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

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?

[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?

[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?

[bigguy4u]

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

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[stonecypher]

Oh nonsense.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am a gay and trans ally.

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

Re:Joyent unfit to lead them?

[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?

[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.

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.