he was so put off by the treatment he was receiving.

xs_kid6• 13 years ago

Sure, he voluntarily resigned after of being called an asshole and sexist by the project owner (Joyent), seems totally expected in my opinion.

yebyen2• 13 years ago

Distinctions like that are meaningful to the unemployment office and in a court of law. They actually said they were firing him, publicly, and he left the project. The fact (of law) is probably that he resigned, voluntarily. I actually came to say "I don't care" but after critical analysis, I think you're wrong. He was fired.

parennoob3• 13 years ago

People who want to ruthlessly enforce their personal version of political correctness (Bryan Cantrill in particular, and Ben's employer Issac Roth, who seems to have competed with Bryan in a no-I-am-the-bigger-asshole contest) forced an important core committer out because he tried to enforce accepted commit policy. This is a particularly aggressive brand of feminism, one that I have mostly seen in the USA. It seems to be mostly dictated by people pushing through their changes based on their ideology at any cost, by branding anyone who opposes them as discriminatory oppressors.

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-...

rmgraham• 13 years ago

Was the strongloop blog post modified since you linked to it? It really doesn't match your characterization of Issac Roth at all. Quite the opposite, actually.

parennoob3• 13 years ago

These are the lines that make me think he is an asshole.

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!"

centrinoblue3• 13 years ago

Issac Roth is not an asshole. The quote about firing Ben was a joke that didn't translate well.

Lazare8• 13 years ago

Inevitable, but a real injustice.

I guess Joyent got what they wanted. Hope it was worth the bad taste it leaves in people's mouths.

dekz• 13 years ago

Wow. Joyent certainly came out looking childish and pedantic to go so far as publishing a blog posturing and name calling[1]. I am at a loss to even comprehend why this amount of feminist alliance was even required by Bryan Cantrill, or why even such a public naming and shaming is being advocated by Joyent as a company. I'm not on the Joyent hate wagon but they certainly come out of this looking hilariously immature.

@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...

xs_kid6• 13 years ago

Joyent was clearly trying to harm the reputation of Ben and of his employeer StrongLoop

malandrew17• 13 years ago

Which is why this project should have been transferred from Ryan Dahl's github account to Isaac's github account or to a new NodeJS organizational github account.

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.

michaelsbradley• 13 years ago

I find myself quite saddened by the whole affair.

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.

[1] https://github.com/mikeal

[2] https://gist.github.com/mikeal/7724521

xs_kid6• 13 years ago

Because of this incident (and Joyent response on it), Isaac Roth from StrongLoop and others are asking for a neutral home for project:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/nodejs/mqSf47HhmyY/Wl8Od9vb1...

bowlofpetunias• 13 years ago

Although Ben could have handled this better, it's quite obvious that this is just a strategically motivated witch hunt by Joyent. Their actions are vicious and completely out of proportion.

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.

IsaacSchlueter4• 13 years ago

Yep. Joyent's new corporate strategy: hunting witches. Nailed it.

doe88• 13 years ago

Which would indeed explain the sheer violence of the blog post.

tkorri• 13 years ago

In the recent weeks I've seend a few businesses make stupid statements on their websites and on social media. As a business owner I just don't understand why they're doing that. What do you achieve when you call your customer/associate/employee a(n) asshole/liar on your website?

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.

Afforess• 13 years ago

Agreed. From a business perspective Joylent's actions in this matter make no sense. Do they hope to gain sales from people impressed with their extreme name-calling?

I for one will not be recommending them or using their services in the future.

__pThrow• 13 years ago

I can't imagine ever wanting to work for Bryan Cantrill or Joyent or even contribute to node.js in any capacity.

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.

sendob• 13 years ago

I still admire some of the work he has done, but I have to also count myself among those who would not want to work with someone so willing to grand stand and just generally so hostile to another human.

One phrase I remember from Cantrill re: Oracle & Solaris was that "People Innovate, not companies". Commits contribute, blog posts rarely do.

Tomte• 13 years ago

That happens when you publicly shame and demonize your core contributors.

