14 ms·

Ben Noordhuis's Departure

208 points by clloyd 13y ago

xs_kid 13y ago
Because of this incident (and Joyent response on it), Isaac Roth from StrongLoop and others are asking for a neutral home for project: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/nodejs/mqSf47HhmyY/Wl8Od9vb1QwJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/nodejs/mqSf47HhmyY/Wl8Od9vb1...
bowlofpetunias 13y ago
Although Ben could have handled this better, it's quite obvious that this is just a strategically motivated witch hunt by Joyent. Their actions are vicious and completely out of proportion. Sidenote: In Ben's native language, using gender neutral pronouns is considerably more contrived and artificial, and therefor not a regular subject of debate when it comes to gender equality.
- IsaacSchlueter 13y ago
  Yep. Joyent's new corporate strategy: hunting witches. Nailed it.
  - doe88 13y ago
    Which would indeed explain the sheer violence of the blog post.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
kirinan 13y ago
This is so sad on many different levels. A guy who clearly liked working on this module has to make a choice to walk (which is his choice) because people get offended by pronouns. I seriously don't like where all this is headed: where he, she, they are all NEEDED so people don't get offended. This is the whole christmas thing all over again, and it needs to be enforced by society that just because you don't like something and it "offends" you then it doesn't mean that people can't/won't do it. in this case, a very popular project loses a great contributor but how long before other things like this starts happening because people are "offended" by little things. Good job on Ben for standing on for whats right, and hope more people take his route and say enough is enough.
- sneak 13y ago
  No, this is trivial and his stand was just him being pointlessly argumentative. It's entirely unproductive from both an equal rights standpoint as well as a technical one. Drama for drama's sake is and should remain a firing offense.
  - veemjeem 13y ago
    If you read the github thread, you'd see that Ben actually never participated in the drama/discussion until it blew up. Ben essentially rejected the pull request, then a giant PR nightmare blew up overnight with blog posts from Joyent & Strongloop. He decided to leave because of the whole ordeal from the companies.
    - wpietri 13y ago
      I read the github thread. Ben closed the sincere and well-meant patch, saying, "Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that." He didn't just participate in the drama; he started it. Non-drama options would be things like: asking the contributor more, asking a colleague to look it over, asking a native speaker why it mattered, and just moving past the pull request and leaving it for somebody who cared.
      - malandrew 13y ago
        It was a trivial change. It didn't help me nor anyone else understand the code being commented on any better, nor did it change any executable code. That's about as close to the definition of a trivial[0] change that I can think of. Pronoun choice is of little value of importance since this is a open source project, not a college gender studies class. If you think that's not trivial, then take it somewhere where it's not considered trivial and spare everyone else the bikeshedding. [0] definition of trivial: of little value or importance.
        wpietri 13y ago
        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.
adamnemecek 13y ago
'Donglegate' 2.0. Also this submission will not be on the front page in less than 30 minutes.
- DanBC 13y ago
  Because threads like these are tainted by hateful mra idiots who joined HN in droves about 8 months ago.
  - jcromartie 13y ago
    > hateful mra idiots They're just the expected outcome of Jezebel/Tumblr Internet feminism. I'm not agreeing with them, but I can see how they may feel like they've been backed into a corner.
phaed 13y ago
I'm in support Ben's decision 100%.
- Myrmornis 13y ago
  Me too
- vbtechguy 13y ago
  Indeed on Ben's side in this but personally, I don't think Ben should of stepped aside/left.
arunoda 13y ago
This is the same thing I'd do if I've faced something like this. All I have to say is Node community is fool enough to lose a talent like Ben. I've got $250 credits from Joyent as a gift for Node Knockout. I will never it and never suggest any of my clients to choose Joyent.
cliftonk 13y ago
Joyent's decision to publicly shame one of Node's largest contributors with a passive-aggressive blog post instead of approaching him privately speaks volumes about their maturity.
- deleted 13y ago
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  - sneak 13y ago
    I don't think that's verging, as they aren't referring directly to him.
    - deleted 13y ago
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    - deleted 13y ago
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  - veemjeem 13y ago
    I just don't understand how a company the size of Joyent would waste time writing blog posts about pronouns in a code comment. This would be the equivalent of Microsoft blogging about some engineer's code comment in the Windows source code. Nobody cares about that stuff.
    - jbigelow76 13y ago
      As others have pointed out in different comments, Joyent's participation in the whole affair looks like strategic maneuvering against a direct competitor. And if Ben is out at Strongloop (a co-founder of the company as well as being a Node/libuv contributor) then it worked like a charm. To paraphrase the saying: "don't let a perfectly good crisis go to waste."
    - wpietri 13y ago
      There was a lot of activity on Twitter around the commit. The issue wasn't the pronouns; they were there for a long time without a problem. The issue was that somebody trying to fix them got their pull request closed with "Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that." It was a jerky move, and a lot of people brought it to Joyent's attention since their name was at the top of the page.
selmnoo 13y ago
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 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/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568172 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568... A lot of people speculated that this is part of a dance Joyent is doing to assert itself as a big cloud player. I don't know how much truth there is to that, but as a general spectator I feel like wanting to remark that Bryan Cantrill only fanned the fire here in all of this. And so perhaps there should be some weight given to the fact that a worker of a company that's a competitor to Joyent just quit, arguably due to Joyent's rough play -- if Joyent had approached the matter differently, carefully, sensitively, there likely would have been a different conclusion to this. But now it's done, and pretty much every participating party in this whole thing came out looking like a loser, Joycent, Strongloop, the whole nodejs scene. Here's hoping Ben now finds a workplace that appreciates him for his talents and respects him as a person.
- mseepgood 13y ago
