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Ben Noordhuis's Departure

blog.nodejs.org

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Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#101

Post by girvo »

patcon wrote: post #45
patcon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

A lot of people across the various forums that discuss this stuff seem to be missing this. It is politics, pure and simple. Joyent and Ben had... an interesting relationship, as far as I'm aware.

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#102

Post by wpietri »

veemjeem wrote: post #57
[deleted] wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

I just don't understand how a company the size of Joyent would waste time writing blog posts about pronouns in a code comment. This would be the equivalent of Microsoft blogging about some engineer's code comment in the Windows source code. Nobody cares about that stuff.

There was a lot of activity on Twitter around the commit.

The issue wasn't the pronouns; they were there for a long time without a problem. The issue was that somebody trying to fix them got their pull request closed with "Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that." It was a jerky move, and a lot of people brought it to Joyent's attention since their name was at the top of the page.

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#103

Post by HaloZero »

Lazare wrote: post #17
mseepgood wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because he refused to take a commit making language in some part of the code gender-neutral He didn't only refuse such a commit. He actively reverted it.

On procedural grounds. It hadn't been accepted, as far as Ben knew, by someone with the authority to make that decision, it didn't follow project guidelines, and the contributor hadn't signed a CLA. The revert had nothing to do with grammar and language.

I thought Isaac accepted the Pull Request and merged it in? Doesn't he have the authority?

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#104

Post by malandrew »

wpietri wrote: post #98
veemjeem wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I read the github thread. Ben closed the sincere and well-meant patch, saying, "Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that." He didn't just participate in the drama; he started it. Non-drama options would be things like: asking the contributor more, asking a colleague to look it over, asking a native speaker why it mattered, and just moving past the pull request and leaving it for somebody who cared.

It was a trivial change. It didn't help me nor anyone else understand the code being commented on any better, nor did it change any executable code. That's about as close to the definition of a trivial[0] change that I can think of. Pronoun choice is of little value of importance since this is a open source project, not a college gender studies class. If you think that's not trivial, then take it somewhere where it's not considered trivial and spare everyone else the bikeshedding.

[0] definition of trivial: of little value or importance.

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#105

Post by nostrademons »

sneak wrote: post #31
rdtsc wrote: post #8

The last time this was discussed the story was buried pretty quickly. My comment was pertinent to drama and the community, it sort of got reinforced a bit more now so I'll just repost. Sorry for anyone who already read it already. --- My understanding of Node.JS and libuv community is as an outsider. I don't follow what's going on unless it is on the front page of HN once in a while and other forums. But one impressi…

> But one impression I get from Node.JS and its surrounding community is arrogance and immaturity. s/Node\.JS/javascript/;

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

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#107

Post by malandrew »

xs_kid wrote: post #27
dekz wrote: post #21

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

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

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

Personally, I would love to see Joyent reliquish control over the project over their pettyness in this whole fiasco. They have proven themselves to be a poor steward of the project.

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#108

Post by x0x0 »

WhaleBiologist wrote: post #59
sneak wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not. It references rape, but is not synonymous. Its current definition is roughly synonymous with "unreasonably upset".

Unless you are a rape victim you have no right to determine what is and isn't acceptable usage of the term. Please respect the triggers of other people and check your privilege.

butthurt isn't slang for rape, and you don't get to decide what the community understanding of the meaning is. Which is someone unreasonably upset.

source: my understanding, peer understandings, and every post on urbandictionary

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#109

Post by waterlion »

xs_kid wrote: post #23
selmnoo wrote: post #7

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

That was Joyent defending their control over to project, remember that Ben & StrongLoop were a menace for Joyent: http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/18/can-this-startup-steal-nod...

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

I think that clears up the question of Bryan's intentions in writing that blog post.

Others have said 'judge Noordhuis by his actions not his intentions'. I don't believe this is a fair way to behave, and this demonstrates why.

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#110

Post by malandrew »

wpietri wrote: post #102
veemjeem wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't understand how a company the size of Joyent would waste time writing blog posts about pronouns in a code comment. This would be the equivalent of Microsoft blogging about some engineer's code comment in the Windows source code. Nobody cares about that stuff.

There was a lot of activity on Twitter around the commit. The issue wasn't the pronouns; they were there for a long time without a problem. The issue was that somebody trying to fix them got their pull request closed with "Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that." It was a jerky move, and a lot of people brought it to Joyent's attention since their name was at the top of the page.

It wasn't a jerky move at all. Ben simply struck down a 100% bikeshed commit that didn't even follow the commit policy.

Making that trivial bikeshed commit in the first place is a jerk move.

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