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Ben Noordhuis's Departure

blog.nodejs.org

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Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#161

Post by yebyen »

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.

Distinctions like that are meaningful to the unemployment office and in a court of law. They actually said they were firing him, publicly, and he left the project. The fact (of law) is probably that he resigned, voluntarily. I actually came to say "I don't care" but after critical analysis, I think you're wrong. He was fired.

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#162

Post by xs_kid »

"Many of you already have expressed your opinion regarding recent drama, and I'd like to ask that you please respect our wishes to let this issue rest, so that we can all focus on the road forward."

Sure, please don't talk about this anymore since it can harm to Joyent's reputation and business.

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#165

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#166

Post by patcon »

yawboakye wrote: post #138
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.

Do you realize the gravity of losing someone like Ben on a project like Node? I know you'd never get around to improving/contributing to Node but how does what you said get us closing to anything?

I know. I think my answer was simplistic. I said I'd never heard of Ben, but I was actually primed by reading this article right before stumbling upon the debacle: http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/18/can-this-startup-steal-nod...

Having only ever had positive experiences with Isaacs in non-node-core capacities, I suppose I immediately jumped on "their side". So I guess I came to the conversation on biased terms.

Could it be that he's just not someone to be a project lead? Someone can be a prolific contributor (and a good person -- not demonizing him), but still not be the right folks to lead a project, right?

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#167

Post by DannyBee »

sampo wrote: post #152
DannyBee wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

That's it? That's the reason to crucify someone? That seems insanely short sighted and stupid.

Without inserting any personal views here, crucifying people who appear completely ignorant of a cause, or don't understand the level of concern you feel about something, is not an effective method of advocacy. It's exactly the opposite.

If you don't understand how to be an effective advocate, you tend to hurt rather than help your cause.

Example: This whole thing.

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#168

Post by drderidder »

janjongboom wrote: post #131
Lazare wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's right, and with their expertise in libuv they could easily target a version to large multicore (32, 64) servers. IBM has also created a PowerPC fork, incidentally.

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#169

Post by pquerna »

davidw wrote: post #159
IsaacSchlueter wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Yes, it highly depends on what your foundation "does".

The ASF does not hire developers to work on projects -- it just provides the infrastructure for development to happen. Once you start hiring developers, budgets for foundations go up way too quickly, and once you do that you get into the whole fundraising trap. (Need to raise 2m? Better pay an ED $250,000 to do that, and then they are motivated to get it to $3m, etc)

Re: Ben Noordhuis's Departure

#170

Post by sneak »

wpietri wrote: post #114
abcd_f wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ben is not a native English speaker, so as stated by Ben, he didn't realize it was a big deal. But is it an actually big deal for native speakers? I realize that some people think it's important, but then some people also think that you can't swear in comments and can't use "retard" as a summary opinion about someone else. In live, non-corporate language would any native speaker in fact routinely use "they" instead…

I routinely use singular they [1] when referring to someone where gender isn't relevant. E.g., "I want to find a new doctor; they should be smarter than the fool I'm using now." What got me going on this was Douglas Hofstadter's "A Person Paper on the Purity of Language" [2], which I read long ago in college. For me it's been a very gradual change; I don't like language forcing me in directions I don't want. Similarl…

A friend once patched an ircd so that it would not accept messages not written in e-prime.

I thought it a brilliant hack.

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