  > because he refused to take a commit making language in some part of the code gender-neutral He didn't only refuse such a commit. He actively reverted it.
  - Lazare 13y ago
    On procedural grounds. It hadn't been accepted, as far as Ben knew, by someone with the authority to make that decision, it didn't follow project guidelines, and the contributor hadn't signed a CLA. The revert had nothing to do with grammar and language.
    - chc 13y ago
      AFAIK this is not the case. The contributor had not signed a CLA when he first submitted the pull request, but evidently did sign it well before Isaac merged in the change (he claimed to have done so very early in the original PR thread). As far as I can tell, procedure was followed. It seems pretty clear that Ben acted somewhat inappropriately — maybe not with his initial rejection, but when he reverted Isaac's merge and "chided" him. The important thing to remember, though, is that one bit of prickly behavior shouldn't be enough to brand someone "an asshole." Heaven knows I've gotten annoyed and said things I've regretted on more than one occasion.
rdtsc 13y ago
The last time this was discussed the story was buried pretty quickly. My comment was pertinent to drama and the community, it sort of got reinforced a bit more now so I'll just repost. Sorry for anyone who already read it already. --- My understanding of Node.JS and libuv community is as an outsider. I don't follow what's going on unless it is on the front page of HN once in a while and other forums. But one impression I get from Node.JS and its surrounding community is arrogance and immaturity. This is from top to down -- companies sponsoring it (Joyent) and many of its vocal proponents. I see plenty of energy, enthusiasm, but mixed with immaturity. "We don't know what are doing, but darn it! we will be very vocal and do it with lots of enthusiasm". One guy doesn't want to commit a trivial change. It blows up into a media shitstorm. Reverted commits. Joyent's reaction is what surprised me -- "While we would fire Ben over this". This guy doesn't even work for them. Hypothetically firing people, hmm, so committed to Women's Rights, they are hypothetically hiring, and firing this person on the spot. Have they talked to him in private? StrongLoop, a company I never heard of until this point, is a bit more mature, that's good to see, but even they couldn't resist the veiled threat. What is sad, as a whole this episode just reinforced the (hopefully wrong) stereotype I have of the community. Joyent instead of helping the community (which I think they thought they did by writing that blog post), are hurting it. Buying into and spending time and money learning a platform/language is also an implicit buy in/participation in the community. So far it screams to me "stay away". Hopefully it will grow up at some point. ---
- sneak 13y ago
  > But one impression I get from Node.JS and its surrounding community is arrogance and immaturity. s/Node\.JS/javascript/;
  - nostrademons 13y ago
    That's not true at all. There are a number of prominent members of the Javascript community - John Resig, Erik Arvidsson, Glen Murphy, Paul Irish, Alex Russell, etc. - that are very mature and a pleasure to work with. The problem is that Javascript is a very large language and has spawned a number of subcommunities, and as is common with communities, the ones with the most drama attract the most attention.
Zikes 13y ago
Joyent called Ben an asshole and said they wanted to fire him over a minor grammatical preference. [1] But let's "please respect [their] wishes to let this issue rest", because it's not like we need an apology or any sort of reassurance from the company that owns a rising star of technology that we're supposed to invest our time and money in. Good luck finding a replacement. [1] http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun
- deleted 13y ago
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- goldenkey 13y ago
  Holy crap, what a read. You have to wonder... What feminist muff is he puffing? I can't stand white knighting especially when it befalls other men in armor. Ben, you've got my sympathies and support, sorry you have to hear this immature politico-feminist-fascluckery from Joyent
  - rosser 13y ago
    What feminist muff is he puffing? Seriously, what does this contribute to the discussion?
  - jacalata 13y ago
    I can't stand white knighting especially when it befalls other men in armor what does that even mean?
    - djur 13y ago
      Personally, I'm wondering about "fascluckery". I think Ben is being poorly served by his defenders, who are gleefully bringing in their MRA hobbyhorses.
      - ceol 13y ago
        HN has been invaded by MRAs from a certain subreddit ever since the "dongle" issue a few months ago. They very quickly latched on to this community because they realized all they had to do was make their comment verbose and it would appeal to the affluent, college-aged men here. Apparently they stuck around.
aabalkan 13y ago
For those who don't know the background of the story: [1] http://werd.io/2013/gendered-pronouns-in-software-a-quick-primer http://werd.io/2013/gendered-pronouns-in-software-a-quick-pr... [2] http://strongloop.com/strongblog/collaboration-not-derision-in-the-node-community/ 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.
- goldenkey 13y ago
  They also call him an asshole. http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun
- chc 13y ago
  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.
  - xs_kid 13y ago
    Sure, he voluntarily resigned after of being called an asshole and sexist by the project owner (Joyent), seems totally expected in my opinion.
  - yebyen 13y ago
    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.
    - chc 13y ago
      StrongLoop did not say they were firing him. They actually said they opposite — that they wanted to keep him on because they benefit from his contributions to the Node and libuv projects. They explicitly noted that the "we will fire him" was a far-future hypothetical situation that they didn't believe would happen. The reason they mentioned firing was because they were responding to Joyent's suggestion that he should be fired. It seemed to me that the overall thrust of StrongLoop's post was, "We think Joyent are quite hasty if they would fire a great guy and great contributor like Ben over a misunderstanding."
parennoob 13y ago
People who want to ruthlessly enforce their personal version of political correctness (Bryan Cantrill in particular, and Ben's employer Issac Roth, who seems to have competed with Bryan in a no-I-am-the-bigger-asshole contest) forced an important core committer out because he tried to enforce accepted commit policy. This is a particularly aggressive brand of feminism, one that I have mostly seen in the USA. It seems to be mostly dictated by people pushing through their changes based on their ideology at any cost, by branding anyone who opposes them as discriminatory oppressors. The number of people I have heard saying stuff like "It was a politically sensitive PR, of course it should have been merged" is surprising. In fact, I would strongly recommend rejecting all such politically sensitive PRs on the basis that they are deliberately controversial, and asking the submitter politely to put their changes in a PR with more significant contributions that they submit to the project. Relevant links: [1] Original pull request: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015 [2] Bryan's "I am going to fire Ben, even though he isn't my employee. Fired. Did I say fired yet?" blog post: http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun [3] Issac Roth's "We'll fire Ben if he doesn't learn grammar. Haha, j/k." blog post: http://strongloop.com/strongblog/collaboration-not-derision-in-the-node-community/ http://strongloop.com/strongblog/collaboration-not-derision-...
