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

Effort dilution

[Anonymous Coward]

The scourge of Open Source disguised as choice..

Re:Effort dilution

[SQLGuru]

Very true. For "the common man" to know what direction to take, too many choices can be bad......especially when there is more similarity than differences and not enough experience to know which differences will be important to them in the future.

Re:Effort dilution

[Penguinisto]

The scourge of Open Source disguised as choice..

I disagree over the degree of which this would be a problem - think of it more like the free market. Under ideal conditions, the best ideas with the broadest appeal tend to win, grow and evolve, while the worst ideas with little appeal tend to fade away relatively quickly.

It also provides a very useful ejection seat of sorts in case of corporate asshattery (see also OpenOffice/Libre Office), patent follies, or worse. Also, consider this: Closed-Source/proprietary software can be just as prone to this kind of internal dissent as OSS, but you the end-user will never have a say in the results.

Forking is awesome to have as an option - either as a threat or as an actuality. A company who knows that their shit could be forked will either behave themselves, or they will lose control of their product. IMHO that's a damned good thing.

Re:Effort dilution

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to love some of the comments on github: "Gendered language is hostile"

Give me a break. If someone says "she shouldn't submit twice" or "he shouldn't submit twice" and you think that is "hostile" you need to grow up and live in the real world. Get the $@#$ off your butt and do something. Now THAT is hostile.

Adults don't care if it says "he" or "she" or "it". Or should I say "she doesn't care".

Re:Effort dilution

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, clearly we must have a central planner to tell us all what to do and how to do it.

Re:Effort dilution

[RabidReindeer]

I disagree over the degree of which this would be a problem - think of it more like the free market. Under ideal conditions, the best ideas with the broadest appeal tend to win, grow and evolve, while the worst ideas with little appeal tend to fade away relatively quickly.

That's fantasy. The best ideas often wither while mediocre - even bad ones - flourish. It also makes the foolish assumption that "best" conflates with "broadest appeal".

MacDonalds didn't get where they were because their products were the best. Their milkshakes taste like library paste. They got there because once they'd achieved critical mass in the market - as the old saying goes: Nothing Succeeds Like Success. Once customers knew that they could obtain a consistent product from coast-to-coast, even though it was consistently second-rate, growth was assured.

Or perhaps an example closer to home. The Commodore Amiga. The first mass-market computer to include Total Harmonic Distortion and Stereo Separation specs on the outside of the package. The first mass-market computer to come out-of-the-box with color graphics (accelerated), Hi-fi stereo sound and full pre-emptive real-time multi-tasking. Even most modern-day systems aren't real-time.

This was the company that "succeeded in spite of itself". Demonstrating that incompetent government isn't the only way to kill competitiveness, Commodore fielded a superior product which could have been even more successful if they hadn't been cursed with incompetent management.

But bad management or not, I'm really doubtful that they'd own the market today. The Wintel platform was already too well entrenched and "Nobody Ever Got Fired for buying IBM/Microsoft/Intel". Even Apple is just an also-ran. The competiton was inferior, but it was sufficient and these days only a few tattered remnants are all that remains of the Amiga.

Re:Effort dilution

[mwvdlee]

MacDonalds' products are the best. Atleast if you define "best" as "fastest and cheapest".
Personally I define "best" as "tastiest for a reasonable price", in which case MacDonalds' products are not the best.
It's all subjective.

VHS had the longest video tapes and apparently that was all people cared about, so for a lot of people it was the best.

Re:Effort dilution

[Anonymous Coward]

Spoken like a true newcomer to open source. I've been reading slashdot since it was called "chips and dips" (that was around 1997) and to this day it still amazes me that somebody who rejects the principles of open source would have the slightest interest reading slashdot, let alone participating in a slashdot discussion. You're as out-of-place here as an atheist at mass.

Re: Effort dilution

[Anonymous Coward]

But Node.js itself is already a distraction.

Its concepts and ideas aren't new. We've been using its techniques in C, C++, Java, Python, Erlang and other languages (all much better than JavaScript, I may add) for many years before it arrived on the scene.

If any software is guilty of causing duplicated effort, it is Node.js.

Re:Effort dilution

[gweihir]

Nonsense. They cut out a negative contributor and hence increased effective effort.

Re:Effort dilution

[Anonymous Coward]

Because clearly, "stuff for nerds, stuff that matters" only refers to "open-source stuff," amirite?

Re:Effort dilution

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is that the abiliity to fork is a core principle and key prerequisite of open source. Furthermore, choice is the basic premise and driving force of open source. To complain about choice in open source is nonsensical, because if choice wasn't there, it wouldn't be open source in the first place. It's like a proprietary software developer complaining that he DOESN'T have choice. Well, duh!

Re: Effort dilution

[Anonymous Coward]

Nonsense. Node.js has a niche just like any other, and if you consider "having a niche" as "dilution" or "distraction" then I don't think it's node.js that has the problems. That, and all of your alternatives are hardly that much better than JS for the common app node.js is used for. If you're going to aim for idealism over pragmatism then at least put a decent language on there like Haskell or Rust or Go. Erlang is the only one that's a substantial improvement over JS in this case, but good luck finding competent Erlang coders compared to competent JS coders.

Re:Effort dilution

[FacePlant]

Node.js is a shitty hamburger restaurant?

Re:Effort dilution

[Enry]

The freedom to fork is like the freedom of speech. You have it, and you can use it, but there may be consequences when you do so there may be times when it's advisable to not do so.

Re:Effort dilution

[Anonymous Coward]

McDonald's tastes pretty much the same anywhere in the world. I actually lived above one in China, aside from fried taro pies and so forth it was the same thing. Really the only big difference I've noticed is in India, where they don't use beef, there's lamb and vegetarian stuff.

Furthermore, all the frozen meat helps it compete in price, not tastiness. You can freeze ground beef and thaw it out and it will taste almost exactly the same. McDonald's is amazing in price, like the fact that people can get 400 calories with plenty protein for $1 is unparalleled in in history.

Re:Effort dilution

[93 Escort Wagon]

Node.js is a shitty hamburger restaurant?

Yes - but their fries are pretty tasty.

Re:Effort dilution

[Connie_Lingus]

The Commodore Amiga. The first mass-market computer to include Total Harmonic Distortion and Stereo Separation specs on the outside of the package. The first mass-market computer to come out-of-the-box with color graphics (accelerated), Hi-fi stereo sound and full pre-emptive real-time multi-tasking. Even most modern-day systems aren't real-time.

i believe that your are somewhat mistaken with this quote.

if memory serves me right, that Atari ST was the first to market with most of these features. i remember this because i bought one...it was buggy as hell but i did sorta work. way ahead of its time.

Re:Effort dilution

[Anonymous Coward]

This was the company that "succeeded in spite of itself". Demonstrating that incompetent government isn't the only way to kill competitiveness, Commodore fielded a superior product which could have been even more successful if they hadn't been cursed with incompetent management.

I call bs. How did those superior products find their way to the store shelves?

Re:Effort dilution

[Kjella]

Don't forget that the PC totally owned the business market, spreadsheets were the killer application of the 80s and the Amiga's multimedia capabilities was totally irrelevant to that. In fact, graphics and sound cards were an add-on to PCs long, long after that. They could have made something similar to the Sony Playstation and become kings of the gaming market, but I doubt they ever had a shot at replacing the PC.

At any rate, it's obvious that in many cases we have picked a non-optimal solution, but the switching costs are just too high. Things like driving on left vs right, power plugs, 50Hz vs 60Hz TV, imperial vs metric and so on. Or simply because of history or network effects, we use COBOL because we got 20 years of code written in COBOL. Or we're on Facebook because everyone else is on Facebook. Products are like genes, it's not the "best" genes that survive it's those that turn a profit and reproduce.

Re: Effort dilution

[Anonymous Coward]

Haskell? Really? The language that's only used by a handful of British computer scientists?

Go? Really? The rather limited language that gets Ruby hipsters all frisky because it has some limited static typing (but no generics and other basic features of modern statically typed languages)?

Rust? Really? The language that still isn't stable, after so many years?

This is some funny stuff. Face it, the GP is right. C, C++, Java and Python matter. Everything else is a joke.

Re:Effort dilution

[Anonymous Coward]

"That's fantasy. The best ideas often wither while mediocre - even bad ones - flourish. It also makes the foolish assumption that "best" conflates with "broadest appeal"."

'Broadest Appeal' translates to "best in the widest variety of circumstances".

'Best' is subjective, not some objective reality that you seem to think it is.

Re:Effort dilution

[Anonymous Coward]

also don't forget that the PC hardware was more open; there were PC clones from Compaq and others, not so with Amiga. This rapidly evolved the platform along with its add ons so it was able to quickly eclipse the Amiga. As is often the case, the optimal solution isn't 100% clear cut as a seemingly sub-optimal option may still have a few advantages, and some people may deem those important enough to deal with the disadvantages.

Re: Effort dilution

[Anonymous Coward]

Node.js is the new PHP: it's used not because it's superior, but because it's easy to learn and pick-up for web developers.

For PHP it caught on because it was embedded within HTML, a language they were already comfortable with (ColdFusion was really hot for the same reason, but PHP was free). For Node.js, the hook is the re-use of JavaScript.

Re: Effort dilution

[TuringTest]

By that metric, COBOL and Fortran are the most relevant and successful, as they're in wide use at core infrastructure in banking and scientific computing respectively.

Re:Effort dilution

[grcumb]

I disagree over the degree of which this would be a problem - think of it more like the free market. Under ideal conditions, the best ideas with the broadest appeal tend to win, grow and evolve, while the worst ideas with little appeal tend to fade away relatively quickly.

That's fantasy. The best ideas often wither while mediocre - even bad ones - flourish. It also makes the foolish assumption that "best" conflates with "broadest appeal".

Well, you need to define 'best' under these circumstances. The Linux kernel became 'best' when it was found that it supported and sustained the involvement of the widest developer/manufacturer constituency at a reasonable level of quality. That's hardly a glowing endorsement of the quality of the code or the operation of the kernel in real-world scenarios.

Remember that the abiding challenge for technologists is not so much 'best' as 'good enough'.

So yes, GP is wrong to see the free market as one in which the best ideas win. They don't. But the most workable available solutions do tend to get the most support. In Commodore's case, their sin was failing to market it in a way that made it readily accessible (i.e. price, distribution and support) and usable (developer support and software market). So you can praise the quality of the device, but from the buyer's perspective, it wasn't the 'best' solution after all, was it?

Re:Effort dilution

[Zynder]

Their fries have been garbage around here ever since they went to that "healthy" no trans fat oil. I'm sorry Indians & Vegans but I want my beef fat back in my fry grease! I no longer eat there- not that I did very much to start with.

