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Node.js Forked Again Over Complaints of Unresponsive Leadership – The New Stack

41 points by taytus 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
randiantech 9y ago
I do understand the 2015 fork and the technical reasons behind it. But this is non sense.
- hinkley 9y ago
  I was hoping this one was about npm and require(). Get my Dev dependencies out of my prod dependencies already.
- kbody 9y ago
  I remember there was similar noise with Ben a while back about a similar "outcry", but this time (along with the general IRL environment) it seems stronger. There has to be a general attitude of focusing on what matters and not implicate irrelevant things to technical matters. Same thing happened with Brendan Eich (Mozilla) and in part on Palmer Lucky (Oculus). This is getting ridiculous.
okreallywtf 9y ago
While I'm not the first to start screaming about free speech when these kinds of issues arise, it seems like a stupid reason to fork the codebase again and split the community. Its a technical solution to a social problem, splitting the community because the guy is an asshole seems immature to say the least.
- jowiar 9y ago
  Not splitting the community because the guy is an asshole is still splitting the community between "people who will put up with the asshole" and "people who leave the community because of the asshole". This gives the people who left a place to go. And possibly ends up creating a bigger community where being an asshole isn't tolerated. Or maybe not. But it's hard to know without trying.
  - jessaustin 9y ago
    Linking in a non-triggering way to a mostly-thoughtful article by a professor of psychology about the challenges faced by those with autism and other neural diversities is not "being an asshole". If that's "asshole" to you, I'd like to trade entire families and sets of acquaintances and business associates with you...
    - mdekkers 9y ago
      Linking in a non-triggering way Is this a thing? How can I avoid linking in a triggering way? What does it mean?
      - jessaustin 9y ago
        I'm not sure I completely understand it myself. I just know there are more and less courteous ways to discuss particular topics. When the topic of discussion is "harassment", one wouldn't refer to it in such a way that a reader or listener would be reminded of particular situations of harassment that they have experienced themselves. The link in question was about the experience of the neurodiverse with the speech police rather than about harassment per se, but it's possible that some readers might have leaped to that topic, had the tweet been something like, "Let's end speech codes so harassing harassers can harass harassment victims without getting hassled by the man!" Whoops I probably just triggered someone...
      - coldtea 9y ago
        Obviously by not accompanying the link with an offensive comment. Links are not just the a href="xxx" part.
      - pluma 9y ago
        I think it's in the new HTML spec: rel="notriggering"
  - coldtea 9y ago
    >Not splitting the community because the guy is an asshole is still splitting the community between "people who will put up with the asshole" and "people who leave the community because of the asshole". Note how all the BS they mentioned show absolutely no proof that the guy is an asshole. I'd go as far as to say that the people that did the split and power grub move are the real asshole and they should be ashamed and driven away from any community.
StevePerkins 9y ago
"Again"? Node has 7,660 forks and counting: https://github.com/nodejs/node https://github.com/nodejs/node It's only notable if any substantial portion of the community forks. The "previous" fork, Io.js, was key moment for Node. Because that was about fundamental technical questions of choosing between stability versus innovation. This appears to be yet another tweet-fight about CoC's. I can't imagine the community actually fracturing over this, but if it did then I would be fine with that. Let there be one set of conferences for the Douglas Crockford's of the world to discuss code, and another set of conferences for people to discuss Douglas Crockford.
- koolba 9y ago
  > This appears to be a tweet-fight about CoC's. If the community fractures over this, then I'd welcome it. If this turns into one version that focuses on features and the other that focuses on CoCs, I know which one I'll be using.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
benmmurphy 9y ago
It looks like 4 people left the TSC after the vote failed but only 2 people actually voted to eject Rod [6 against, 2 for and 2 abstains?]. Was there something that prevented people who weren't comfortable with Rod being around from voting for him to leave? Though, too be fair I think some of the people who have left have said it wasn't because of someone in particular but rather because of how the TSC was working (or not working).
- LamaOfRuin 9y ago
  10 TSC members voted. It seems there were 13.
  - benmmurphy 9y ago
    This is my concern. If you were willing to resign over a failed vote then it seems like you should make an effort to make the vote. If people were unable to make it to the meeting for such an important vote then there seems to be a problem in the process.
- benmmurphy 9y ago
  Oh. I was mistaken on the distribution of the votes. 6 against. 4 in favour. 2 abstains. That makes more sense. [https://github.com/nodejs/board/issues/67 https://github.com/nodejs/board/issues/67]
flanbiscuit 9y ago
There was a previous discussion of this a day ago on HN (got the link via reddit) but it's showing up as flagged. I'm not sure why it was flagged as I haven't read the full comments myself yet. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15078995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15078995 and here's the reddit discussion I pulled it from https://www.reddit.com/r/node/comments/6vhbit/here_we_go_again_nodejs_forked_to_ayojs_iojs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/node/comments/6vhbit/here_we_go_aga...
- mzw_mzw 9y ago
  Discussions of this topic on HN tend to get flagged quickly because the discussion goes strongly against the witch-hunters.