- rmgraham 13y ago
  Was the strongloop blog post modified since you linked to it? It really doesn't match your characterization of Issac Roth at all. Quite the opposite, actually.
  - parennoob 13y ago
    These are the lines that make me think he is an asshole. > Ben made a mistake by not understanding how important the gender pronoun change was in the pull request. But he was trying to interpret the commit rules... WTF? Any commit should be according to commit rules. And changes which do not actually affect how the code runs are actually unimportant from a core committer's point of view. Couldn't Issac Roth have empathized with that worldview a little more? > But people deserve a chance to correct their mistakes and improve. "You enforced standard commit policy, but because the extreme feminists didn't like it, I am going to give you a chance before firing you." ...aaaand > If Ben can’t learn, we’ll fire him. [Edit: See comment below. This is not meant literally.] "If Ben can't learn, we will fire him. Don't worry, only figuratively fire him. Work out how we can figuratively fire him, good day!"
Lazare 13y ago
Inevitable, but a real injustice. I guess Joyent got what they wanted. Hope it was worth the bad taste it leaves in people's mouths.
dekz 13y ago
Wow. Joyent certainly came out looking childish and pedantic to go so far as publishing a blog posturing and name calling[1]. I am at a loss to even comprehend why this amount of feminist alliance was even required by Bryan Cantrill, or why even such a public naming and shaming is being advocated by Joyent as a company. I'm not on the Joyent hate wagon but they certainly come out of this looking hilariously immature. @bnoordhuis if you're reading this, I've never used libuv as a developer, but you obviously worked hard on the project. I'm sorry you had to felt forced to give it up over some blog post from a company I once believed to be reputable. [1]: http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun [1a]: mirror: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/3051faface454d516929/raw/3fe5038504f29d3310db272d078197c4ef7132d8/gistfile1.txt https://gist.github.com/anonymous/3051faface454d516929/raw/3...
- xs_kid 13y ago
  Joyent was clearly trying to harm the reputation of Ben and of his employeer StrongLoop
  - malandrew 13y ago
    Which is why this project should have been transferred from Ryan Dahl's github account to Isaac's github account or to a new NodeJS organizational github account. Personally, I would love to see Joyent reliquish control over the project over their pettyness in this whole fiasco. They have proven themselves to be a poor steward of the project.
michaelsbradley 13y ago
I find myself quite saddened by the whole affair. I am a big fan of Node.js (though I spend as much time or more with Clojure/JVM these days). Over the past year+, I've been very impressed with the tech coming out of Joyent and the engineering team/s led by Bryan Cantrill. Without intending to be inflammatory, I must say that I found Bryan's blog post regarding pronouns and assholes to be unprofessional and disturbing. I asked Mikeal Rogers[1] about his thoughts regarding the ethical limits of "unacceptance" policies/campaigns within developer communities and workplaces[2], and I would be interested to read the HN crowd's feedback as well. [1] https://github.com/mikeal https://github.com/mikeal [2] https://gist.github.com/mikeal/7724521 https://gist.github.com/mikeal/7724521
tkorri 13y ago
In the recent weeks I've seend a few businesses make stupid statements on their websites and on social media. As a business owner I just don't understand why they're doing that. What do you achieve when you call your customer/associate/employee a(n) asshole/liar on your website? I haven't heard of Joyent before this whole thing started. And to be honest, I still don't know what they do, but I'm pretty sure I don't want to do any business with them.
- Afforess 13y ago
  Agreed. From a business perspective Joylent's actions in this matter make no sense. Do they hope to gain sales from people impressed with their extreme name-calling? I for one will not be recommending them or using their services in the future.
deleted 13y ago
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__pThrow 13y ago
I can't imagine ever wanting to work for Bryan Cantrill or Joyent or even contribute to node.js in any capacity. I encourage Cantrill and Joyent to think about their obligations as founder and employer to their own employees. Ben was not one of their employees, but the callous remarks, the callout culture, the threat of immediate firing over something so trivial speaks to a deep misunderstanding of the modern role of employer and employee. Cantrill's remarks were shameful. That Joyent didn't walk them back egregious.
- sendob 13y ago
  I still admire some of the work he has done, but I have to also count myself among those who would not want to work with someone so willing to grand stand and just generally so hostile to another human. One phrase I remember from Cantrill re: Oracle & Solaris was that "People Innovate, not companies". Commits contribute, blog posts rarely do.
Tomte 13y ago
That happens when you publicly shame and demonize your core contributors. Joyent has royally fucked up there, and if I was buying services from them, I'd have stopped now. They didn't have to like his opinions, but this could have been handled much more amicably (maybe some "agree to disagree" and "we overrule you on this specific issue, no hard feelings"). Instead they chose the nuclear option, not only publicly blogging about how wrong they think Ben was, but actually fantasizing about firing him. This is what happens when you're flat-out denying the Holocaust here in Germany. But for standing on the "wrong side" of how to handle gernder pronouns? Please...
Myrmornis 13y ago
Gender inequality is the world's greatest human rights challenge, but Ben Noordhuis is not the problem. This was idiotic politically correct micromanaging that deserved the response initially given to the PR: "not interested in trivial changes like that".
- newman314 13y ago
  Don't you think genocide or human trafficking trumps that?
  - Myrmornis 13y ago