Re:Effort dilution

[Zynder]

How is America's left hand drive a non-optimal solution? That implies LHD is superior. Having driven both styles, I must say there appears to be no difference because most aspects are mirrored. You still sit in the middle of the road just on a different side. Swapping shifting hands and not turning on your wipers to signal a turn are the only parts most have to relearn if they swap styles often.

The power plugs? I hate them both, but have no better solution. Euro 220V plugs are entirely too big though.

50vs60Hz? Seems a matter of preference to me though I'm sure back in the day it was chosen to reduce competition from imports. Save with PAL vs NTSC.

Metric....can we not just swap over already? I personally hate the celcuis temp scale, but I'll adapt eventually.

The overall theme and content of the post though I can't agree with more.

Re:Effort dilution

[Anonymous Coward]

The Atari ST's video was color, but barely accelerated (no counterpart to the blitter until later), and the beepers weren't exactly hi-fi.

Re:Effort dilution

[_merlin]

Funny, the biggest issue I get with switching RHD to LHD is checking my blind spot over the opposite shoulder. The motion feels unnatural.

PAL actually has reasons besides intentional incompatibility. Alternating phase on alternate lines makes it possible to correct for phase shift, so the tint control can be set and forgotten.

Re: Effort dilution

[Anonymous Coward]

That may have been true in 1980, and even as late as 2000 for some companies. But it hasn't been true since then. The vast majority of that code still in use was converted to C or C++ for scientific apps, or to C++, Java, C# and even PHP for business apps. Yes, there are still some niche users of Fortran and COBOL, but they're in the minority these days.

Re:Effort dilution

[farble1670]

A company who knows that their shit could be forked will either behave themselves

it depends.

for a company that's the primary contributor, the benefits of accepting external contributions doesn't balance out the gain. in fact there's significant overhead. of course there's a breaking even point, but in my experience it's way below 50-50. companies get a net gain when they are very minor contributors, and not so much after that.

that's not to say there aren't ancillary benefits. community good will, joint effort between companies, and, in the case of Google Android, a concession to business partners (we'll buy into Android, as long as we can part ways w/ Google and keep Android).

i don't have data for the Node.js Joyent relationship, but from reading this blog,
https://www.joyent.com/blog/br...

it sounds like Joyent basically ran the place.

Re:Effort dilution

[farble1670]

This was the company that "succeeded in spite of itself". Demonstrating that incompetent government isn't the only way to kill competitiveness, Commodore fielded a superior product which could have been even more successful if they hadn't been cursed with incompetent management.

i know you wouldn't want to pass over the opportunity to talk down to someone and try to make them sound stupid, but you know he said "Under ideal conditions" right?

Re:Effort dilution

[farble1670]

fast matters to those of us that have busy lives. now, if you are a hipsters with a trust fund, i'm sure you have all the time in the world to wait for your gourmet mango chutney encrusted quinoa patty.

Re:Effort dilution

[Zynder]

If I was a technician in those wonderfully warm glowy tube days I would have probably known that. Thanks for putting a method to the madness.

Re:Effort dilution

[Kjella]

How is America's left hand drive a non-optimal solution? That implies LHD is superior.

Actually I wasn't trying to say one is superior or inferior, but that we have several competing standards for historical reasons where picking one would have worked fine for everybody. That way car companies could produce one model for all markets, you could import/export cars without the wheel being on the wrong side, tourists can drive the same everywhere and so on. But when you compare the relatively minor gains to the cost of redoing everything for an entire country and the associated accidents as people adjust, well... it doesn't make sense. But you wouldn't design it that way.

Re:Effort dilution

[Anonymous Coward]

" That implies LHD is superior."

I think you meant RHD, and it often is considered superior. Americans have largely nullified the difference by driving almost exclusively automatics. But the thinking was:
1. The majority of people were right hand dominate or ambidextrous.
2. Cars had manual gearboxes.
3. Steering is more important than changing gears from a safety perspective.
4. Therefore RHD was safer because the dominate hand was on the steering wheel.

Re:Effort dilution

[Zynder]

I would think maybe, being very generous here, that back in the day America probably didn't care about exporting vehicles. Though in this day and age you are completely correct. Differences now are mostly tradition IMHO. I mainly responded because I love to hear the arguments people make why one side is preferable to the other. You evidently weren't claiming that, my bad.

Re:Effort dilution

[mridoni]

The Atari ST had two things over the Amiga: a built-in MIDI port and a high-res (for the time) B/W video mode. It found itself a couple of nice niches (digital music and DTP) for all those who couldn't afford a Macintosh. In every other respect, especially after the introduction of the 2000 model, which was fully expandable, the Amiga was far superior.

Re: Effort dilution

[TuringTest]

By converted, you mean "wrapped", right? Banks sinply don't throw away well tested code that runs core business logic merely to update the language, they build interfaces around them and keep then running. Surely new systems are built in new languages (mostly Java) and old systems will be ultimately shut down, but it doesn't make sense for the parts where requirements remain the same, and the principles of banking have been the same for centuries.

And high performance scientific code is often easier to write in Fortran than C. When you add that to the knowledge an already swt-up environments in academy, there's still a relevant community trusting their libraries for their computing needs.

Re:Effort dilution

[Anonymous Coward]

fast matters to those of us that have busy lives. now, if you are a hipsters with a trust fund, i'm sure you have all the time in the world to wait for your gourmet mango chutney encrusted quinoa patty.

In other words, you're too poor to enjoy life. Presumably working yourself to death so that you can enjoy the good things when you retire - assuming you don't drop dead from overwork first.

Unless you just don't enjoy things.

Re: Effort dilution

[Anonymous Coward]

HTML is a joke? Yeah, right. Can you intermix HTML and C, C++, Java or Python coming from the server without installing an extra binary? No? Sorry you lose. The point is we are tired of programming in at least 5 programming languages. Since Javascript is essentially the only client language that has stood the test of time, we'd like to use it on the server as well. I'm all for improving JavaScript.

Re:Effort dilution

[shutdown -p now]

There are plenty of people who acknowledge open source as pragmatically useful in some/many/most cases, but not follow it as some kind of God-ordained religion for everyone.

Re:Effort dilution

[Shirley Marquez]

50Hz vs 60Hz was a case of choosing different engineering tradeoffs. All else being equal, transformers are more efficient at lower frequencies. But transformers at lower frequencies also need to be physically larger; you need a bigger mass of iron to make them work. Airplanes use 400Hz electrical systems because that lets them make the transformers much lighter, which is important when every pound matters. Railroad electrification often used 25Hz; weight isn't critical for trains but efficiency is.

One downside of the choice of 50Hz didn't become apparent until well after the choice was made - visible flicker of light bulbs. Flicker wasn't a big deal for incandescent bulbs; the thermal mass of the glowing filament evens out the light output. But when fluorescent lights came along the flicker was much more visible.

The argument for 120V vs 220V is a case of a tradeoff between efficiency and safety. Electrical systems are more efficient at higher voltages; moving the same amount of power at a higher voltage requires less current (power = voltage * current), and resistive losses are related to current rather than power. But everything else being equal, electricity at a higher voltage is more likely to kill you.

In both cases, I doubt the incentive was cutting down imports. The US was not yet a significant exporter at the time the decisions were made, and the people developing electric technology were not thinking of it as a global market.

NTSC vs PAL is another matter. The global marketplace was starting to emerge by then, so it's possible that the technology decisions were partly motivated by economic protectionism. Though one important different between the systems, the refresh rate, was driven by the difference in line frequency that was already firmly entrenched by then. Early TV cameras used the line frequency as the reference for their sync oscillators, which is how we ended up with 60Hz TV in North America and Japan, and 50Hz TV in most other places.

We actually now have 59.94Hz TV in the US. That's the frequency that was used when NTSC color was invented as it was close enough to 60Hz to be backward compatible with the installed base of television sets, but the mathematics of the slightly changed frequency avoided problems with harmonics and beat frequencies. That meant that NTSC cameras had to use stable internal reference oscillators rather than using the line frequency, making them more expensive. But other aspects of the technology meant that NTSC cameras were going to be expensive anyway. It also meant that sync had to be distributed to all the cameras for multi-camera live shoots; otherwise cuts from one camera to another would not work correctly. 59.94Hz is still used despite the demise of analog television so that DTV signals can be converted to analog for viewing on old sets. And yes, your "60Hz" computer monitor or laptop screen actually runs at 59.94Hz.

Re: Effort dilution

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, so node. js is popular because you don't have to bother with abstraction layers and separation of concerns. Those things are a waste of time anyway. Yeah.

Re: Effort dilution

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, so node. js is popular because you don't have to bother with abstraction layers

Well that is one reason, yes. Being able to use a portable solution without machine-dependent pre-compiled binaries accessed through an abstraction layer is quite clearly a much simpler avoids needless complexity.

Re:Effort dilution

[Anonymous Coward]

But at least contributors had the will to say "we dont like where this is going so we will do something about it and fork it"

Then there is the other side where users just complain that the free software they get is changing and they dont like it but are not willing to contribute to making any kind of change, systemd for example.

Re:Effort dilution

[dkf]

Swapping shifting hands and not turning on your wipers to signal a turn are the only parts most have to relearn if they swap styles often.

When you're dealing with an automatic, it depends on what the car manufacturer thought was a good idea for their brand image; there's no benefit at all to either side (but you need to pick one). With a manual shift, you want the signal lever on the opposite side so that you are able to signal while changing gear.

The windscreen wiper control appears to migrate from side to side with no technical considerations at all, and headlight controls are even more variable...

Re:Effort dilution

[Zynder]

That was a very informative description put in laymen's terms. If I had mod points, you'd get two!

main site

[Trepidity]

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

Re: main site

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Solent news has been covering the story without shoving pop up ads to my phone.

Fuck dice. Fuck beta. Fuck the Slashdot Nuevo.

take their money and run... real classy

[Anonymous Coward]

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

taking the money and running away is extremely childish, and possibly criminally fraudulent. they paid you to work on node.js. so... work on it... actually, don't. it sucks.

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

[thaylin]

So they are required to continue donating their time and energy from the start to entirety just because they accepted sponsorship for a period of time?

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:take their money and run... real classy

[Penguinisto]

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

No. If an open source project's leadership accepts monetary or other sponsorship, then the leadership of that project has to do the corporation's bidding. The other contributors can still do whatever the fuck they want.

To be honest, unless there's a contract (with a term) involved, the project's leadership can change or reject the terms at any time, and can definitely negotiate or even reject any changes (proposed or actual in their relationship with the sponsor.

Finally, this is a two-way street - the sponsor must accept that the project they took on simply is what it is.

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

[Archangel Michael]

Corporations need to understand that while they will get features they want, sometimes they need to address the needs of the whole community. Else, they will end up with no support. No support, but everything you want may be okay, but more likely no support will kill whatever it is that you wanted.

difference?

[AcerbusNoir]

Unless they plan to change the feature set, offer something node doesn't, they're wasting their time. Another fork "just because I can".