mayank 9y ago
This is really misleading and shoddy reporting. It's one disgruntled developer forking over Code of Conduct issues (not even technical). The chances that this will win over any significant traction from the node community is nearly zero. > The Node.js Foundation did not immediately offer a response in time for this story. They also didn't put out a press release when I clicked the "fork" button on Github yesterday.
- jondubois 9y ago
  It looks like some sort of power grab. Do these people even care about Node.js at all? How did they get on the Node.js TSC in the first place? Good luck to Ayo.js... and anyone who ends up using it.
- LamaOfRuin 9y ago
  4 members of the TSC have resigned and the foundation board made their scheduled meeting private and are dedicating it entirely to this issue.
  - mayank 9y ago
    node's strength is its community -- how do any of the things you cited indicate that the community is going to fork, especially over a non-technical issue? The reason io.js took off with the community is because it addressed a core technical issue in node, namely the outdated version of V8 that 0.x was using. It's a bit like the Bitcoin fork -- the only thing that matters is adoption, not resignations over personal issues and private meetings. If Ayo.js suddenly offered 2x the performance of node, then we'd have a real story. Right now, this is the type of internal bickering that happens in any organization.
  - pluma 9y ago
    3 members resigned over this issue. The 4th member resigned over a conflict of interest.
strictnein 9y ago
> "In that Tweet, Vagg commented “If you’ve never considered the potential downsides of codes of conduct, here’s a good place to start.”" Well clearly we should burn this heathen.
- pluma 9y ago
  The wording seems to have been unfortunate. He later clarified he wasn't "anti-CoC", he just thinks the CoC is open to discussion like any other document and that it can be improved. Which of course is totally irresponsible hate speech and should rightfully be treated as grounds for kicking him out of an organisation he massively contributed to for the better part of its lifetime.
jessaustin 9y ago
Please edit the title! s/ – The New Stack// The "fork" is not called that; that's just some random online media brand.
linkmotif 9y ago
rvagg endorsed this article: http://quillette.com/2017/07/18/neurodiversity-case-free-speech/ http://quillette.com/2017/07/18/neurodiversity-case-free-spe...? What an inane article—WOW! If Isaac Newton showed up in 2017 and bestowed upon humanity the heretofore undiscovered Newtonian Mechanics, humanity would definitely publish those results! He would get by without the 20k Twitter followers. And hey, if he was anti PC and inflammatory he might even get elected POTUS!
- debacle 9y ago
  Douglas Crockford has said some of the most stupid shit I've ever read. He's still contributed massively to JavaScript.
  - pluma 9y ago
    And there has been a witch hunt against him too. People tried to get him kicked off a conference he was being invited to because of "safety" concerns. Allegedly he vented backstage after someone's talk once in a way that made another person feel "unsafe". Plus he's a well-off old straight white man.
    - debacle 9y ago
      I guess my point was that people having bad ideas doesn't mean they can't contribute.
- jessaustin 9y ago
  My impression is that the introduction was pitched to eighth graders... the piece [0] got better as it went on. The actual point, that some people, for biological reasons, have more trouble with the speech police than other people have, seems obviously true? A case is made that those neurodiverse people are still worth having around... you may disagree! Either way there is nothing triggering in the piece itself, nor in the tweet pointing to it. The various board members seem simply to have a disagreement here. If they can't stand to be on a board with people who disagree with them, they certainly should set up their own board so they will be more happy. [0] http://quillette.com/2017/07/18/neurodiversity-case-free-speech/ http://quillette.com/2017/07/18/neurodiversity-case-free-spe...
debacle 9y ago
What the actual fuck. I was expecting a technical rationale. This is all about a witch hunt against a single board member? io.js was a hugely effective fork in moving node forward. This is trying to split a technical project for social reasons. Who is this going to benefit? After looking at the "evidence" below, I'm not really sure how to feel. Nothing Rod did was particularly noble, but I don't think it's all that bad. It'd register a few hundred millieichs at best. He seems to be a relatively combative guy who might feel slighted by the community - I don't know enough about what goes on politically in the node space to judge. This makes me sad. Open source projects are supposed to be about people coming together, about creating something that the entire world can use, leverage, and take value from. Completely unrelated, but somewhere in the linked twitter thread there's a great recipe for deviled eggs for no reason I can identify. Edit: This reddit comment is fantastic - https://www.reddit.com/r/node/comments/6vhbit/here_we_go_again_nodejs_forked_to_ayojs_iojs/dm0lhfh/ https://www.reddit.com/r/node/comments/6vhbit/here_we_go_aga...
jessaustin 9y ago
This whole episode may be pretty silly, but flagging TFA is even worse. We have to know these people are around trying to ruin all our nice stuff... why not read about their shenanigans?
marcofatica 9y ago
> Williams charged that Vagg’s presence on the board indicated that the organization is not serious about fostering inclusivity within the community, a frustration she has expressed for well over a year. Good, software isn't about being inclusive, it's about delivering software. I can't imagine how awful it was to work with these women.
ausjke 9y ago
https://github.com/nodejs/board/issues/67 https://github.com/nodejs/board/issues/67 here is the statement from the nodejs side. what exactly is this? what is the "behavior problem" actually? anything to do with 'political correctness"?

