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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...
That explains a ton, I imagine. It might even explain everything. ...makes Ben's decision to pull out of the project even more interesting though. Where does that leave StrongLoop?
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No, this is trivial and his stand was just him being pointlessly argumentative. It's entirely unproductive from both an equal rights standpoint as well as a technical one. Drama for drama's sake is and should remain a firing offense.
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.
Looking at the IRC log, here's a weirdery: The initial patch (47d98b6) and the merge commit isaacs made (5812e19) both appear in the IRC log. bnoordhuis' revert (804d40e) doesn't. In fact, the revert isn't discussed at all.
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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?
At the time of the controversy, the core developers of libuv were Ben Noordhuis (bnoordhuis), and Bert Belder (piscisaureus), both working for StrongLoop. Nothing is meant to be committed to the libuv tree without one of them signing off on it. To quote Ben's commit message: "@isaacs may have his commit bit but that does not mean he is at liberty to land patches at will. All patches have to be signed off by either me or Bert. Isaac, consider yourself chided."
But the very first comment on Ben's revert is from Bart: "I signed off on it. Just leave it as-is, no need to revert."
In short: Isaac did accept the pull request. He did not have the authority. Someone with authority (Bert) did accept it, however it was reverted (by Ben) under the mistaken belief that no one with authority had accepted it. A simple communication breakdown; why Bert didn't commit it himself (or why Isaac didn't note that he was committing it with Bert's authorisation) I'll never know.
For those who don't know the background of the story: [1] http://werd.io/2013/gendered-pronouns-in-software-a-quick-pr... [2] http://strongloop.com/strongblog/collaboration-not-derision-... As said in [2]: If Ben can’t learn, we’ll fire him. [Edit: See comment below. This is not meant literally.] that seems like the result.
Although Ben could have handled this better, it's quite obvious that this is just a strategically motivated witch hunt by Joyent. Their actions are vicious and completely out of proportion. Sidenote: In Ben's native language, using gender neutral pronouns is considerably more contrived and artificial, and therefor not a regular subject of debate when it comes to gender equality.
Yep. Joyent's new corporate strategy: hunting witches. Nailed it.
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That explains a ton, I imagine. It might even explain everything. ...makes Ben's decision to pull out of the project even more interesting though. Where does that leave StrongLoop?
I would not be surprised to see StrongLoop fork node.
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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.
AFAIK this is not the case. The contributor had not signed a CLA when he first submitted the pull request, but evidently did sign it well before Isaac merged in the change (he claimed to have done so very early in the original PR thread). As far as I can tell, procedure was followed. It seems pretty clear that Ben acted somewhat inappropriately — maybe not with his initial rejection, but when he reverted Isaac's merg…
Still though, I would make the reverse point: I think the initial rejection was a bit dodgy, but the reversion was clearly justified.
Really, the reversion had nothing to do with the CLA; rather it was made by Isaac, who did NOT have authority to make that commit, and as far as Ben knew, it was unauthorized. Reverting it was justified. (In fact it was authorized by Bert, but Ben didn't know that. Yeah, Ben could have checked with Bert first, but I doubt I'd have done that in his shoes. If I was making a commit to a project I didn't have authority to, I'd probably make a public note who had told me it was okay. Isaac didn't.)
...still, either way, I agree with your conclusion.
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…
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.
Joyent's decision to publicly shame one of Node's largest contributors with a passive-aggressive blog post instead of approaching him privately speaks volumes about their maturity.
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I don't think he appears to really disrespect women. I would say that he is, as are most guys in tech, ignorant of issues around sexism and arrogant enough to believe that if he is not aware of an issue it does not exist. Having read his responses, I think he seems like a reasonable guy who could stand to understand the world better. edit: it wasn't that long ago? 16 years ago I was in elementary school. That's like…
I think we're allowed to be ignorant of the politically correct gender issues surrounding grammatical usage in a codebase. To do otherwise is to bikeshed. On the internet no one knows you're a dog. 99% of the time I have no idea if the person I'm talking to on Github is a man, woman or has a different gender identity, nor do I care. It'd simply doesn't matter. [0] All that original commit did is set off a giant clust…
You should consider that just because something isn't important to you doesn't mean it isn't important to someone. A commit like that doesn't measurably hurt you or me, so even if it only helps someone else moderately and in a way we don't entirely understand, it is still net-good. This isn't political correctness; it's objective practicality.