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...

Myrmornis4• 13 years ago

Gender inequality is the world's greatest human rights challenge, but Ben Noordhuis is not the problem. This was idiotic politically correct micromanaging that deserved the response initially given to the PR: "not interested in trivial changes like that".

newman314• 13 years ago

Don't you think genocide or human trafficking trumps that?

Myrmornis4• 13 years ago

You might be right, but the reason I tend to think it's gender inequality is, obviously, because every person has a 50% chance of being affected. And probably every woman on the planet is affected to some degree. Whereas the pan-global, per-person probability of being affected by genocide or human trafficking is extremely small in comparison. My guess is that the average amount of suffering per person ends up being much higher for gender inequality. I.e. for genocide it's a sum over a few million people of a very large amount of suffering each, whereas for gender inequality it is a sum over say 40% of the world's population of smaller amounts of suffering each, plus a sum over, say, 10% of the world's population of a large amount of suffering (e.g. women who are denied access to education, denied personal freedom of movement outside their homes, etc).

lettergram• 13 years ago

I think from now on I am going to use "him" sometimes and "her" sometimes in my code. I'll flip a coin on which one to use.

neokya• 13 years ago

What a disaster. This company @joyent totally fucked up the whole situation.

malandrew17• 13 years ago

Joyent,

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.

http://substack.net/images/coronation.png

drderidder3• 13 years ago

When Ryan originally announced the transition to Joyent, someone asked if node would be moved to Joyent's github repo. Isaac replied: "I hope not". But now he asserts that Joyent owns node, and considers it a "cash cow".

malandrew17• 13 years ago

Who owns the trademark?

benatkin• 13 years ago

I think this was between ry/node and joyent/node, not nodejs/node and joyent/node.

lolwutf• 13 years ago

To everyone who felt polarized by this issue, I want you to take a second and feel shame.

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.

aquadrop• 13 years ago

Did actually any women complain? Cause all I saw was bunch of guys arguing about how awful it is to use gender pronouns. I wouldn't care if all examples were written with "her". Cause that's absolutely unimportant. As I understand there's more serious, real issues with gender equality, like: salary difference, not promoting women, entering barrier, etc. Not damn "he" in doc examples. And as Ben mentioned he actually do some real things: 'I volunteer in a mentorship program that gets young people - especially young women - involved in technology.' Too bad they all didn't talked it over privately in the very beginning and resolved the issue. That retaliation post by Bryan Cantrill only hurts Joyent's reputation in my eyes.

WhaleBiologist2• 13 years ago

Sadly this is the exact behaviour I have come to expect from these types of people.

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).

ravisarma• 13 years ago

To answer your question: Yes. https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d... (please scroll).

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.

htp• 13 years ago

This is the kind of thing that helps me understand why people don’t want to contribute to open source:

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?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5106767

gotofritz2• 13 years ago

That's it, I'm out. I'm dropping node for dart.

aktau3• 13 years ago

I already had done so, but it makes me feel even better about dropping node for go. Not just because of the increased sanity go brings to my codebase (no more callback hell, which frankly was a mess even with node addon libraries). Now I can also feel good about not tacitly supporting Joyent, way to make good people leave.

dccoolgai• 13 years ago

Using gender-neutral pronouns in English is the right thing to do...but this guy is a native Dutch speaker. Seems really insensitive and hegemonic to have jumped down his throat like that, considering.

xs_kid6• 13 years ago

"Many of you already have expressed your opinion regarding recent drama, and I'd like to ask that you please respect our wishes to let this issue rest, so that we can all focus on the road forward."

Sure, please don't talk about this anymore since it can harm to Joyent's reputation and business.

Zelphyr• 13 years ago

Oh my GOD I can't believe this is actually a thing.

mmgutz• 13 years ago

Ridiculous. First Ryan Dahl, now Ben.

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.

caseman72• 13 years ago

I think each of the people who comment on github should have to do it in Dutch (and try to get the pronouns correct).

Ben Noordhuis's Departure

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