Re:difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure but it's amusing watching one group of web hipsters fighting with another group of web hipsters. Hopefully both will crash and burn and we can move beyond the node.js fad.

Re:difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

As @jonhorvath stated there is one developer from Joyent making all the decisions. Forking a project so people can work in open collaboration is a good thing for open source and node. I am excited to see what the new collaboration will bring. Perhaps those who could not have a voice in the project will bring interesting new ideas.

Re: difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

faster changes
More V8

Re: difference?

[Anonymous Coward]

Same old shitty Javascript.

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.

Re:difference?

[drinkypoo]

Unless they plan to change the feature set, offer something node doesn't, they're wasting their time.

If the top contributors migrate, then what they'll have to offer that node doesn't is being where the action is.

Re:difference?

[shutdown -p now]

For example, they will likely update the bundled V8 engine to use a more recent version, that is actually supported by Google, and doesn't have known codegen bugs.

(right now, even unstable node 0.12 has V8 that's so old that it's unsupported by upstream)

Soulskill likes gay ANAL SEX

[Anonymous Coward]

But timothy needs to be fired first. Someone, someone. Please fire timothy!
 
Taco wouldn't and now Dice is up to bat. Don't let us down for once!

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?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, congratulations - you just made me proud that I do business with Joyent. Crawl back under your rock.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

Says the life-long virgin who can only get sex from his right hand and mommy's weekly tug jobs.

Oh the horrors of treating women as if they were actual people and not chattel!!!

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Megol]

So what's wrong? It's one thing to accidentally have (things that can be seen as) sexist texts in a product but the idea that correcting that is somehow wrong is unbelievable idiotic. There is no logical reason to resist the changes which leads to the conclusion that the person in question either is someone that want more control of the project than is reasonable (complaining and blocking edits just to be in control) or that he is indeed sexist.

As for you and your coworkers the only remaining reason to be upset is if you are sexist idiots.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[thaylin]

So you are proud to do buisness with them why? Because their logic is that if you use any gender specific pronouns you are, by default, misogynistic?

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[znrt]

reading the comments in that pull request you mentioned reminded me of the infamous discussion (https://github.com/karma-runner/karma/issues/376) about the name change for "testacular". it was so fucking embarassing i couldn't believe it, and that this bunch of idiotic humorless trolls even accomplished their goal (it's now named "karma") ... sheesh! what's the fucking problem with these people? the statement about noordhius is indeed very enlightening of what kind of assholes cut the deals now at joyent, although that doesn't surprise me. money definitely spoils everything.

anyway, nodejs is great and i welcome this fork!

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[dave420]

That's not what the post said. It said that if you insist on using masculine pronouns to the point of rejecting pull requests which contain non-masculine pronouns, you are not being a very nice person.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Megol]

...or you could of course just be complete idiots.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bryan Cantrill, a unilingual anglophone born in america lecturing the dutch about pronouns.

In french we say "la fourchette" which means the fork is feminine and "le chapeau" which means the hat is masculine.

Does it make sense? No. It's simply idiosyncrasies built in to the language and that's that.

But yeah, thanks "post-colonial english society" for exercising your continued imperialism, this time over the web.

Much appreciated...

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[MetalliQaZ]

Wow, after reading that blog post, I suddenly understand exactly why they're forking themselves away from Joyent. And to be honest, I'm now expecting that Io.js will become dominant over Node.js in time, which is the opposite of what I thought yesterday.

Apparently Joyent doesn't want to focus on the product. 99% of people who depend on Node.js don't give a flying fart about what pronouns are used in COMMENTS in the library.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

that is amazingly trivial

https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015/files

* 1. Read errors are reported only if nsent==0, otherwise we return nsent.
* The user needs to know that some data has already been sent, to stop
- * him from sending it twice.
+ * them from sending it twice.

not really a big surprise though. Both sides should put on their big boy pants and move on.

I wouldn't want to work for a company that would try to fire someone for rejecting a patch of the comment text. How absurd and spiteful.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Electricity Likes Me]

Hey guess what, names for things are kind of important. You know what I don't want to install on my grandmother's computer? A program called "Gigolo" - I don't care how good it may or may not be at managing network connections.

The army of people who seem to think they're so logical and above emotions ironically are always the most upset when people want to change stuff which they think "doesn't matter".

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

Says the life-long virgin who can only get sex from his right hand and mommy's weekly tug jobs.

Oh the horrors of treating women as if they were actual people and not chattel!!!

masculine pronouns are rape /s

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

Because their logic is that if you use any gender specific pronouns you are, by default, misogynistic?

I thought their logic was that using the male pronoun for persons of unknown gender or in contexts where gender ought to be irrelevant is both unnecessary and sexist - even if it used to be standard usage. How hard is it to use they/their instead of he/his? I manage it easily enough.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

You've only heard one side of it.

Isaac committed a change to remove the gendered pronoun. If I saw that change in my codebase, I'd be having a standing meeting really quick. Changing a pronoun is not worth of developer resources. I would have reversed it too -- we don't need everyone's principled opinions infiltrating the codebase and starting problems between people's values and beliefs.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[JaredOfEuropa]

From the Joyent guy:

[...] 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. On the one hand, it seems ridiculous (absurd, perhaps) to fire someone over a pronoun -- but to characterize it that way would be a gross oversimplification: it's not the use of the gendered pronoun that's at issue (that's just sloppy), but rather the insistence that pronouns should in fact be gendered. To me, that insistence can only come from one place: that gender—specifically, masculinity—is inextricably linked to software, and that's not an attitude that Joyent tolerates.

This is about replacing "he" with "they" somewhere. Noordhuis' single response in the comments section to this change was "Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that.", and a flamewar that is as stupid as it is predictable ensues. Joyent then jumps to the conclusion not just that rejecting a trivial change like this constitutes an insistence on principle that pronouns should be gendered, but that such insistence springs from the notion that masculinity is inextricably linked to software. And this is a sacking offense? MikeRT called it right when he used the term "SJW tools". To me, this would at most be cause to remind the employee of whatever Diversity policies the company has in place.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

AC, I don't agree with MikeRT, either, but he's entitled to his opinion. You really aren't helping.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

What you don't understand?
He is proud because he is another of those sjw idiots. I just hope that fucking fad dies fast.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[MetalliQaZ]

You're blinded by your strong support of activism. The issue is the way that Joyent threw the guy under the bus. They said, in essence, "We would fire this guy if we could, but he's totally not an employee. We hate him as much as you do, so don't hate on us!" And they said it in a very public way. That's alienation. Oh, they forked it? Big surprise.

If you actually looked at the merge request he rejected it for being a worthless change. He didn't invest any value in a change that had no functional improvements and didn't even make the documentation any clearer. It was just churn. He didn't reject it on the grounds that pronouns should be masculine.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[SharpFang]

Your philosophy is to waste time, effort and resources for an army of experts and spit on their work, so that in the extremely unlikely case someone who is bothered by gendered pronouns happens to read the obscure comment at obscure comment of an obscure part of some code?

By the way, show your face, don't post as AC.

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?

[Penguinisto]

Wait, WTF?

From your first link:

But while Isaac is a Joyent employee, Ben is not—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's some rather petty bullshit, truth be told - by all parties involved, including the author of that blog entry. Now if they were fighting over something, you know, *technical*, I'd be more sympathetic, but really - ideological bullshit like that? Call me when the dude added some actual code to the damn thing and got rude treatment.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that there is no intented sexism with pronouns, only idiots who want to bring gender politics into places they don't belong.
Especially if the coder is not a native english speaker, and has a gendered nouns based language, where pronouns being masculine or feminine has nothing to do with genitals.

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?

[Sesostris III]

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.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Kjella]

I wouldn't want to work for a company that would try to fire someone for rejecting a patch of the comment text. How absurd and spiteful.

Not to mention a patch which changes a valid sentence to a broken one, my English teacher would mark down this sentence:

The user needs to know that some data has already been sent, to stop them from sending it twice.

Them? Them who? Oh, the user. If you can't use a singular (he/she/it) then you must rewrite the whole sentence to be "Users needs to know that some data has already been sent, to stop them from sending it twice.

I'd also try to revert that patch simply for being broken English. And if that's a firing offense, well I'd be happy to not work there anymore. Best of luck to io.js.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[SharpFang]

Such minimal corrections are a clutter that makes actual, important changes get lost in the noise. It's not that the change was wrong. It was that the usefulness of the change didn't justify creating the clutter it added on maintenance level.

Also:

  * 1. Read errors are reported only if nsent==0, otherwise we return nsent.
  * The user needs to know that some data has already been sent, to stop
  * him from sending it twice.

Is this comment sexist?

Is this something worthy of firing a talented expert (as the company blog suggests) over the above?

Do you have your priorities shoved so deep up your ass you really believe using correct gender pronouns in comments of your software is more important than having the code written well?

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

People were treating him as a Joyent employee and looking down on them for his actions. They cleared up the situation. End of story

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[dave420]

Having a gendered pronoun is more of a value than not having one, as one is clearly more accurate than the other. Accepting a pull request takes seconds, so you can't argue about developer resources, especially considering the person who was dealing with the pull request wasn't even employed by the company in question.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

The issue is the way that Joyent threw the guy under the bus. They said, in essence, "We would fire this guy if we could, but he's totally not an employee. We hate him as much as you do, so don't hate on us!" And they said it in a very public way. That's alienation.

They also implicitly called him an asshole. Which is not exactly professional conduct either.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[dave420]

You do realise that Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks were SJWs, right? You use that term like it's a bad thing, when the only negative aspect of people using that term is showing that the users of said term are either woefully ignorant, insecure beyond belief, or full of hate. Pick one. Please.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

I'll post any way I please, SharpFang, but I haven't posted as AC in this thread. Try to pay attention.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pedantic, but not misogynist.

English rules dictate that unspecified or unknown gender uses masculine pronouns. Using a "singular they" is often considered poor form.

I don't necessarily agree with those style guidelines, and will readily accept "singular they". But I can see where someone else might be a pedantic dickweed and start a fight over it. Pedantic dickweedery lives for the fight.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Charliemopps]

Thanks for clearing up what the real controversy was.

I have no idea where I stand on the issue. He's right, it IS trivial. But who cares? He probably should have just shrugged it off. But on the other hand, I'd say, if someone wanted to change the documentation wording, fine... but let it go in along with some other substantial re-write. And I think that was the guys point... we're not going to do a commit just for the sake of politics. What the people who wanted this done should have done was sat down, re-wrote all the text to make it better, more clear and included their gender neutral wording in that.

I went to my boss a few years back because my job title was odd... I wanted it to be a strait forward "Software Developer" or "Database administrator" (I basically do both) but my title was something silly that would make little sense to an outside observer. If I went to him and asked for a change for the sake of a change he'd have laughed at me. So instead I got some training, wrote a couple of key pieces of software, then went to him and said "Wouldn't you say what I'm really doing is software development now?" He agreed and viola, I got the change I wanted.