41 points by taytus 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

randiantech 9y ago

I do understand the 2015 fork and the technical reasons behind it. But this is non sense.

hinkley 9y ago
I was hoping this one was about npm and require(). Get my Dev dependencies out of my prod dependencies already.
kbody 9y ago
I remember there was similar noise with Ben a while back about a similar "outcry", but this time (along with the general IRL environment) it seems stronger. There has to be a general attitude of focusing on what matters and not implicate irrelevant things to technical matters. Same thing happened with Brendan Eich (Mozilla) and in part on Palmer Lucky (Oculus). This is getting ridiculous.

okreallywtf 9y ago

While I'm not the first to start screaming about free speech when these kinds of issues arise, it seems like a stupid reason to fork the codebase again and split the community. Its a technical solution to a social problem, splitting the community because the guy is an asshole seems immature to say the least.

jowiar 9y ago
Not splitting the community because the guy is an asshole is still splitting the community between "people who will put up with the asshole" and "people who leave the community because of the asshole". This gives the people who left a place to go. And possibly ends up creating a bigger community where being an asshole isn't tolerated. Or maybe not. But it's hard to know without trying.
- jessaustin 9y ago
  Linking in a non-triggering way to a mostly-thoughtful article by a professor of psychology about the challenges faced by those with autism and other neural diversities is not "being an asshole". If that's "asshole" to you, I'd like to trade entire families and sets of acquaintances and business associates with you...
  - mdekkers 9y ago
    Linking in a non-triggering way Is this a thing? How can I avoid linking in a triggering way? What does it mean?
    - jessaustin 9y ago
      I'm not sure I completely understand it myself. I just know there are more and less courteous ways to discuss particular topics. When the topic of discussion is "harassment", one wouldn't refer to it in such a way that a reader or listener would be reminded of particular situations of harassment that they have experienced themselves. The link in question was about the experience of the neurodiverse with the speech police rather than about harassment per se, but it's possible that some readers might have leaped to that topic, had the tweet been something like, "Let's end speech codes so harassing harassers can harass harassment victims without getting hassled by the man!" Whoops I probably just triggered someone...
    - coldtea 9y ago
      Obviously by not accompanying the link with an offensive comment. Links are not just the a href="xxx" part.
    - pluma 9y ago
      I think it's in the new HTML spec: rel="notriggering"
- coldtea 9y ago
  >Not splitting the community because the guy is an asshole is still splitting the community between "people who will put up with the asshole" and "people who leave the community because of the asshole". Note how all the BS they mentioned show absolutely no proof that the guy is an asshole. I'd go as far as to say that the people that did the split and power grub move are the real asshole and they should be ashamed and driven away from any community.

