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Ben Noordhuis's Departure

blog.nodejs.org

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Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#151

Post by mcv »

patcon wrote: post #42
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…

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.

Ben didn't handle it well, and certainly could have explained himself a bit better. And I disagree with him on the commit; minor language improvements that make the language more inclusive are still valuable, and rejecting them means you're rejecting part of the community.

But the amount of crap he got was totally out of proportion. The commiters should have been able to simply discuss this and decide to handle this better next time.

Maybe this fairly minor incident was blown way out of proportion because of the Joyent-Strongloop friction.

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#152

Post by sampo »

DannyBee wrote: post #63
rodgerd wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here's hoping Ben now finds a workplace that appreciates him for his talents and respects him as a person. He'd better find one that respects him more than he appears to respect women. What's oddest about this is the amazing volte-face Bryan Cantrill appears to have performed. It wasn't that long ago he was adressing gross deficiencies in Solaris' performance compared to Linux on SPARC hardware with snarky, persona…

"He'd better find one that respects him more than he appears to respect women." I've read his responses twice now, and i don't see, in either case, anything that makes me think he doesn't respect women. Can you please point it out? I'm genuinely interested. The guy said like 7 sentences none of which said anything like "i think what is being done here is wrong" (instead, he said "i generally reject trivial doc fixes…

> he said "i generally reject trivial doc fixes for X reasons"

But for people who do not consider the related gender issues trivial, it was not a trivial doc fix.

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#153

Post by sampo »

DanBC wrote: post #84
jacalata wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 would say that he is, as are most guys in tech, ignorant of issues around sexism He's also speaking English as a second language.

I am speaking English as a second language, and my native language does not have gendered pronouns, and the gendered pronouns bother me every day, I cannot make myself blind to them.

Then again, if his native tongue also has gendered pronouns (as it appears to do), he should be aware of the issue, not because of English, but because of his native language has the same issue. Well, perhaps his native language user community has not yet started the same discussion, though.

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#154

Post by sampo »

malandrew wrote: post #122
wpietri wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand you believe it was trivial. Maybe Ben Noordhuis still does too. Others disagree. Using power to force one's own view because one can is a problematic behavior in open source projects. It needlessly costs contributors. And respect.

Please explain to me what view you think Ben was forcing upon the community, because I do not think the view you and others nerd-raging here is aligned with reality. Ben was forcing the view that the commit policy had not been followed, which is a view that the rest of the community agrees with . This all got blown out of control when someone misinterpreted Ben's actions and started a bikeshedding tempest in a teacup…

> "Please explain to me what view you think Ben was forcing upon the community

The view that the improvement to the documentation text was trivial.

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#155

Post by spion »

gotofritz wrote: post #145
RyanZAG wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a note: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/nodejs/mqSf47HhmyY/m8QpZE9mJ... These are the guys in control of nodejs. They appear to be both immature and highly profit driven with far more interest in themselves than the platform. If this isn't a red flag for investing time in nodejs, I don't know what is.

the post you link to seems quite sensible, I don't see what's the problem with it

Is it really?

Does Joyent care about the future of node more than about it being its cash cow?

If so, why aren't Joyent willing to collaborate with other companies in a sensible way?

Why are they willing to throw collaborators that work for competitors into the fire as soon as shit hits the fan?

If collaborators know that Joyent will issue a press release to discredit them and protect their asses as soon as that collaborator makes a PR mistake, do you think that anyone would be actually willing to join the node project and work as a collaborator?

Is the answer to the previous question good for node.js?

These are just some of the fears that I'm having for the future of node.

I think that Joyent should apologize. Not for standing up for gender equality, but for betraying the community's trust. The trust that collaboration will consist of good will and support; that all issues will be resolved with reasonable discourse, no matter what company you happen to work for. Or at the very least, for handling things poorly by adding fuel to the fire.

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#156

Post by aktau »

I already had done so, but it makes me feel even better about dropping node for go. Not just because of the increased sanity go brings to my codebase (no more callback hell, which frankly was a mess even with node addon libraries). Now I can also feel good about not tacitly supporting Joyent, way to make good people leave.

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#157

Post by dccoolgai »

Using gender-neutral pronouns in English is the right thing to do...but this guy is a native Dutch speaker. Seems really insensitive and hegemonic to have jumped down his throat like that, considering.

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#158

Post by smf »

malandrew wrote: post #122
wpietri wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand you believe it was trivial. Maybe Ben Noordhuis still does too. Others disagree. Using power to force one's own view because one can is a problematic behavior in open source projects. It needlessly costs contributors. And respect.

Please explain to me what view you think Ben was forcing upon the community, because I do not think the view you and others nerd-raging here is aligned with reality. Ben was forcing the view that the commit policy had not been followed, which is a view that the rest of the community agrees with . This all got blown out of control when someone misinterpreted Ben's actions and started a bikeshedding tempest in a teacup…

Exactly. Well said.

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#159

Post by davidw »

IsaacSchlueter wrote: post #124
RyanZAG wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a note: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/nodejs/mqSf47HhmyY/m8QpZE9mJ... These are the guys in control of nodejs. They appear to be both immature and highly profit driven with far more interest in themselves than the platform. If this isn't a red flag for investing time in nodejs, I don't know what is.

You say "profit driven" like it's a bad thing. I thought this was a forum about startups.

> Let's say that we don't/can't do that, we'd have to create a new foundation. That's not cheap. Conservative estimates put it at around 1-2 million a year for legal, marketing, hiring a few developers to work on Node.js.

BTW, I think the Apache Software Foundation gets by with much less than that.

I agree that 'profit driven' is not a bad thing, though, in any event!

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#160

Post by xs_kid »

chc wrote: post #134
aabalkan wrote: post #10

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.

Ben wasn't "fired" — he voluntarily resigned from the Node and libuv projects because he was so put off by the treatment he was receiving.

Sure, he voluntarily resigned after of being called an asshole and sexist by the project owner (Joyent), seems totally expected in my opinion.
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