You get more flys with Honey. I think all these recent stories with gamergate and all that nonsense are doing more to hurt the feminist movement than anything. Yea, be aggressive... assert your rights. But if you spazz out with every single tiny infraction, people will eventually stop paying attention when you spazz out.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[JaredOfEuropa]

I agree that the patch is silly. However, the use of "they" or "them" in the singular, gender neutral sense has a very old history in the English language, more than a century at least.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[MetalliQaZ]

Again, here is someone who didn't look at the request and doesn't understand why it was rejected. Just lap up that SJW narrative and don't think about it. You get an A+ in modern activism.

What happened here is a request was deferred for valid technical reasons and then removed because of intra-project politics. Those same politics led to the forking.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Luthair]

I'd say there is logic in not bothering to make the change, it takes effort and brings no value. My experience has been that gendered pronouns are often used in documentation, though usually they use a mix of the two genders.

That said there isn't logic in attempting to revert the commit when another committer merged it (unless the rule was that documentation would use a gendered pronoun). Though I also don't think the tone and content of Joyents post is appropriate either.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not about sexism. It's about ethics in ... oh, wait, wrong topic.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

So what would everyone do if the lingua franca of software development was not English, but perhaps a Latin-based language, or Latin itself, full of all those sexist masculin & feminine nouns, where the neuter verb conjugation is to use the masculine-based pattern? Or what about Slavic languages?

English should be recognized now for really having awkward neuter grammar patterns. Trying to get around it to avoid "inherent sexism" patterns while noble, sucks for the readability of the language. The problem really is English, not code per se. Are software comments, code check-ins, etc, really the right forum to address and "fix" this, or is it just a bit of nerdy wankery?

All I can see are some of the principals involved arguing, ala the characters in monty python's life of bryan... not able to see themselves in the mirror.

Great, we have a fork. Whatever.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realise that Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks were SJWs, right? You use that term like it's a bad thing, when the only negative aspect of people using that term is showing that the users of said term are either woefully ignorant, insecure beyond belief, or full of hate. Pick one. Please.

You're deluding yourself. King and Parks would laugh in the faces of the modern day SJWs.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what I want? I want my grandma to make that choice. Like I could care less if she managed to install the Kim Khardasian app on her phone...

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Sesostris III]

Reading the blog, he would not have been fired for using the gendered pronoun, but for refusing to accept it being changed.

It's important. If you don't think it is, try looking for any gendered pronoun in (say) the Eclipe Documentation (Think IBM) or in the Java Tutorial (think Oracle).

And no, I haven't looked at it in depth, but I trust both IBM and Oracle to use gender neutral pronouns (except for the rare cases when they want to specify the gender of a person, as in "Alice" or "Bob"). What is good enough for IBM and Oracle (and every other corporation out there) is good enough for Joyent.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

MLK and Rosa Parks stood something. Most of the Tumblr SJW generation are just lazy spoiled kids.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[i.kazmi]

their logic is that if you use any gender specific pronouns you are, by default, misogynistic?

It's one thing to accidentally use gendered pronouns in documentation but resisting when someone else tries to fix the documentation (Alex) and trying to roll back the change when someone else (Isaac) accepts it, makes the person throwing a tantrum (Ben) either a dumb prat or a sexist, take your pick. Either way, the person in question is not an asset I'd want on my project team.

Also, if you think this was an issue where Joyent were in the wrong and going against community wishes, have a look at the comments on the github merge request, the overwhelming majority of people want the merge request to be accepted, so who exactly wasn't listening to the community? Hint: it wasn't Joyent...

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Zeromous]

They lost me when they said had he been a Joyent employee it would have been a firing offense. I say: give it up, She's dead Jim and you killed it by politicizing a commit. Fork it and forget it. goodbye.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[PRMan]

You mean like to highlight a well-written, popular piece of code authored mainly by a female... Instead of throwing a fit over a non-sexist language documentation change.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Junta]

Changing a pronoun is not worth of developer resources. I would have reversed it too -- we don't need everyone's principled opinions infiltrating the codebase and starting problems between people's values and beliefs.

The thing is, the change was done by some third party. Rejecting it and justifying actually took *more* work than just accepting it. The change was just inside comments. Now if the change was to function names or something, that would be different.

If I were faced with a commit that just changed he to they or he to she or she to he or they to he, I'd probably accept it because I don't care what a comment says. The exception would be if it became apparent that two committers cared in different ways about such an asinine thing, then I'd have to think. As this stands, someone rejected a practically patch that some people cared about and should have just accepted the damn patch.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Junta]

What gets me is all this fuss over words in the damn *comments*. Who gives a crap either way.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

if you insist on using masculine pronouns to the point of rejecting pull requests which contain non-masculine pronouns

But that's not what happened so... what's your point?

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

The change is so trivial that I was sure there is more to the story. And there you have it:
"accumulate small doc changes until they had enough to prevent git-blame from becoming too convoluted"
So the change was not totally rejected but only postponed until there was enough small changes to roll into one bigger update? And Joylent was ready to break guidelines just to unnecessarily underline their political correctness?

Does not sound very professional. I think the decision to fork was the correct one.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[PPH]

Not being a Node.js developer/user, I am not aware of the organizational politics surrounding this pronoun gender issue. But a quick scan of coments and related threads leads me to believe that this issue is the symptom of some underlying politics at Joyent. The documentation and development direction conroversies are hiding the fact that management has lost control of the culture of the company. And now a few factions are engaged in an office war and higher-ups are powerless to deal with it.

I don't know which group left to support the fork and which stayed behind. But I wouldn't be surprised if the battle will now continue between the two groups. "They did X. And since they are a bunch of assholes, X must be bad. So we won't do it." And the user community will suffer as a result.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[znrt]

i see your point and what you could do is this: kindly ask the developer(s) for a name change. if they are ok, then you can install it, if not, then simply you install some other thing. easy? what's the point in assembling a mob to force the developer? how dare you? so, you may be picky about names, but someone cannot name HIS OWN CREATION as he pleases because you grandma could be offended if she knew? get off my lawn. there is a name for this: "gutmensch". your point turns to bullshit IF you're not capable of displaying the same tolerance or sensibility you demand from others.

that the industry rushes to support this kind of collective idiocy is just natural: it allows them to make more money off you. it's irrelevant that they use slave work for that, unless they don't name it that way. from a supposedly intelligent open source community i would expect a higher standard.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[HeckRuler]

whoa ho ho there. This whole thing is about some language nuance. If you're going to try and use a broad brush, you'd best use it consistently.

Because MLK and Rosa Parks were typically refereed to as "civil rights activists", and the term "social justice warrior" (I had to google that by the way) only gained traction THIS year.

If we're going to get in a huff over language, I believe that civil rights and social justice, while having a large overlap, aren't quite the same thing. Social justice is farther-reaching while civil rights fall short of, say, firing people over whether they call you a negro or black or a colored person.

Justice is usually a reactionary thing. Retaliatory even. Rights are things you have all the time. (And violating rights should lead to justice). It's really best to stay positive, and the SJW term brings with it a negative aspect that isn't going to help the effort.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[juanfgs]

It's important. If you don't think it is, try looking for any gendered pronoun in (say) the Eclipe Documentation [eclipse.org] (Think IBM) or in the Java Tutorial [oracle.com] (think Oracle).

So what's this:

So a performer having the role Callcenter Agent can initiate the support case management process after he has received a support call.

MA..... WYMYN THE WHAAAAMBULANCE!!!!

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Hognoxious]

Or just "..., to avoid sending it twice". Still, I wouldn't consider this a priority for devs' time.

Storm in a pisspot.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been established that Rosa Parks staged her arrest so that the NAACP may have a better chance of getting the community involved. Claudette Colvin was the first african american to be arrested for refusing to give up a seat to a white passenger. She was an unmarried pregnant 15-year-old at the time, and the NAACP didn't think the community would overlook her circumstances in order to support the cause.

Claudette Colvin later testified during the SCOTUS trial of Browder v. Gayle which ultimately segregated the Montgomery buses.

Let's give credit where it really is due...

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[juanfgs]

Sorry but I'm not a native english speaker and that sounds confusing as hell. If you guys/girls are going to do shit like that you should really come up with a new standard way to get into your language because that's not how is being thaught around the world. Or better, why not use he/she like that? Or that would offend people that identify themselves as potato?

In that case you can then add he/she/it and it's still more correct than "them".

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[ljw1004]

Noordhuis had not one but TWO responses: (1) as you said he dismissed it as trivial, (2) when someone else nevertheless accepted the change he tried to undo it and chided them publically for bypassing both him and (???forgot alias).

Noordhuis chided someone publically, he got chided back publically, seems about fair.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

That was suppose to read:

Claudette Colvin later testified during the SCOTUS trial of Browder v. Gayle which ultimately desegregated the Montgomery buses.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[phantomfive]

I don't care who is 'right' or 'wrong,' but I can tell you:

If I ever worked in a place that had so much drama over pronouns, I would be looking for another job. That's a hostile work environment.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[supton]

I am not a linguist, but I think you are confusing articles with pronouns. The former is not as powerful in communicating social norms as the latter. More to the point, descriptors for people are more powerful than descriptors for non-person objects. To suggest that language is just arbitrary (in idiosyncratic, not post-structuralist terms [1]), and not without ideological power is naive.

No anglo-centricity about it. Sounds like someone made a fuss about a simple change they should have accepted, and then multiple parties treated each other badly.

[1] Language is arbitrary in terms of signifiers always pointing to signifieds that are in fact signifiers themselves (infinitely recursive); but that means that linguistic choices about something as simple as pronouns can and should be situated in a context to understand them, and that is not without baggage. Like the time a recruiter sent a message to a local UG list I am saying her employer needed to hire "a bunch of guys quickly." It's not intent, but socially situated meaning that makes that problematic reinforcement of stereotype of consequence.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[phantomfive]

That Joyent guy has a name, Bryan Cantrill.

And he has a sexist past. Look how he responded at the bottom of this post (If you think it's funny, you're a misogynistic porcine woman hater, etc). More importantly, note that his avoidance of technical subjects began early. He's management material, right there.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

Text isn't sexist, only the morons that interpret it.

This is literally a non-issue being screamed in to the public by a bunch of childish adults that never got enough attention when they were kids.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[thaylin]

Actually that is not what it said at all. They said that :

it's not the use of the gendered pronoun that's at issue (that's just sloppy), but rather the insistence that pronouns should in fact be gendered.

So it was not that they had a masculine pronoun, but that the developer did not believe in gender neutral. It could have been feminine or masculine, the company did not care, in fact they specifically state that it was not the issue..

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Yakasha]

Changing a pronoun is not worth of developer resources. I would have reversed it too -- we don't need everyone's principled opinions infiltrating the codebase and starting problems between people's values and beliefs.