    You might be right, but the reason I tend to think it's gender inequality is, obviously, because every person has a 50% chance of being affected. And probably every woman on the planet is affected to some degree. Whereas the pan-global, per-person probability of being affected by genocide or human trafficking is extremely small in comparison. My guess is that the average amount of suffering per person ends up being much higher for gender inequality. I.e. for genocide it's a sum over a few million people of a very large amount of suffering each, whereas for gender inequality it is a sum over say 40% of the world's population of smaller amounts of suffering each, plus a sum over, say, 10% of the world's population of a large amount of suffering (e.g. women who are denied access to education, denied personal freedom of movement outside their homes, etc).
lettergram 13y ago
I think from now on I am going to use "him" sometimes and "her" sometimes in my code. I'll flip a coin on which one to use.
neokya 13y ago
What a disaster. This company @joyent totally fucked up the whole situation.
malandrew 13y ago
Joyent, Please do the classy thing and have Isaac create a NodeJS organization on Github and move the project to that organization under his stewardship. With great power came great responsibility and using the Joyent corporate blog to excoriate one of the community's most valuable contributors is the path to the dark side. http://substack.net/images/coronation.png http://substack.net/images/coronation.png
- drderidder 13y ago
  When Ryan originally announced the transition to Joyent, someone asked if node would be moved to Joyent's github repo. Isaac replied: "I hope not". But now he asserts that Joyent owns node, and considers it a "cash cow".
  - malandrew 13y ago
    Who owns the trademark?
    - drderidder 13y ago
      Joyend. I mean Joyent.
  - benatkin 13y ago
    I think this was between ry/node and joyent/node, not nodejs/node and joyent/node.
lolwutf 13y ago
To everyone who felt polarized by this issue, I want you to take a second and feel shame. This was such of little consequence, honestly. This wasn't some massive, elaborately planned, misogynistic plot. This was a matter of few pronouns in a random software project. Stupid crusades like this do damage. We all need to pick our battles carefully. And not doing as much should collectively be viewed as a bad thing. If you were mounting up on a crusade about this little issue, let me be clear: you should feel bad. I love tech's progressive thoughts on individual rights and respect and firm adherence to equality, but sometimes the tech industry loses sight of the forest for the trees, and we should collectively rally against that habit. Now, we lost an amazing Node contributor.
aquadrop 13y ago
Did actually any women complain? Cause all I saw was bunch of guys arguing about how awful it is to use gender pronouns. I wouldn't care if all examples were written with "her". Cause that's absolutely unimportant. As I understand there's more serious, real issues with gender equality, like: salary difference, not promoting women, entering barrier, etc. Not damn "he" in doc examples. And as Ben mentioned he actually do some real things: 'I volunteer in a mentorship program that gets young people - especially young women - involved in technology.' Too bad they all didn't talked it over privately in the very beginning and resolved the issue. That retaliation post by Bryan Cantrill only hurts Joyent's reputation in my eyes.
- WhaleBiologist 13y ago
  Sadly this is the exact behaviour I have come to expect from these types of people. Rather than actively work towards fixing the big issues in gender inequality (which requires society as a whole to change, and consequently will take decades of slow improvement), they choose to take the easy route and fill themselves with self-righteous indignation over an open source maintainer who reverted a commit for a trivial documentation change that he thought violated commit procedures. Obviously he is a rampant misogynist and needs to be crucified. The real irony here is that the people with the pitchforks are generally more sexist than those they choose to lambast, seeing as they feel so compelled to defend poor defenseless women from all aggressors (real and imagined).
- ravisarma 13y ago
  To answer your question: Yes. https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482dcc8d1c41c14333fcb48 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d... (please scroll). However, that's not a necessary criteria. Substitute "he" for some other term, say "white person", and I doubt you'll see the need for a specific member of the excluded segment to speak up. The real argument is around the second part of your comment. Which can be recast as whether male as the default gender, when used in texts, is a matter of concern for the development/opportunities of women. I think so. Along with salary differences, etc. We do not have to reach to Simone de Beauvoir to make that point... here is a link to a current analysis/view: http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/gender-sensitive-language/ http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/gender-sensitive-langu.... Quote: > Moreover, these issues are important for people concerned about issues of social inequality. There is a relationship between our language use and our social reality. If we “erase” women from language, that makes it easier to maintain gender inequality. As Professor Sherryl Kleinman (2000:6) has argued, > > [M]ale-based generics are another indicator—and, more importantly, a reinforcer—of a system in which “man” in the abstract and men in the flesh are privileged over women. > > Words matter, and our language choices have consequences. If we believe that women and men deserve social equality, then we should think seriously about how to reflect that belief in our language use.
htp 13y ago
This is the kind of thing that helps me understand why people don’t want to contribute to open source: You can get flamed just for making code public [1]. Contributing to someone else’s project and missing the bar for quality is one thing, but this person _shared some potentially useful code_ and several Internet-famous people took a dump on her project. Wrapping your head around software is already hard enough without having to worry about getting trolled or potentially destroying future opportunities. Or the case we have here: a couple of actions get taken out of context and have meaning read into them where there wasn’t any, and now people think you’re a misogynist. Why contribute and deal with all of that potential noise, when you can do _just about anything else_ and not have to worry? [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5106767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5106767
gotofritz 13y ago
That's it, I'm out. I'm dropping node for dart.
aktau 13y ago
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.
dccoolgai 13y ago
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.
xs_kid 13y ago
"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.
Zelphyr 13y ago
Oh my GOD I can't believe this is actually a thing.
mmgutz 13y ago
Ridiculous. First Ryan Dahl, now Ben. Why does the guy who wrote the blog post still have a job? That is the most unprofessional post I've read on a company blog.
caseman72 13y ago
I think each of the people who comment on github should have to do it in Dutch (and try to get the pronouns correct).

