Node.js Forked By Top Contributors

New submitter jonhorvath writes: Several of the top contributors to Node.js, a popular open source run-time environment, have decided to fork the project, creating io.js as an alternative. The developers were unhappy with how cloud computing company Joyent was directing work on Node.js. Mikeal Rogers said, "We don't want to have just one person who's appointed by a company making decisions. We want contributors to have more control, to seek consensus." Here's the new repository, and a README file to go with it. A developer at Uber tweeted that they've already migrated to io.js on their production systems. It'll be interesting to see how many other sites follow.

Comments

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[Trepidity]

I believe this is one part of the "Node Forward" project.

Joyent unfit to lead them?

[MikeRT]

You think? You treat a core contributor like this and then wonder why he steps down and leaves? The best part is that when they announced his departure they're like "yeah, uh we totally respect him and his amazing contributions now please respect our wishes and stop bringing up the fact that we are a bunch of SJW tools who treated a major contributor with less respect than Linus Torvalds treats people who intentionally crap all over his code base."

I've shown this crap to coworkers who were interested in learning Node and their reaction was "W...T...F..." that's how they treat their community?

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[bigguy4u]

He resisted the correction not because he was opposed to the content of the changes, but the way the change was applied. As later explained, one of the guidelines they had was to accumulate small doc changes until they had enough to prevent git-blame from becoming too convoluted, or at least that's what was being said. This was why the initial PR was rejected, and when somebody else merged it in after the rejection, the commit was undone due to contributor politics. It was never about the gender pronouns, but people conveniently disregarded anything stating otherwise and called the contributor sexist and other such things; joyent decided to join in and called him an "asshole", despite, again, this not being about gender pronouns, but the git history. The contributor later explained his position.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[stonecypher]

Oh nonsense.

to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent.

Back here in the real world, this is how this sounds:

"Ben decided that someone was making changes to the codebase that had no technical purpose, which served solely to push someone's weird social agenda and desperation to modify the language to suit them, as well as to refer to anything which went otherwise as sexist. Since this is pointless, and since Ben has been in communities where this created unnecessary shitstorms, Ben rejected the PR in the hope of preventing a bunch of drama-driven developers from wasting a year complaining about unimportant things. When Isaac decided to merge the PR, Ben felt slighted: he had been given the authority to make these decisions, and Isaac decided to make a social point that Ben would get trampled no matter what."

That's all fine and good. One developer is being a neckbeard about not wanting to hear a cry of oppression in something that has nothing to do with social justice. The other developer is being a neckbeard about being all inclusive no matter the tone.

Then you get to the point that adults are angry about.

and if he had been, he wouldn't be as of this morning: to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent.

That says "we value Ben so little that our disagreement over the nature of an unimportant, purely social justice related, non-technical PR would have caused us to fire him on the spot, instead of to have a discussion."

That's *ridiculous*. Employers have an obligation to their employees to create safety and stability. There is no legitimate cause on God's green earth for that to be a fireable offense. Joyent's management are PR-oriented children, and that you're standing up for them is an embarrassment to the 'movement' you're trying to rationalize.

I am a gay and trans ally.

But nobody should get anything sterner over something like that than a stern talking to. That's *obscene*.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, can't share your outrage. Using gender-neutral pronouns for documentation seems reasonable to me, especially if viewable by the public, and if that documentation is linked to your company. To refuse to correct gendered pronouns just seems perverse.

In the English language, words like "he" and "him" are used in the contexts when the sex is masculine, neutral, or unknown. Words like "she" and "her" are only used when the sex is both known and known to be feminine. Let me repeat and bold this: "he" and "him" are the gender-neutral terms. The documentation was already gender-neutral. What is perverse is saying that somebody should be fired because you don't know second-grade English, as Bryan Cantrill did.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Jesus_666]

The blog is useless. I read the Github discussion on the pull request and the revert. Here's what happened:

1. A pull request containing only two very minor changes to comments in the source code was made.
2. Mr. Noordhuis rejected the pull request with a terse "Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that."
3. A flamewar erupts about the appropriateness and neccessity of the singular "they". Mr. Noordhuis is not participating in the flamewar.
4. The pull request is forced through while the flamewar rages on.
5. Mr. Noordhuis reverts the forced landing on the grounds that it violated project policy. The revert immediately begins to accumulate a fair number of hostile comments.
6. The flamewar intensifies. Allegations are made about Mr. Noordhuis's character.
7. A joyent employee, acting in an official role and using Joyent's official blog, decided to write and publish a text about how Mr. Noordhuis is sexist and would've gotten fired from Joyent on the spot, indirectly calling Mr. Noordhuis an asshole in the process. Joyent, by not taking the text down, implicitly endorses it.
8. Mr. Noordhuis posts into the discussion to point out that the rejection/revert had been made on purely procedural grounds. He simultaneously announces that he will leave the project, which I can fully understand.

After that the flame war goes on. Some people actually point out that Joyent's behavior is highly unprofessional, which the Joyent employee disregards because "'Fired' isn't a gendered word that has larger social ramifications that careless use of pronouns does." So yes; according to Joyent, publicly calling someone so sexist that they would've been fired on the spot is less bad than using "he" in a gender-neutral role. (Bonus points for one woman in the discussion calling the whole thing a "witch burning". For the record, she was also the one person to offer a solution instead of flaming about pronouns.)

If IBM and Oracle worked remotely like that they'd be up to their ears in wrongful termination suits. And libel suits. And, depending on whether insults are an actionable offense in the relevant jurisdiction, suits about that too.

The sad thing is that early on someone offered a perfectly reasonable way of resolving the situation: Mandating the singular "they" in the project's coding guidelines and then floating changes to existing code until they can be mixed in with other refactoring commits. Of course it was completely ignored.


(For the record, I am a proponent of singular-they and I still think that the term "social justice warriors" with all its negative connotations entirely applies here. Many of the people involved completely went off the rails as soon as the pull request was rejected and immediately assumed Mr. Noordhuis to be a moustache-twirling antifeminist villain.)

Re:take their money and run... real classy

[petermgreen]

if these open source projects are going to accept corporate sponsorship, they must do that corporation's bidding.

The people and entities who signed the sponsorship contract must do what they contractually agreed to do (which may be virtually nothing or it may be very specific depends what was in the contract).

Other people aren't bound by that though. Most contributors to open source projects do not have any contract with or obligation to the operators of the project. If they (or their employers if relavent) decide they would rather put their effort into a fork then they are perfectly entitled to do so.

Re:difference?

[Junta]

People don't fork 'just because they can'. They fork because they are failing to get what they want out of the project. It remains to be seen if they are wasting their time.

It could be like ethereal to wireshark, where the holder of the copyright has precisely *zero* development skin in the game.

It could be like XFree86 to Xorg where both had some nominal capability to continue, but it becomes quickly apparent that the fork is where the development effort went.

It could be like Wayland fork where the fork pretty much died (though the main project isn't seeing massive adoption either).

Worst case would be something like the ffmpeg/libav fiasco, where both forks go and which one is available readily for a given distribution is almost more a matter of politics than technical merit, and yet they have significantly diverged.