The thing is, the change was done by some third party. Rejecting it and justifying actually took *more* work than just accepting it.

THIS time. When the next 1,273 "single word in a comment" submissions come in to be reviewed, is the total time spent on them still 0? He is "not interested in trivial changes like that." Accepting one invites more.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

More than a millenium.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[thaylin]

That is not what they stated. In addition using they/their in a singular fashion is considered to be improper use by many in grammar.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

The change was just inside comments.

Well somebody clearly needs to slap this guy (gal?). Committing a change that is only in comments, and not even helpful? The hell.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

A twist in the fabric of space where time becomes a loop...

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

Technically Rosa Parks specifically didn't stand for something, which was the whole big deal ;)

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

He's referring to me, I think. And I agree - I'll post any way I please.

Keep something in mind - this pull request was submitted by THE FORMER MAINTAINER.

And any time someone uses "SJW" as an insult, I know I'm dealing with someone who doesn't deserve my respect - and that's why I made the "congratulations" comment.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

Using gender-neutral pronouns for documentation seems reasonable to me, especially if viewable by the public

It was in a code comment. So technically viewable by the public (unless it's minimized?) but come on.

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?

[Trailer Trash]

That's not what the post said. It said that if you insist on using masculine pronouns to the point of rejecting pull requests which contain non-masculine pronouns, you are not being a very nice person.

The entire intent of the pull request was to change a pronoun and there was nothing else of value in it. He didn't reject a legitimate pull request that had non-masculine pronouns - he rejected two pull requests that did nothing but change a single pronoun each.

You can see them here:

https://github.com/alex/libuv/...
https://github.com/alex/libuv/...

I typically also write using non-gendered pronouns just because I like the style better. But you can bet your ass that I'm not going to accept a modification to comments in my code just to make such a minor change that has nothing to do with code. Those changes bring nothing of value to the code or comments and as such should be rejected.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you referring to this?

Have you ever kissed a girl?

I don't think that's misogyny. It's a tactic that SJWs use shame men.

It makes these assumptions:

* The target has never had a girlfriend.
* The target is heterosexual.
* Men are worthless without a girlfriend.

Frankly, I think it's more either homophobia or sexual objectification of the target (misandry?) than anything else. Well, no, it's probably none of these things. It's an immature, non-sequitur, ad-homenim response to a technical matter.

At the very least, it highlights the deep double standard our culture has when it comes to gender. It highlights just how sexist SJWs are. Comments like that hurt both men and women and flush any chances at ever seeing gender equality down the toilet.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[phantomfive]

Are you referring to this?

Have you ever kissed a girl?

I don't think that's misogyny. It's a tactic that SJWs use shame men.

It's specifically misogyny because it is objectifying the woman.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[savuporo]

Thats exactly it. Drama is hostile, doesnt matter over what exactly. SJW or something else.
I choose to work somewhere to build a particular product, idea or service - thats what im there for, if it comes with a truckload of drama and emotion i will simply go elsewhere. Which is what the devs here did.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

In addition using they/their in a singular fashion is considered to be improper use by many in grammar.

I've heard the same said about passive voice, and starting a novel by describing the weather. I'm not in the habit of following rules off cliffs. Until the prescriptivists who insist that singular they/their as a gender-neutral pronoun come up with a better alternative, they're welcome to kiss my fat New Yorker ass.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fucking SJWs man. Ruin evertying, and it's bleeding into my software and has been happening for a while now. I don't understand why people get so god damn bent out of shape about this trivial shit.

All those dumb ass comments. "I would have been easier to click Merge than Close". I don't use github to manage git, but sounds like the same amount of effort to me. Fucking guys, no ones going to suck your dick for appearing like a 'good guy' online. Fuck sake.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[phantomfive]

he would not have been fired for using the gendered pronoun, but for refusing to accept it being changed.

That's not a firing offense in any sane programming shop.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

What you call "sexist texts" is otherwise known as proper English. Have you looked at that "gender" patch?
Here it is (bold tags are mine): /* Only free when there was no error. On error, we touch up write_queue_size
        * right before making the callback. The reason we don't do that right away
        * is that a write_queue_size > 0 is our only way to signal to the user that
- * he should stop writing - which he should if we got an error. Something to
- * revisit in future revisions of the libuv API.
+ * they should stop writing - which they should if we got an error. Something
+ * to revisit in future revisions of the libuv API.
        */ ...signal to the user .. that they should ... - What kind of grammar is that?

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[baka_toroi]

OMG I'm already feeling OPPRESSED! Damned patriarchy!

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's ok to objectify woman as a "seal of approval" for men. men without a girlfriend/wife are pathetic beings and should get off the SJW's internet.
search twitter, you'll actually see them use this tactic or worse, outright call a man a homosexual as an insult.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Hey guess what, names for things are kind of important. "

Hey guess what - any importance placed on words by the listener are exactly that - placed by the listener.

If anyone ever had the fucking gall to reject a commit I made due to some weird fucking pseudo-religious gender bullshit I would expend every effort to make that motherfuckers life a living hell.

You know what should have been done during the Inquisition? The 'Inquisitors' should have been hunted down and fucking wiped out.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are a sexist, because you prosecute Ben for only one reason: because he is a man.

You're also a psychopath because you love a witch hunt.

You are a nasty creep.
 

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[drinkypoo]

Hey guess what, names for things are kind of important. You know what I don't want to install on my grandmother's computer? A program called "Gigolo" - I don't care how good it may or may not be at managing network connections.

So given that the topic is gender-neutral pronouns, you'd be okay with "prostitute" or "sex worker" I take it? As long as it's not "gigolo" or "whore", etc.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you look at the patch, it totally screws the grammar (it uses plural pronouns to reference a singular noun).

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously. I get fired over something like this where politics trump practical/technical concerns, fuck that company.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[bn557]

These 'trivial' changes often cause merge conflicts with other trees. If people are developing against the 'pre change' tree, any changes around the comments might need manual merging. Manual merging introduces additional opportunities for mistakes. I see trivial comment patches like this bounced on these exact grounds in watching active linux driver changes; particularly if you watch a new vendor driver submitted to the staging tree, and then watch it get cleaned up to be in-line with the kernel's coding style.

As far as this PARTICULAR patch being dropped, it probably could have been handled more in line with 'NACK: We'll set a date in the future to do a comment cleaning and have everyone rebase on that', but my first reaction isn't that the developer who declined it is sexist (or whatever the particular flavor of discrimination is). From my PERSONAL Point of view, a change should provide value, and I *PERSONALLY* don't see value in a change like this. A typo fix maybe, but this is not a typo.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

Getting fired for using a goddamn gender pronoun is a lawsuit waiting to happen.

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:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

Only assholes call other people assholes. You can take my word for it.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[HeckRuler]

And let's not fool ourselves, deciding which cases get the spotlight is the linchpin of our society now. Take this fiasco in Ferguson. Every year there are shooting deaths and potential race issues. Why did this one get the attention it did?

Or the Monsanto case against the guy buying feed seed, and killing off the non-roundup ready seeds. He didn't sign any contract or agree to any of the stringent IP rules from Monsanto, but Monsanto chose to push for this guy's prosecution so that they could get a ruling about how this practice is illegal for everybody.

The selective enforcement of the law is a form of corruption. When legal precedent is on the line, it's practically a controlling factor.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[nedlohs]

Your english teacher is an idiot, but that's hardly unusual.

Sure some prescriptivists want to ignore that singular they has been in continuous use in english since the 14th century, but being an idiot is hardly uncommon.

Still patching a comment solely to change his/their is stupid - there isn't a single person who is confused by the original language and hence no reason to change it. There are good reason's not to change it though - it could cause conflicts in merges if someone else happens to have been working on that piece of code and changed that part as well as the obvious example.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's one thing to accidentally use gendered pronouns in documentation

Accidentally?

People accidentally follow the rules of English?

Amazing. Can this be exploited? Can we get people to accidentally follow whitespace and indentation standards, too?

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[HiThere]

Even typo changes need justification because, as you remarked, "These 'trivial' changes often cause merge conflicts with other trees."

As for this kind of change...if its a real issue, then there needs to be a policy, e.g., "always avoid the singular they". (Personally I often use it, if I remember to. But it sure isn't what I was taught in school. Still, I find it much better than "s/he", though in some contexts I'll use "s/he/it".)

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

- She's dead Jim and you killed it by politicizing a commit. Fork it and forget it. goodbye.
+ They're dead Jim and you killed it by politicizing a commit. Fork it and forget it. goodbye.

FTFY.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[RavenLrD20k]

As noted elsewhere: This was a pull that added nothing to the code except for changing comments. Ben Noordhuis initially and rightly rejected this change as it added nothing of value. Isaac Schlueter then did an override and made the commit. This sent out two very strong messages that should give project contributors pause and was likely the reason for Noordhuis' attempt to revert the commit: (1) The project leads put high value in making political statements over only allowing quality commits on every commit that improve the actual software; and (2) the project leads put low value in the time of their developers who have to read over these essentially non-functional commits as now they have shown that minimally functional changes are all that's needed to get a submission into code. For these reasons I can completely understand Noordhius' desire to revert...but of course, the SJW megaphones were turned all the way up. "Death to efficiency, long live our political butthurt! We are the victims, hear us roar as we trample our message all over your passion!"

Now I'm not at all saying that the change to the comments for gender shouldn't or couldn't have been made...but don't expect a commit only on changing some comments that don't matter to the functionality of the code...that's wasting time for a political statement that has no real value. If the change included some bug fixes or a solution to a functional problem, then by all means, the commit should have been allowed including the gender change. That was sorely not the case here.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[SharpFang]

People like you can't tell a noisy obnoxious scammer apart from a person who actually contributes to the good of humanity, and your respect is more often than not woefully misplaced.

As result, nobody of any actual significance cares about your respect - only your companions from your echo chamber, blinded to any real world issues, do.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[glwtta]

99% of people who depend on Node.js don't give a flying fart about what pronouns are used in COMMENTS in the library

Apparently Ben Noordhuis does.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Zynder]

I think he means it was a waste of said programmers time to sit there and rewrite all the docs to sanitize them instead of fixing an actual, real problem. Not the guy clicking accept/reject.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Zynder]

As a nerd myself, I will say that pedantic dickweedery is a hallmark trait of ours. I will also now take the term "pedantic dickweedery" and add it to my lexicon. Douchebaggery has been taken up by the hipsters and has become mainstream. Ironic isn't it!

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

There was nothing "sexist" in the comments of the code.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Zynder]

If you read the link Mike posted you'll find out the "reason" why:

we believe that empathy is a core engineering value—and that an engineer that has so little empathy as to not understand why the use of gendered pronouns is a concern almost certainly makes poor technical decisions as well.