StevePerkins 9y ago

"Again"? Node has 7,660 forks and counting: https://github.com/nodejs/node https://github.com/nodejs/node It's only notable if any substantial portion of the community forks. The "previous" fork, Io.js, was key moment for Node. Because that was about fundamental technical questions of choosing between stability versus innovation. This appears to be yet another tweet-fight about CoC's. I can't imagine the community actually fracturing over this, but if it did then I would be fine with that. Let there be one set of conferences for the Douglas Crockford's of the world to discuss code, and another set of conferences for people to discuss Douglas Crockford.

koolba 9y ago
> This appears to be a tweet-fight about CoC's. If the community fractures over this, then I'd welcome it. If this turns into one version that focuses on features and the other that focuses on CoCs, I know which one I'll be using.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

benmmurphy 9y ago

It looks like 4 people left the TSC after the vote failed but only 2 people actually voted to eject Rod [6 against, 2 for and 2 abstains?]. Was there something that prevented people who weren't comfortable with Rod being around from voting for him to leave? Though, too be fair I think some of the people who have left have said it wasn't because of someone in particular but rather because of how the TSC was working (or not working).

LamaOfRuin 9y ago
10 TSC members voted. It seems there were 13.
- benmmurphy 9y ago
  This is my concern. If you were willing to resign over a failed vote then it seems like you should make an effort to make the vote. If people were unable to make it to the meeting for such an important vote then there seems to be a problem in the process.
benmmurphy 9y ago
Oh. I was mistaken on the distribution of the votes. 6 against. 4 in favour. 2 abstains. That makes more sense. [https://github.com/nodejs/board/issues/67 https://github.com/nodejs/board/issues/67]

flanbiscuit 9y ago

There was a previous discussion of this a day ago on HN (got the link via reddit) but it's showing up as flagged. I'm not sure why it was flagged as I haven't read the full comments myself yet. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15078995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15078995 and here's the reddit discussion I pulled it from https://www.reddit.com/r/node/comments/6vhbit/here_we_go_again_nodejs_forked_to_ayojs_iojs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/node/comments/6vhbit/here_we_go_aga...

mzw_mzw 9y ago
Discussions of this topic on HN tend to get flagged quickly because the discussion goes strongly against the witch-hunters.

mayank 9y ago

This is really misleading and shoddy reporting. It's one disgruntled developer forking over Code of Conduct issues (not even technical). The chances that this will win over any significant traction from the node community is nearly zero. > The Node.js Foundation did not immediately offer a response in time for this story. They also didn't put out a press release when I clicked the "fork" button on Github yesterday.

jondubois 9y ago
It looks like some sort of power grab. Do these people even care about Node.js at all? How did they get on the Node.js TSC in the first place? Good luck to Ayo.js... and anyone who ends up using it.
LamaOfRuin 9y ago
4 members of the TSC have resigned and the foundation board made their scheduled meeting private and are dedicating it entirely to this issue.
- mayank 9y ago
  node's strength is its community -- how do any of the things you cited indicate that the community is going to fork, especially over a non-technical issue? The reason io.js took off with the community is because it addressed a core technical issue in node, namely the outdated version of V8 that 0.x was using. It's a bit like the Bitcoin fork -- the only thing that matters is adoption, not resignations over personal issues and private meetings. If Ayo.js suddenly offered 2x the performance of node, then we'd have a real story. Right now, this is the type of internal bickering that happens in any organization.
- pluma 9y ago
  3 members resigned over this issue. The 4th member resigned over a conflict of interest.