208 points by clloyd 13y ago

Because of this incident (and Joyent response on it), Isaac Roth from StrongLoop and others are asking for a neutral home for project: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/nodejs/mqSf47HhmyY/Wl8Od9vb1QwJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/nodejs/mqSf47HhmyY/Wl8Od9vb1...

bowlofpetunias 13y ago

Although Ben could have handled this better, it's quite obvious that this is just a strategically motivated witch hunt by Joyent. Their actions are vicious and completely out of proportion. Sidenote: In Ben's native language, using gender neutral pronouns is considerably more contrived and artificial, and therefor not a regular subject of debate when it comes to gender equality.

IsaacSchlueter 13y ago
Yep. Joyent's new corporate strategy: hunting witches. Nailed it.
- doe88 13y ago
  Which would indeed explain the sheer violence of the blog post.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

kirinan 13y ago

This is so sad on many different levels. A guy who clearly liked working on this module has to make a choice to walk (which is his choice) because people get offended by pronouns. I seriously don't like where all this is headed: where he, she, they are all NEEDED so people don't get offended. This is the whole christmas thing all over again, and it needs to be enforced by society that just because you don't like something and it "offends" you then it doesn't mean that people can't/won't do it. in this case, a very popular project loses a great contributor but how long before other things like this starts happening because people are "offended" by little things. Good job on Ben for standing on for whats right, and hope more people take his route and say enough is enough.

sneak 13y ago
No, this is trivial and his stand was just him being pointlessly argumentative. It's entirely unproductive from both an equal rights standpoint as well as a technical one. Drama for drama's sake is and should remain a firing offense.
- veemjeem 13y ago
  If you read the github thread, you'd see that Ben actually never participated in the drama/discussion until it blew up. Ben essentially rejected the pull request, then a giant PR nightmare blew up overnight with blog posts from Joyent & Strongloop. He decided to leave because of the whole ordeal from the companies.
  - wpietri 13y ago
    I read the github thread. Ben closed the sincere and well-meant patch, saying, "Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that." He didn't just participate in the drama; he started it. Non-drama options would be things like: asking the contributor more, asking a colleague to look it over, asking a native speaker why it mattered, and just moving past the pull request and leaving it for somebody who cared.
    - malandrew 13y ago
      It was a trivial change. It didn't help me nor anyone else understand the code being commented on any better, nor did it change any executable code. That's about as close to the definition of a trivial[0] change that I can think of. Pronoun choice is of little value of importance since this is a open source project, not a college gender studies class. If you think that's not trivial, then take it somewhere where it's not considered trivial and spare everyone else the bikeshedding. [0] definition of trivial: of little value or importance.
      - wpietri 13y ago
        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.

adamnemecek 13y ago

'Donglegate' 2.0. Also this submission will not be on the front page in less than 30 minutes.

DanBC 13y ago
Because threads like these are tainted by hateful mra idiots who joined HN in droves about 8 months ago.
- jcromartie 13y ago
  > hateful mra idiots They're just the expected outcome of Jezebel/Tumblr Internet feminism. I'm not agreeing with them, but I can see how they may feel like they've been backed into a corner.

phaed 13y ago

I'm in support Ben's decision 100%.

Myrmornis 13y ago
Me too
vbtechguy 13y ago
Indeed on Ben's side in this but personally, I don't think Ben should of stepped aside/left.

arunoda 13y ago

This is the same thing I'd do if I've faced something like this. All I have to say is Node community is fool enough to lose a talent like Ben. I've got $250 credits from Joyent as a gift for Node Knockout. I will never it and never suggest any of my clients to choose Joyent.

cliftonk 13y ago

Joyent's decision to publicly shame one of Node's largest contributors with a passive-aggressive blog post instead of approaching him privately speaks volumes about their maturity.