I don't think your statement of

It could have been feminine or masculine, the company did not care, in fact they specifically state that it was not the issue..

is an accurate interpretation. Mine may not be either, but both statements imply something deeper is going on and no one will come right out and say it. Your statement claims the problem is adherence to syntax. I thought this was a key value a programmer could have. A programmer who thinks like a machine and is OCD like a machine is someone you want. That code monkey will always, consistently always, dot their I's and cross their T's and will rarely get bitten by stupid shit like forgetting the semicolon. What I quoted says that they do care because he didn't "empathize" or find it to be a "concern". Empathizing is not taking a neutral stance, at least not the way I hear everyone use it.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[I4ko]

Not only that. My native language is not English. My language does not have pronouns, the gender is directly expressed in the noun form. There are feminine single, masculine single, feminine plural, masculine plural, and non-gendered single. And you cannot just leave the common root as that would mean writing unfinished words. So you have to write quite a lot of duplicated forms if you want to cover everything. You can't just use the non-gender forms for one single but very important reason - it is extremely offensive, (to women, more so than to men), because the non-gender forms are reserved exclusively for inanimate objects. Using a masculine form when unknown is ok in respect of brevity, objectifying humans as inanimate objects (especially women) is not. Now, that is not to defend someone doing it in English, where it is perfectly fine to have the proper pronouns, and I don't know the cultural background of the person, but putting your values on people of other cultures just does not work.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

But, "The Program is Political". I read so in my humanities class.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh man, it's like we're almost twins. When I hear that people get insulted by being called an SJW and subsequently lose respect for the insulters, then I lose all respect for them! Both attitudes indicate closemindedness and that's exactly something we need more of! Oh and btw, white knight, tanking this thread on /. isn't gonna get ya inside Lilith's Heart-shaped box, sorry.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because there is a difference. Activists are active. SJW's are just bitching to be bitching on the internet because it's the in thing right now. You won't find SJWs at rallies. Activists can't stand them because their outrage is fake and everyone can see it.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Zynder]

My apologies, your quote is also from that same article. Well that just makes it worse. Now it's doublespeak.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Zynder]

If Noord held a higher position on the chain of command, then he was correct in chiding him. We have structures for a reason.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Zynder]

You've overanalyzed to the point of missing the obvious. He wasn't being sexist, he was calling the dude a super nerd virgin. The same type of insult like living in your mom's basement or Cheeto snorting, Mt Dew guzzling uber slob. Did you read the wall of text it was a response to? They were having a classic "vi vs emacs" style fight, in this case, Solaris vs SPARC, I think. You were correct about the technical deflections though. Someone on here says something about if you can't win, ad hominem. Seems appropriate to this post.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Firetoad]

The best part about this post is the disclaimer at the end, followed up by your sig.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[phantomfive]

Nah, I understood it, but if someone is going to fire someone else over a sexist pronoun, you'd expect them to be a bit more circumspect themselves.....As you say, he wasn't intending to be sexist, but no one discussed anywhere here intended to be sexist.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Zynder]

Someone on here says something about if you can't win, ad hominem. Seems appropriate to this post.

Appropriate to the original post, not yours. I wasn't clear enough. You were not ad hommin'.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Zynder]

Riiiiight. You wanna hate on the poster for objectifying women but evidently all you think a mom is good for is jerking her kid off. Your kind of talk is what makes everyone else ignore your causes and blow them off as unimportant.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[phantomfive]

No worries, I got it.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what I want? I wanna fuck your grandma. It'll totally be her choice though. Also, if you could care less about the KK app, why do care even a little about it now?

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Zynder]

Nope, you've fell into the trap and explained the problem completely:

Sounds like someone made a fuss about a simple change they should have accepted

Everyone is arguing about that right there. You say he should have accepted it. I say he shouldn't have- at least not at that moment. That's one of those little things that gets saved until the next actual version is committed. Granted, that would have merely delayed the argument until that time most likely, but it could have also sparked an overall debate about the validity of it where management and the programmers could have came to a resolution and nailed down a policy. The way it went down now, well, you see the fallout.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Zynder]

Devil Jesus, as a mustachianado, I take great offense in linking the lip-hair-blessed population with those.....ugh.....villains. Isn't that a fine "How do you do?" Good day, sir. I SAID GOOD DAY! *twirls mustache and sachets away*

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[farble1670]

thanks for posting that link.

yeah, so what's this over? one guy submits a silly pull request to change the word "him" to "them", and an argument ensues about the correct wording, and then morphs into a discussion about discrimination of women in tech. 228 comments ensue. the pull requests gets closed when someone (correctly) makes the observation that is has gotten hopelessly off topic and is a complete waste of time.

the guy that closed it was correct.

you argue about the wording comments.
we code.
PMF.
http://programming-motherfucke...

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Zynder]

You suggestions are leveled headed and if I am remembering correctly the exact solution suggested in the flamewar- by the only female participating fyi. What really got the shit started, IMHO, was that chain of command was broken. Ben had authority to tell the luser to fuck off with his sanitizing and said luser made an end run around him and got someone else to do it. If you're my kid and I tell you 'no', and then you run off to grandpa to get your way, I'm gonna spank your ass, and chew grandpa out. Same happened here. Ben said no, dude said fuck off I'll get whoeverthefuck to do it instead, and Ben got mad because his authoritay was not respected. You MUST respect his authoritaaaay!

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Zynder]

Gotcha. I guess the world isn't filled with too many people with the view you have. Instead of cleaning out their closet, they just shove a dresser in front of it and hope no one notices.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading the Github convo it feels like the whole thing was a setup to begin with. I think Alex knew exactly what would happen and continued to press on the rubbish until bnoordhuis jumped ship because the whole thing was bullshit.

I support gender equality but merging rubbish like that which benefits the code in no way, shape or form is an absolute waste of time. I would have considered merging this if it was in a pile of other code that needed merging in the same area. Other than that, who gives us a fuck about rubbish like that... seriously I've had enough of the recent sexism witch hunts and putting one gender up on a pedestal because 'reasons'

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Aighearach]

Joyent sounds pretty awesome and ethical to me.

Presumably ethics is only for "SJWs."

Gamergate womenhaters should just crawl back under their rocks. They are so not the direction society is moving on this stuff! lol

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's important. If you don't think it is, try looking for any gendered pronoun in (say) the Eclipe Documentation [eclipse.org] (Think IBM) or in the Java Tutorial [oracle.com] (think Oracle).

No, it isn't important. It's fucking trivial. I understand that some people may not feel comfortable with it, but I don't give a rat's ass how people FEEL about the documentation - I care whether the code WORKS. I'll get past the documentation, as mature people are able to do. Put your feelings aside, they are trivial.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

> And any time someone uses "SJW" as an insult, I know I'm dealing with someone who doesn't deserve my respect

It's true; they ought to say "Social Justice Crusader," because that's more accurate.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Only assholes call other people assholes. You can take my word for it.

Hey, I'm not an asshole, asshole!

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[elvis the frog]

That's not a firing offense in any sane programming shop.

Yes, that's not management, that's insane cowardice. It's all the rage around the bay.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[shutdown -p now]

If the normal procedure for pull requests was not followed - i.e. if he was a guy who needed to sign off, and he was circumvented - then it was absolutely the right course of action for him to revert. Procedures exist for a reason, and you don't get to skip them because your pull request is to right some social wrongs or something.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[i.kazmi]

The use of 'them' and 'they' as ungendered singular pronouns goes back centuries and using gendered pronouns when you are addressing a cross-gender audience is just plain wrong. Also, instead of 'he', 'you' could've been used and to top it off, the sentence could've easily been structured to not contain any pronouns.

Try reading some books some time, English has many nuances that your kindergarten teacher never taught you and thinking of what you were taught as unbreakable rules is, imho, naive.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[exomondo]

Isaac committed a change to remove the gendered pronoun.

No that change was submitted by Alex Gaynor, rejected by Ben and accepted by Isaac.

If I saw that change in my codebase, I'd be having a standing meeting really quick.

With who?

Changing a pronoun is not worth of developer resources.

It's not up to you, Joyent or Ben Noordhuis to dictate what a developer does.

I would have reversed it too -- we don't need everyone's principled opinions infiltrating the codebase and starting problems between people's values and beliefs.

Personally I wouldn't have spent effort making the change but I don't see any reason to revert it either.

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[Anonymous Coward]

He said, "Like I could care less." It means he could not care less. Dumbass.

Exhibit A

[Anonymous Coward]

See Red Hat's raping of the Linux operating system with the forced implementation of systemd. The only people that even want systemd are spiky haired teenagers that think Arch is some great cool thing (it's not).

I applaud this fork, node.js is dead to me and Joyent is too!

Re:Exhibit A

[Anonymous Coward]

My hair is too long to be spiky, and I like Arch just fine. Likewise with systemd. Systemd has something in common with eating out your mother: it's not that bad once you get used to it.

Re:Exhibit A

[Anonymous Coward]

When I hear Red Hat mentioned all I can thing about is poettering repeatedly fucking Tux the Linux penguin in the ass while Tux screams out in terror....they control Linux now and will do whatever they want to it

Byebye Node.js.

[Qbertino]

If these guys know how to play it right, Node.js is history. He had the same thing with the Mambo Fork Joomla. Hardly anyone remembers Mambo anymore, and Joomla is a leading project.

I hope this new project knows how to manage things and do good marketing.
Thumbs up. Let's see where this goes.

Re:Byebye Node.js.

[Anonymous Coward]

+1

Re:Byebye Node.js.

[Anonymous Coward]

> He had the same thing with the Mambo Fork

Please use 'they' you insensitive clod!

Re:Byebye Node.js.

[Shatrat]

If these PEOPLE know how to play it right, Node.js is history. HE/SHE had the same thing with the Mambo Fork Joomla. Hardly anyone (POSSIBLY HAVING A PENIS BUT POSSIBLY NOT) remembers Mambo anymore, and Joomla is a leading project.

FTFY

Re:Byebye Node.js.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you meant to say:

If these PEOPLE know how to play it right, Node.js is THEIRtory. HE/SHE had the same thing with the PARENTING UNITbo Fork Joomla. Hardly anyone (POSSIBLY HAVING A GENITALS BUT POSSIBLY NOT) remembers PARENTING UNITbo anymore, and Joomla is a leading project.

You'll be escorted from the premises shortly.

Re:Byebye Node.js.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thumbs up. Let's see where this goes.

Censorship. False flag attacks. Protests. "Muh Soggy Knees!". Twitter-storm. Endless cries of "shitlord" and "pissbaby". "Javascript is Dead" articles. Twitter-hurricane. Developer email protests. Even more censorship. Doxxings. Swattings. Firings. More flase flags. Mainstream media barrage on javascript developers. Gawker calls on world to bully computer geeks. Even more emails. Massive gaffes by anti-nerd executives, compromised developer organisations, and developer e-celeb meltdowns. Linus Torvalds reduced to a tearful apology for a drawing a 8==> in an email, Windows 8 pulled from Austrailian retailers after hysterical online petitions.