strictnein 9y ago

> "In that Tweet, Vagg commented “If you’ve never considered the potential downsides of codes of conduct, here’s a good place to start.”" Well clearly we should burn this heathen.

pluma 9y ago
The wording seems to have been unfortunate. He later clarified he wasn't "anti-CoC", he just thinks the CoC is open to discussion like any other document and that it can be improved. Which of course is totally irresponsible hate speech and should rightfully be treated as grounds for kicking him out of an organisation he massively contributed to for the better part of its lifetime.

jessaustin 9y ago

Please edit the title! s/ – The New Stack// The "fork" is not called that; that's just some random online media brand.

linkmotif 9y ago

rvagg endorsed this article: http://quillette.com/2017/07/18/neurodiversity-case-free-speech/ http://quillette.com/2017/07/18/neurodiversity-case-free-spe...? What an inane article—WOW! If Isaac Newton showed up in 2017 and bestowed upon humanity the heretofore undiscovered Newtonian Mechanics, humanity would definitely publish those results! He would get by without the 20k Twitter followers. And hey, if he was anti PC and inflammatory he might even get elected POTUS!

debacle 9y ago
Douglas Crockford has said some of the most stupid shit I've ever read. He's still contributed massively to JavaScript.
- pluma 9y ago
  And there has been a witch hunt against him too. People tried to get him kicked off a conference he was being invited to because of "safety" concerns. Allegedly he vented backstage after someone's talk once in a way that made another person feel "unsafe". Plus he's a well-off old straight white man.
  - debacle 9y ago
    I guess my point was that people having bad ideas doesn't mean they can't contribute.
jessaustin 9y ago
My impression is that the introduction was pitched to eighth graders... the piece [0] got better as it went on. The actual point, that some people, for biological reasons, have more trouble with the speech police than other people have, seems obviously true? A case is made that those neurodiverse people are still worth having around... you may disagree! Either way there is nothing triggering in the piece itself, nor in the tweet pointing to it. The various board members seem simply to have a disagreement here. If they can't stand to be on a board with people who disagree with them, they certainly should set up their own board so they will be more happy. [0] http://quillette.com/2017/07/18/neurodiversity-case-free-speech/ http://quillette.com/2017/07/18/neurodiversity-case-free-spe...

debacle 9y ago

What the actual fuck. I was expecting a technical rationale. This is all about a witch hunt against a single board member? io.js was a hugely effective fork in moving node forward. This is trying to split a technical project for social reasons. Who is this going to benefit? After looking at the "evidence" below, I'm not really sure how to feel. Nothing Rod did was particularly noble, but I don't think it's all that bad. It'd register a few hundred millieichs at best. He seems to be a relatively combative guy who might feel slighted by the community - I don't know enough about what goes on politically in the node space to judge. This makes me sad. Open source projects are supposed to be about people coming together, about creating something that the entire world can use, leverage, and take value from. Completely unrelated, but somewhere in the linked twitter thread there's a great recipe for deviled eggs for no reason I can identify. Edit: This reddit comment is fantastic - https://www.reddit.com/r/node/comments/6vhbit/here_we_go_again_nodejs_forked_to_ayojs_iojs/dm0lhfh/ https://www.reddit.com/r/node/comments/6vhbit/here_we_go_aga...

jessaustin 9y ago

This whole episode may be pretty silly, but flagging TFA is even worse. We have to know these people are around trying to ruin all our nice stuff... why not read about their shenanigans?

marcofatica 9y ago

> Williams charged that Vagg’s presence on the board indicated that the organization is not serious about fostering inclusivity within the community, a frustration she has expressed for well over a year. Good, software isn't about being inclusive, it's about delivering software. I can't imagine how awful it was to work with these women.

ausjke 9y ago

https://github.com/nodejs/board/issues/67 https://github.com/nodejs/board/issues/67 here is the statement from the nodejs side. what exactly is this? what is the "behavior problem" actually? anything to do with 'political correctness"?