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Ben was called a bigot and his rejection of the pull request was ascribed to the "principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered" (from the Joyent blog). Th
by austinz 13y ago
Ben was called a bigot and his rejection of the pull request was ascribed to the "principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered" (from the Joyent blog). The problem is, all of this is being extrapolated from his statement "sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that", which could be seen as a flippant dismissal of gender issues in the tech industry - or it could be simply a curt response acknowledging standard practice ('rejecting pull requests that only correct typos or comments'). Only Ben really knows Ben's intention - and he didn't clarify it in either of the long comment threads on github. (If he did make explicitly misogynistic follow-up comments please correct me; I didn't see any myself.)
Maybe he was insensitive or tone-deaf, maybe he should have made an exception (because perhaps commits like these have some sort of special significance that goes beyond simply fixing spacing issues in comments), maybe people should have talked to him and explained why others might have found his actions questionable - and, some of this did happen - but the hysterical response is really sort of scary. Wikipedia has an "assume good faith" principle - maybe something similar would be a good idea for open-source communities, so that problems and differences in opinion could be resolved before escalation into a screaming match?
- piscisaureus 13y agoWell, there you go: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568172 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568...
- Lazare 13y agoJoyent is looking worse and worse as the dust settles.
- austinz 13y agoBen: "If this is what I have to deal with, then I'd just as rather do something else." After this all-smoke-no-flame shitstorm, one big company carrying out a character assassination and publicly wishing they could fire him and his current employer dangling a Damocles' sword over his job...I really can't blame him.
- yetanotherphd 13y ago"To me as a non-native speaker, the difference between 'him' and 'them' seems academic but hey, if it gets us scores of female contributors, who am I to object?" I sense some subtle irony in that statement.
- nsxwolf 13y ago"To the people that felt it necessary to call me a misogynist: I volunteer in a mentorship program that gets young people - especially young women - involved in technology. How many of you go out and actively try to increase the number of women in the field?" This is sort of like the "but my best friend is black" defense, but in this case I think it demonstrates that defense is not always invalid.
- acdha 13y agoYour spin attempt ignored the part where he reverted someone else's commit with a threatening message. Nobody would ge talking about it if he had simply ignored it or asked Isaac about it first.
- skwirl 13y agoWhat was the threatening message? Could you link to it?
- benmmurphy 13y agoI believe he said, 'you are chided' or something along those lines. A public reprimand is quite harsh but I wouldn't call it a threatening message.
- austinz 13y agoHere's his revert message, copied from below, in the full: "@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." Refers to a procedural matter, kind of snarky. Hardly 'threatening'. Does not discuss the pronoun, content of the revert, or any content related to gender issues at all. By the way, it's rather fatuous to refer to my comment as a 'spin attempt' just because I didn't reflexively grab my pitchfork and torch and run out to join the mob trying to crucify this developer as a incorrigible misogynist, but asked for evidence and clarification instead. Food for thought.
- skwirl 13y agoI would really appreciate it if acdha could explain how they view this comment as a threat. acdha made the same claim elsewhere in this thread as well. It appears that some people are attempting to lower the bar for something to be a "threat" to be any statement made by someone they don't like (or they've been told not to like).
- acdha 13y ago