Eventually, 4 months later, the javascript programming community will still be there, scarred but standing, and the SJW / anti-humanist opposition will decide to quietly find another community to infiltrate for profit, leaving a small army of urine soaked true believers behind them.

When the first blogs condemning the io.js fork for trans-phobia come out -- you'll know.

Re:Byebye Node.js.

[steelfood]

Sorry, both "HE" and "SHE" are not gender-neutral. The proper replacement term is "singular THEY":

If these PEOPLE know how to play it right, Node.js is history. Singular THEY had the same thing with the Mambo Fork Joomla. Hardly anyone (POSSIBLY HAVING A PENIS BUT POSSIBLY NOT) remembers Mambo anymore, and Joomla is a leading project.

So what's this about?

[SharpFang]

What are the specific grievances?
I mean, they wouldn't want the fork if the corporation handled the management right. Even if through just one person, but one *competent* person.

Joyent

[Frankie70]

Joyent has made news before also.

http://news.slashdot.org/story...

They shut down paid lifetime accounts earlier.

Re:Joyent

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, fuck Joyent.

Re:Effort dilution (vs. Stigmergy)

[Paul Fernhout]

"The scourge of Open Source disguised as choice.."

All too true too often. And the failure of the Linux Desktop to gain traction is a prime example of that (other than finally essentially via the Chromebook).

That said, "Stigmergy" is a way that large structures (like the FOSS landscape?) can get built by entities following relatively simple local rules. For example, termites build big complex mounds by getting excited when they see other termites having accomplished something small but interesting (creating an arch).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://www.evolutionofcomputin...

See especially:
http://journal.media-culture.o...
"Collaboration in small groups (roughly 2-25) relies upon social negotiation to evolve and guide its process and creative output. ... Collaboration in large groups (roughly 25-n) is dependent upon stigmergy."

Although in the termite case, they are increasingly joining together their separate actions vs. splitting apart the community in the NodeJS case. Maybe this is more akin to how a new generation of termite "queens" and their consorts takes to the air and finds a new place to create a new mound?

In any case, as a software developer moving into using NodeJS (and JavaScript in general) for new projects, this is not the sort of new I really want to hear. That is because it seems, in the short term, to increase risk (including from dilution of effort and community). In the long term I can, of course, be cautiously hopeful that the social and organizational issues will get worked through one way or another.

Fortunately, and why I like the JavaScript ecosystem even as I find JavaScript the language awkward to work with,there are many possible JavaScript containers to run stuff in. Here are a couple more for the server:

http://nodyn.io/
"Nodyn is a Node.js compatible framework, running on the JVM powered by the DynJS Javascript runtime"

http://ringojs.org/
"Ringo is a CommonJS-based JavaScript runtime written in Java and based on the Mozilla Rhino JavaScript engine. It takes a pragmatical and non-dogmatic stance on things like I/O paradigms. Blocking and asynchronous I/O both have their strengths and weaknesses in different areas."

So, in the Stigmergic sense, the idea of JavaScript everywhere (including on the server) is taking off as all us little FOSS termites get excited about the idea and work together on various arches. And with ways to compile C to code that can run efficiently on a JavaScript runtime, I wonder f we will see more and more adoption of JavaScript containers and further improvements in them.

While divisions of this look painful, when you step back and look at the landscape of millions of software developers who like to develop software (sometimes in different styles or with different emphases) this kind of forking is inevitable.

Reflecting on this though, I started shifting from Python around the time that the "Benevolent Dictator for Life" Guido van Rossum created a new (somewhat) backwardly-incompatible version of Python (3) while the community kept pushing support for the old one. Perl faced a similar issue with a new version going to version 6. I'm sympathetic to that dilemma for the original authors, but those are, to a lesser extent, and maybe with less drama, other examples of these sorts of tensions of priorities and individual vs. community control regarding priorities and future directions.

We probably need to develop much better understanding of what makes a FOSS project a success (in terms of community dynamics) and how it can stay a success despite trying to fix up early design choices.

Sometimes workarounds can keep things together for a time, like how JSLint/JSHint and "use strict" i

The main question is

[pooh666]

Which one should I use now and why?

Re:The main question is

[Anonymous Coward]

"neither" is always my feeling with this stuff... wake me up when they've got a stable API, understand release management, the need for stable security support and realise that not everyone wants to run git head all the time...

Incorrect...

[Junta]

A 'project' is a vague concept. What 'sponsorship' means can be vague too. Are they providing hosting services? Are they managing the authentication configuration? Did they impose some CI where they get final say? Did they provide employment to some or all participants? Did they pay as part of a contract arrangement for the time of some developers?

In short, knowing how corporate sponsorship historically happens in open source, the corporation maybe provides some contribution, but does take control of the project hosting and copyright such that the 'authoritative' source follows their will, but they do not actually offer many of the developers financial benefit or bind their hands to fork.

This happens not infrequently to very prominent software in open source land, sometimes without the commercial facet. MySQL and MariaDB. Ethereal and Wireshark. gPXE and iPXE. XFree86 and Xorg. ffmpeg and and libav. Openoffice and Libreoffice. Usually it becomes clear where the *real* meat of development was and only one fork is technically viable.

Solve this once and for all...

[Anonymous Coward]

s/(he|she|it|they)/\(he\|she\|it\|they\)/

Or something similiar that is a proper regex :)

If you just include all 4 each time it'll be difficult for anybody's panties to be in a bunch and additionally you can make one scripted run across the entire documentation-base to change them once and for all, assuaging both devs complaints (singular irrelevant doc change, and gender neutralizing all pronouns)

Problem solved.

Re:Solve this once and for all...

[BreakBad]

s/(he|she|it|they)/Pat/g

Because, it's Pat.

MEAN becomes MEAI? MEIA? MIEA? MEAO? MEOA?

[AnontheDestroyer]

MEIOA? (like meow?)
EI EI O?

Not enough consontants to work with, unless there's a good non-English curseword sound in there. Anyone?

And all 12 users cried

[Anonymous Coward]

While the rest of the world trudged on...

Why didn't they fork it before?

[cripkd]

When TJ Holowaychuk announced he is leaving Node behind he said:

Streams are broken, callbacks are not great to work with, errors are vague, tooling is not great, community convention is sort of there, but lacking compared to Go. That being said there are certain tasks which I would probably still use Node for, building web sites, maybe the odd API or prototype. If Node can fix some of its fundamental problems then it has good chance at remaining relevant, but the performance over usability argument doesn’t fly when another solution is both more performant and more user-friendly.

And now they're forking Node over this ?
So I'm guessing streams will still be broken and callback will still be not great to work with.

Re:Why didn't they fork it before?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's Mr callback to you! Don't make them fork it again!

What's wrong with them?

[MikeRT]

So what's wrong? It's one thing to accidentally have (things that can be seen as) sexist texts in a product but the idea that correcting that is somehow wrong is unbelievable idiotic.

Are you stupid or just pretending to be stupid? The issue is that there was an established technical reason why commits like that shouldn't go in. He enforced the rule and then called an asshole among other things demonizing his character. If you think this is acceptable, especially from a Vice President of a company (Cantrill is a Vice President according to Wikipedia) then I don't know what to say except that your social skills make Linus Torvalds look like he's ready to ghost write an etiquette book for managing teams.

Re:What's wrong with them?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't find it acceptable that you go around calling people stupid when you don't agree with them. Go re-read your post and tell me that your social skills are anything but Linus quality.

Congratulations for social justice!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well done social justice!
You just killed node.js!
Huzzahs for all.

And now the community at large is going to see your bullshit tactics even more and they will dismiss you for the bunch of crybabies you are.
Well done. You should pat yourselves on your backs for this.

I bet they don't even realize this as well. That is the hilarious thing.

What what?

[Sla$hPot]

Whatwat wat wat wt??

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Effort dilution (vs. Stigmergy)

[Connie_Lingus]

And the failure of the Linux Desktop to gain traction is a prime example of that (other than finally essentially via the Chromebook).

well, there is always next year.

Obligatory XKCD

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

When someone thinks the standard isn't working....

How many years after the OpenOffice fork are there people still thinking what's OpenOffice vs LibreOffice? How many years past Oracle giving the keys to the source repository to OpenOffice do we still think OpenOffice vs LibreOffice

When it comes between slogging through a new architecture, or dealing with people, usually the new architecure is easier and almost always more fun. One advantage to paid projects (note: before mod down, this is a single advantage, not me saying paid is better or worse) the money can make people stick to a single project and not fork, meaning we have more consistency in interfaces. On a fork you may get goodness like the gcc/egcs split where the fork is so much better it becomes the mainline, or you might get the emacs/Xemacs split which is still an issue a decade plus out.

Felt similar about the "firing" bit as extreme

[Paul Fernhout]

I especially liked the link to "empathy is a core engineering value" though: http://www.listbox.com/member/...

Linked from: https://www.joyent.com/blog/th...

And if so, should not empathy extend throughout all levels of a learning organization, including between managers and subordinates? Everyone is learning stuff all the time, including about cultural changes. Firing someone rather than trying to understand the situation and the individual's motives more first and whether change is needed or possible does not seem "empathic". Perhaps that is the kind of thing you tend to learn after many years of experience being a parent or other long-term caregiver (including a long-term manager or mentor) when you see someone learn and grow and change over a long time?

Plus, as other comments suggest here, there is an assumption in this blog post that may ignore the possibility the issue was about consolidating minor changes rather than having them as individual commits. If this issue was deemed by enough of the community to be important, maybe a more systematic patch would indeed be in order? One tiny change is not much work, but it may set a bad precedent?

Also, it is not empathic to coworkers and the rest of a company and community depending on someone to fire that person without notice without reasonable review or attempts at remediation for a less than egregious offense (contrast with, say, someone accused of physically assaulting a coworker). The issue there is proportion and risk/harm assessment.

So, the response of "we would have fired him" seems too extreme in multiple ways.

I am all for meaningful diversity in workgroups, like discussed in this book:
"The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies"
http://www.amazon.com/The-Diff...

However, the problem with some of these "politically correct" initiatives or statements which seem on the surface to be helpful to promote "diversity" is that they can actually make workspaces more stressful for *everyone*. Someone can bully with the rules (or their interpretation) just as much, or more, than with a fist... Here is a website by psychologist Izzy Kalman that explores some issues related to bullying and truly creating happy productive workplaces by *really* emphasizing empathy and forgiveness and growth and free speech:
http://bullies2buddies.com/

Just think about it -- does everyone at Joyent now need to be afraid of getting fired if they check the word "he" into the codebase, even by accident? Or maybe by saying "he" accidentally as a meeting? There are potential unintended consequences of creating a different sort of hostile workplace climate, like many US schools are finding out these days as a result of "zero tolerance" policies (like biting a cracker at lunch to make it shaped like a gun can get you in deep deep trouble).