deleted 13y ago
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- sneak 13y ago
  I don't think that's verging, as they aren't referring directly to him.
  - deleted 13y ago
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  - deleted 13y ago
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- veemjeem 13y ago
  I just don't understand how a company the size of Joyent would waste time writing blog posts about pronouns in a code comment. This would be the equivalent of Microsoft blogging about some engineer's code comment in the Windows source code. Nobody cares about that stuff.
  - jbigelow76 13y ago
    As others have pointed out in different comments, Joyent's participation in the whole affair looks like strategic maneuvering against a direct competitor. And if Ben is out at Strongloop (a co-founder of the company as well as being a Node/libuv contributor) then it worked like a charm. To paraphrase the saying: "don't let a perfectly good crisis go to waste."
  - wpietri 13y ago
    There was a lot of activity on Twitter around the commit. The issue wasn't the pronouns; they were there for a long time without a problem. The issue was that somebody trying to fix them got their pull request closed with "Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that." It was a jerky move, and a lot of people brought it to Joyent's attention since their name was at the top of the page.

selmnoo 13y ago

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 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/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568172 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568... A lot of people speculated that this is part of a dance Joyent is doing to assert itself as a big cloud player. I don't know how much truth there is to that, but as a general spectator I feel like wanting to remark that Bryan Cantrill only fanned the fire here in all of this. And so perhaps there should be some weight given to the fact that a worker of a company that's a competitor to Joyent just quit, arguably due to Joyent's rough play -- if Joyent had approached the matter differently, carefully, sensitively, there likely would have been a different conclusion to this. But now it's done, and pretty much every participating party in this whole thing came out looking like a loser, Joycent, Strongloop, the whole nodejs scene. Here's hoping Ben now finds a workplace that appreciates him for his talents and respects him as a person.

mseepgood 13y ago
> because he refused to take a commit making language in some part of the code gender-neutral He didn't only refuse such a commit. He actively reverted it.
- Lazare 13y ago
  On procedural grounds. It hadn't been accepted, as far as Ben knew, by someone with the authority to make that decision, it didn't follow project guidelines, and the contributor hadn't signed a CLA. The revert had nothing to do with grammar and language.
  - chc 13y ago
    AFAIK this is not the case. The contributor had not signed a CLA when he first submitted the pull request, but evidently did sign it well before Isaac merged in the change (he claimed to have done so very early in the original PR thread). As far as I can tell, procedure was followed. It seems pretty clear that Ben acted somewhat inappropriately — maybe not with his initial rejection, but when he reverted Isaac's merge and "chided" him. The important thing to remember, though, is that one bit of prickly behavior shouldn't be enough to brand someone "an asshole." Heaven knows I've gotten annoyed and said things I've regretted on more than one occasion.

rdtsc 13y ago

The last time this was discussed the story was buried pretty quickly. My comment was pertinent to drama and the community, it sort of got reinforced a bit more now so I'll just repost. Sorry for anyone who already read it already. --- My understanding of Node.JS and libuv community is as an outsider. I don't follow what's going on unless it is on the front page of HN once in a while and other forums. But one impression I get from Node.JS and its surrounding community is arrogance and immaturity. This is from top to down -- companies sponsoring it (Joyent) and many of its vocal proponents. I see plenty of energy, enthusiasm, but mixed with immaturity. "We don't know what are doing, but darn it! we will be very vocal and do it with lots of enthusiasm". One guy doesn't want to commit a trivial change. It blows up into a media shitstorm. Reverted commits. Joyent's reaction is what surprised me -- "While we would fire Ben over this". This guy doesn't even work for them. Hypothetically firing people, hmm, so committed to Women's Rights, they are hypothetically hiring, and firing this person on the spot. Have they talked to him in private? StrongLoop, a company I never heard of until this point, is a bit more mature, that's good to see, but even they couldn't resist the veiled threat. What is sad, as a whole this episode just reinforced the (hopefully wrong) stereotype I have of the community. Joyent instead of helping the community (which I think they thought they did by writing that blog post), are hurting it. Buying into and spending time and money learning a platform/language is also an implicit buy in/participation in the community. So far it screams to me "stay away". Hopefully it will grow up at some point. ---

sneak 13y ago
> But one impression I get from Node.JS and its surrounding community is arrogance and immaturity. s/Node\.JS/javascript/;
- nostrademons 13y ago
  That's not true at all. There are a number of prominent members of the Javascript community - John Resig, Erik Arvidsson, Glen Murphy, Paul Irish, Alex Russell, etc. - that are very mature and a pleasure to work with. The problem is that Javascript is a very large language and has spawned a number of subcommunities, and as is common with communities, the ones with the most drama attract the most attention.

Zikes 13y ago

Joyent called Ben an asshole and said they wanted to fire him over a minor grammatical preference. [1] But let's "please respect [their] wishes to let this issue rest", because it's not like we need an apology or any sort of reassurance from the company that owns a rising star of technology that we're supposed to invest our time and money in. Good luck finding a replacement. [1] http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun

deleted 13y ago
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goldenkey 13y ago
Holy crap, what a read. You have to wonder... What feminist muff is he puffing? I can't stand white knighting especially when it befalls other men in armor. Ben, you've got my sympathies and support, sorry you have to hear this immature politico-feminist-fascluckery from Joyent
- rosser 13y ago
  What feminist muff is he puffing? Seriously, what does this contribute to the discussion?
- jacalata 13y ago
  I can't stand white knighting especially when it befalls other men in armor what does that even mean?
  - djur 13y ago
    Personally, I'm wondering about "fascluckery". I think Ben is being poorly served by his defenders, who are gleefully bringing in their MRA hobbyhorses.
    - ceol 13y ago
      HN has been invaded by MRAs from a certain subreddit ever since the "dongle" issue a few months ago. They very quickly latched on to this community because they realized all they had to do was make their comment verbose and it would appeal to the affluent, college-aged men here. Apparently they stuck around.

