Comment by chappi42
11 years ago
I don't see truth in your statement that core people did not want to defend him. Shitstorm happened mostly by outsiders/ignorants. He didn't want to continue in such a climate. Joyent wrote a blog post that ruined their reputation. - Good net effect one year later is that node might free themself from Joyent and become much more open/inclusive.
Could someone make (or provide a link to) a summary of the melodrama for outsiders ? It being not too partisan for one side or the other would be a plus.
I was interested myself, so I did a little google-foo.
So Ben Noorddhuis was a major contributor to NodeJS and a volunteer (that is, not a Joyent employee). It turns out Ben rejected a pull request that would have made pronoun in the document gender neutral. The documents were already grammatically correct, but whoever made the pull request had a political preference for using a non masculine pronoun. Ben rightly saw this a trivial change. But the political harpies made an issue of it. Joyent put an embarrassing and immature blog posting which essentially called Ben an "Asshole" and said that if he was an employee he'd be fired. https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun Ben, on the other hand, handled himself quite well. https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6845286
Wow I'd never actually read that Joyent post, it is truly ridiculous!
Wow. I really cannot understand how you see Joyent's actions as immature and embarrassing.
The request is/was/remains a relevant one. Language is important, it is after all the one of the few tools to describe percieved reality.
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My comment starts with "I (don't) think". Feel free to think otherwise, but my statement has truth - I know what I think.