For reference, here is what makes for happy productive creative workplaces in general (Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose):
"RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates people"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Anyway, these are all complex issues about language, sex, management, control, gender roles, cultural change, recruitment, productivity, norms, and more. They are tricky to talk about or write about without seeming uncaring or inept because of various assumptions people make about the context or the people involved -- and the fact that none of us are "perfect" (and that perfection can be in the eye of the beholder based on priorities). It is sad to see such great software get mired in them. But I guess they are p

Re:Felt similar about the "firing" bit as extreme

[Anonymous Coward]

"I especially liked the link to "empathy is a core engineering value" though:"

What the fuck is a company doing spouting a bunch of pseudo religious bullshit? For fucks sake they cant run themselves into the dirt fast enough

Re:Felt similar about the "firing" bit as extreme

[Anonymous Coward]

Good god, Paul. Are you one of Stephen King's aliases? Like him, you have diarrhea of the typewriter, regardless of how well thought out and articulated your posts may be. But please, carry on.

What a great reason to fork a project....

[jtara]

NOT.

Can't we all just get along?

Now, let's focus on more serious issues. I've dealt with my share of this. I was almost fired from Sony San Diego Studio for my clicky keyboard. Let's make sure all projects permit the use of clicky keyboards, or FORK IT!

You know what, though - I decided it wasn't worth it - I just put up with a crappy Microsoft keyboard.

Re:What a great reason to fork a project....

[Anonymous Coward]

It's annoying enough when people hammer crappy bubble keyboards in a shared space, let alone clicky ones. We are all entitled to think and have quiet time. Or maybe I should play happy hardcore music out of my speakers while you are working because it helps my coding mojo in the same way your cliquey keyboard helps yours?

sign of the open source times

[Anonymous Coward]

Appears a lot of forks of recent foundation technologies in the F/OSS community are having the same arguments and situations. Systemd comes to mind.
  ono
So in the commercial world: change happens from market pressures (to make a profit) and technical (profit still, but the tech sucked).

In the FOSS world: changes appears to happen from petty contributor personality issues to development team philosophy.

As you can tell, I did not mention end user experience in either case.

Mod parent informative

[Anonymous Coward]

Do it, the world needs to know.

I love node but this is STUPID.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not about anything even remotely technical. They both need to eat humble pie and apologize for being political and stupid. They need to decide that the node repository is not the place to discuss gender issues, gun control or a whole host of things.

I don't know what kind of bad PR joyent got or if this is just from their own political agenda's but they should appreciate the free technical help and as long as the programmer isn't puting #BooBies everywhere in the variable names then changing code arguing over he/she/they isn't anymore helpful than tabs / spaces. Standardize, don't standardize, change , don't change -- it really doesn't matter you just need agreement. the computer won't notice the difference in the runtime.

 

Stupid and hypocritical

[Zynder]

From the article you linked:

we believe that empathy is a core engineering value—and that an engineer that has so little empathy as to not understand why the use of gendered pronouns is a concern almost certainly makes poor technical decisions as well.

Bullshit, bullshit, and more bullshit. Technical decisions have practically dick to do with empathy. Every single time I have tried to add features to a product or system for "social" value I've been slapped the hell down. Technical decisions are based on 2 factors: Cost and Fitness for Purpose. The fitness is really just pointing back to profit since no one will buy a washing machine that can't wash. I'm not arguing anything about sexism or whatever. I could care less (but I won't because I do care a little) about which pronoun is used. And really does this whole thing not sound like it was completely a political bunch of spinning because "women in tech" is the big "thing" right now?

Also, do you smell that? That's hypocrisy right there. "We, this company, are making an overly broad generalization about people who make overly broad generalizations and wish to state that we don't condone overly broad generalizations. Those making overly broad generalizations shall be sacked." What I want to know is when and where the corporate-wide seppuku party will be so I can go watch.

How about those guys and gals get back to making java not suck so bad.

That's why I delete them

[Zynder]

That's why regardless of what the comments say or which code snippet they may be from, I delete them. The open source plugs, the attributions, the ascii art of the brogrammers cat, the ones that specifically tell me I'm not allowed to delete them because GNU_GPL v6004 license-- ALL of them. I also don't write any comments in my software. I am also a bad programmer.

Linux = Lusers

[Zynder]

I prefer to use "the luser" for three reasons: One) I am immature and find it funny. Two) It is a staple term I learned at a young age from my LUG and I've heard many of you here use it all the time. Three) As I said a post above, I am a shitty programmer so this reminds me that I am a luser too, so it keeps my arrogance in check.

Siding with Bryan's view

[JPyObjC Dude]

Sorry but I'm +1 on the change in jode.js and any open source project. I would prefer to avoid insulting the sensitive developers out there in code by avoiding gender pronouns.

Ben, sorry but you were being a di*k / a**hole there.

I agree that Bryan Cantrill could have been softer on how he blogged about this but that is not Bryan's style and I find his style very refreshing for the most part.

Now that is not to say that I may switch to io.js as I am getting very impatient about the 0.12 release getting out. Its taking way too long to have a production stable execSync().

Re:Siding with Bryan's view

[Shados]

The focus on getting stability is pretty important. I mean, you can already download the 0.11x builds, and they've been adopted by main branches of node-webkit, atom-shell, etc already.

But some stuff still needs work. ie: until 0.11.14, the SSL pipeline was totally broken (the new async SNICallback was crashing left and right). Just can't release that. At first glance, io.js wants to push faster releases out and get features out faster. These are the same folks who wrote the unstable code in 0.11.x. Its not going to be magically any more stable in io.js.

Honestly, aside from having a build in way to make async stuff sync (for your execSync, and there was a reason I was trying to get SNICallback from >0.11.13.... one of the main use case of SNICallback is for when certs are generated on the fly...and you can't easily do that synchronously...you need the async SNICallback support for that...), there really isn't much thats needed out of node that can't be achieved via NPM packages. Just make it faster, more stable, and we're good.

There's third party support for that via fibers, but thats external packages that have to be compiled, its hell to integrate in the webkit-based shells...so it really needs to be built in, as opposed to having every damn function in the ecosystem have both a sync and an async version.

FAIL!

[Zynder]

You didn't fix shit, AC: They're dead, Jim, and it was killed by politicizing a commit. Fork it and forget it. goodbye.

If one is going to properly sanitize a statement, "you" can't be used. As a reader, *I* didn't kill shit, and it is antagonistic to suggest I did. Offensive even! See the stigma regarding "you people" or "those people".

Re:FAIL!

[Zeromous]

Lol. That went better than expected

You bastard!

[Anonymous Coward]

TRIGGER WARNING NEXT TIME FUCKER!

lamness filter is lame

lamness filter is lame
lamness filter is lame

Bryan Cantrill to be fired soon?

[Anonymous Coward]

But just so you heard it from us: if this were the act of a Joyent employee, we would—to deliberately use a gender-neutral pronoun—fire them.

oh wait, this just a fork, not a gender-neutral pronoun issue...

McD's Fries do have beef fat in them.

[billstewart]

They're not cooked in tubs of beef fat, like the old days, or trans-fats like the less-old days, but the latter is because the public (correctly)perceives trans-fats as unhealthy. They still have beef fat in the pre-cooked frozen fries, for flavor purposes, so they're still not edible for us vegetarians, they're just less unhealthy for you carnivores.

Burger King doesn't use meat fat in their fries, and they also have veggie burgers, Five Guys probably makes the best fries, In-n-Out's are ok if you get the right out of the fryer (they're actually made by chopping potatoes, instead of heavily-processed frozen stuff, so they don't last as long, and if you're not vegan you can get animal-style fries, which are a sort of California poutine grease overdose (yay!))

Re:McD's Fries do have beef fat in them.

[Zynder]

Thanks for the clarification. It's all trash nowadays and I've drastically reduced my consumption so I doubt I'll go back anyway. Don't congratulate me though, to make up for healthier eating I've increased my tobacco consumption, lol!

McD's niche was consistent adequacy

[billstewart]

You can find a much better hamburger almost anywhere. But you can also find a much worse hamburger anywhere. What McD's delivered early on was a consistently adequate hamburger, fries, and drinks at a relatively low price and high convenience. It would never be as good as the burgers at Ralph's Exxon*, much less the Waldorf Astoria, but it would also never be as bad as the burgers at the Binghamton NY Greyhound station or the vending machine at college. And it would also always be better than White Castle.**

* Ralph's was originally a gas station in central NJ, added a lunch counter, and eventually the food was bringing in more business than the gas. 10-oz burgers on a good hard roll (if you're not from the NY-NJ-Philly area, you may never have had a good hard roll.) They went out of business shortly after I stopped eating meat.
** Unless you're Harold and Kumar that night they were high; if you're high your mileage may vary.

Realted to Io programming language?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this related to the Io programming language? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Io_%28programming_language%29

CORRECTION

[Zynder]

I meant to say "That implies RHD is superior"

The fork should switch to using Spidermonkey

[Anonymous Coward]

And here I was thinking they forked node.js to get away from the V8 engine which is no longer the fastest.

Yet another example of Lewis's law

[Anonymous Coward]

Articles like these are why I tend to never read the comments on /.

Joyent was not in the wrong for suggesting that reverting a commit to the documentation would be a fire-able offense. The way it was done certainly seems like it was taken then wrong way by some. At very lease HR would have a conversation with you if you pulled crap like that at any reasonable company.

If during your HR conversation it came out that your intent was altogether benign and that you simply thought the request didn't merit a commit, then you would work with your manager on a better way to handle such situations. Because to you, obviously from your place of privilege, it seems trivial and not an issue at all. To others it's apparently an issue and being sensitive to the needs of others is no skin off your back. It actually makes life easier for yourself and others in the long run.

So I believe it's sad that node.js is being forked to io.js over what amounts to a temper tantrum. I believe that Ben feels hurt by all of this and for that I'm sorry, but to leave the project instead of owning what he did and vowing to do better in the future does not speak well of his character.

Stepping down is a cop-out, often done by those who have no recourse to offer, as a form of self-punishment and a way to absolve themselves of future responsibility.

Personally, I'll be avoiding io.js and I hope that Ben comes back to work on the project with the full knowledge that this was a bit of a gaffe, but not a big deal in the long run and I'm sure he's a totally reasonable guy most of the time. If he wants to wear his big boy pants again I'm sure the project would welcome his skills back.

Full disclosure: I am not at all involved in this project and I don't know what their feelings on this are.

Re:Yet another example of Lewis's law

[p0larity]

I may see what io.js has to offer, but this whole mess seems unfortunate.

I guess we sometimes can't all just get along.

Python?

[EmperorOfCanada]

Will this happen with Python? Is there an internal division about the 3.x situation? Or is the controversy entirely external?