aabalkan 13y ago

For those who don't know the background of the story: [1] http://werd.io/2013/gendered-pronouns-in-software-a-quick-primer http://werd.io/2013/gendered-pronouns-in-software-a-quick-pr... [2] http://strongloop.com/strongblog/collaboration-not-derision-in-the-node-community/ 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.

goldenkey 13y ago
They also call him an asshole. http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun
chc 13y ago
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.
- xs_kid 13y ago
  Sure, he voluntarily resigned after of being called an asshole and sexist by the project owner (Joyent), seems totally expected in my opinion.
- yebyen 13y ago
  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.
  - chc 13y ago
    StrongLoop did not say they were firing him. They actually said they opposite — that they wanted to keep him on because they benefit from his contributions to the Node and libuv projects. They explicitly noted that the "we will fire him" was a far-future hypothetical situation that they didn't believe would happen. The reason they mentioned firing was because they were responding to Joyent's suggestion that he should be fired. It seemed to me that the overall thrust of StrongLoop's post was, "We think Joyent are quite hasty if they would fire a great guy and great contributor like Ben over a misunderstanding."

parennoob 13y ago

People who want to ruthlessly enforce their personal version of political correctness (Bryan Cantrill in particular, and Ben's employer Issac Roth, who seems to have competed with Bryan in a no-I-am-the-bigger-asshole contest) forced an important core committer out because he tried to enforce accepted commit policy. This is a particularly aggressive brand of feminism, one that I have mostly seen in the USA. It seems to be mostly dictated by people pushing through their changes based on their ideology at any cost, by branding anyone who opposes them as discriminatory oppressors. The number of people I have heard saying stuff like "It was a politically sensitive PR, of course it should have been merged" is surprising. In fact, I would strongly recommend rejecting all such politically sensitive PRs on the basis that they are deliberately controversial, and asking the submitter politely to put their changes in a PR with more significant contributions that they submit to the project. Relevant links: [1] Original pull request: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015 [2] Bryan's "I am going to fire Ben, even though he isn't my employee. Fired. Did I say fired yet?" blog post: http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun [3] Issac Roth's "We'll fire Ben if he doesn't learn grammar. Haha, j/k." blog post: http://strongloop.com/strongblog/collaboration-not-derision-in-the-node-community/ http://strongloop.com/strongblog/collaboration-not-derision-...

rmgraham 13y ago
Was the strongloop blog post modified since you linked to it? It really doesn't match your characterization of Issac Roth at all. Quite the opposite, actually.
- parennoob 13y ago
  These are the lines that make me think he is an asshole. > Ben made a mistake by not understanding how important the gender pronoun change was in the pull request. But he was trying to interpret the commit rules... WTF? Any commit should be according to commit rules. And changes which do not actually affect how the code runs are actually unimportant from a core committer's point of view. Couldn't Issac Roth have empathized with that worldview a little more? > But people deserve a chance to correct their mistakes and improve. "You enforced standard commit policy, but because the extreme feminists didn't like it, I am going to give you a chance before firing you." ...aaaand > If Ben can’t learn, we’ll fire him. [Edit: See comment below. This is not meant literally.] "If Ben can't learn, we will fire him. Don't worry, only figuratively fire him. Work out how we can figuratively fire him, good day!"

Lazare 13y ago

Inevitable, but a real injustice. I guess Joyent got what they wanted. Hope it was worth the bad taste it leaves in people's mouths.

dekz 13y ago

Wow. Joyent certainly came out looking childish and pedantic to go so far as publishing a blog posturing and name calling[1]. I am at a loss to even comprehend why this amount of feminist alliance was even required by Bryan Cantrill, or why even such a public naming and shaming is being advocated by Joyent as a company. I'm not on the Joyent hate wagon but they certainly come out of this looking hilariously immature. @bnoordhuis if you're reading this, I've never used libuv as a developer, but you obviously worked hard on the project. I'm sorry you had to felt forced to give it up over some blog post from a company I once believed to be reputable. [1]: http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun [1a]: mirror: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/3051faface454d516929/raw/3fe5038504f29d3310db272d078197c4ef7132d8/gistfile1.txt https://gist.github.com/anonymous/3051faface454d516929/raw/3...

xs_kid 13y ago
Joyent was clearly trying to harm the reputation of Ben and of his employeer StrongLoop
- malandrew 13y ago
  Which is why this project should have been transferred from Ryan Dahl's github account to Isaac's github account or to a new NodeJS organizational github account. Personally, I would love to see Joyent reliquish control over the project over their pettyness in this whole fiasco. They have proven themselves to be a poor steward of the project.

michaelsbradley 13y ago

I find myself quite saddened by the whole affair. I am a big fan of Node.js (though I spend as much time or more with Clojure/JVM these days). Over the past year+, I've been very impressed with the tech coming out of Joyent and the engineering team/s led by Bryan Cantrill. Without intending to be inflammatory, I must say that I found Bryan's blog post regarding pronouns and assholes to be unprofessional and disturbing. I asked Mikeal Rogers[1] about his thoughts regarding the ethical limits of "unacceptance" policies/campaigns within developer communities and workplaces[2], and I would be interested to read the HN crowd's feedback as well. [1] https://github.com/mikeal https://github.com/mikeal [2] https://gist.github.com/mikeal/7724521 https://gist.github.com/mikeal/7724521

tkorri 13y ago

In the recent weeks I've seend a few businesses make stupid statements on their websites and on social media. As a business owner I just don't understand why they're doing that. What do you achieve when you call your customer/associate/employee a(n) asshole/liar on your website? I haven't heard of Joyent before this whole thing started. And to be honest, I still don't know what they do, but I'm pretty sure I don't want to do any business with them.

Afforess 13y ago
Agreed. From a business perspective Joylent's actions in this matter make no sense. Do they hope to gain sales from people impressed with their extreme name-calling? I for one will not be recommending them or using their services in the future.

deleted 13y ago

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__pThrow 13y ago

I can't imagine ever wanting to work for Bryan Cantrill or Joyent or even contribute to node.js in any capacity. I encourage Cantrill and Joyent to think about their obligations as founder and employer to their own employees. Ben was not one of their employees, but the callous remarks, the callout culture, the threat of immediate firing over something so trivial speaks to a deep misunderstanding of the modern role of employer and employee. Cantrill's remarks were shameful. That Joyent didn't walk them back egregious.

sendob 13y ago
I still admire some of the work he has done, but I have to also count myself among those who would not want to work with someone so willing to grand stand and just generally so hostile to another human. One phrase I remember from Cantrill re: Oracle & Solaris was that "People Innovate, not companies". Commits contribute, blog posts rarely do.

Tomte 13y ago

That happens when you publicly shame and demonize your core contributors. Joyent has royally fucked up there, and if I was buying services from them, I'd have stopped now. They didn't have to like his opinions, but this could have been handled much more amicably (maybe some "agree to disagree" and "we overrule you on this specific issue, no hard feelings"). Instead they chose the nuclear option, not only publicly blogging about how wrong they think Ben was, but actually fantasizing about firing him. This is what happens when you're flat-out denying the Holocaust here in Germany. But for standing on the "wrong side" of how to handle gernder pronouns? Please...

Myrmornis 13y ago

Gender inequality is the world's greatest human rights challenge, but Ben Noordhuis is not the problem. This was idiotic politically correct micromanaging that deserved the response initially given to the PR: "not interested in trivial changes like that".

newman314 13y ago
Don't you think genocide or human trafficking trumps that?
- Myrmornis 13y ago
  You might be right, but the reason I tend to think it's gender inequality is, obviously, because every person has a 50% chance of being affected. And probably every woman on the planet is affected to some degree. Whereas the pan-global, per-person probability of being affected by genocide or human trafficking is extremely small in comparison. My guess is that the average amount of suffering per person ends up being much higher for gender inequality. I.e. for genocide it's a sum over a few million people of a very large amount of suffering each, whereas for gender inequality it is a sum over say 40% of the world's population of smaller amounts of suffering each, plus a sum over, say, 10% of the world's population of a large amount of suffering (e.g. women who are denied access to education, denied personal freedom of movement outside their homes, etc).

lettergram 13y ago

I think from now on I am going to use "him" sometimes and "her" sometimes in my code. I'll flip a coin on which one to use.

neokya 13y ago

What a disaster. This company @joyent totally fucked up the whole situation.

malandrew 13y ago

Joyent, Please do the classy thing and have Isaac create a NodeJS organization on Github and move the project to that organization under his stewardship. With great power came great responsibility and using the Joyent corporate blog to excoriate one of the community's most valuable contributors is the path to the dark side. http://substack.net/images/coronation.png http://substack.net/images/coronation.png

drderidder 13y ago
When Ryan originally announced the transition to Joyent, someone asked if node would be moved to Joyent's github repo. Isaac replied: "I hope not". But now he asserts that Joyent owns node, and considers it a "cash cow".
- malandrew 13y ago
  Who owns the trademark?
  - drderidder 13y ago
    Joyend. I mean Joyent.
- benatkin 13y ago
  I think this was between ry/node and joyent/node, not nodejs/node and joyent/node.

lolwutf 13y ago

To everyone who felt polarized by this issue, I want you to take a second and feel shame. This was such of little consequence, honestly. This wasn't some massive, elaborately planned, misogynistic plot. This was a matter of few pronouns in a random software project. Stupid crusades like this do damage. We all need to pick our battles carefully. And not doing as much should collectively be viewed as a bad thing. If you were mounting up on a crusade about this little issue, let me be clear: you should feel bad. I love tech's progressive thoughts on individual rights and respect and firm adherence to equality, but sometimes the tech industry loses sight of the forest for the trees, and we should collectively rally against that habit. Now, we lost an amazing Node contributor.

aquadrop 13y ago

Did actually any women complain? Cause all I saw was bunch of guys arguing about how awful it is to use gender pronouns. I wouldn't care if all examples were written with "her". Cause that's absolutely unimportant. As I understand there's more serious, real issues with gender equality, like: salary difference, not promoting women, entering barrier, etc. Not damn "he" in doc examples. And as Ben mentioned he actually do some real things: 'I volunteer in a mentorship program that gets young people - especially young women - involved in technology.' Too bad they all didn't talked it over privately in the very beginning and resolved the issue. That retaliation post by Bryan Cantrill only hurts Joyent's reputation in my eyes.

WhaleBiologist 13y ago
Sadly this is the exact behaviour I have come to expect from these types of people. Rather than actively work towards fixing the big issues in gender inequality (which requires society as a whole to change, and consequently will take decades of slow improvement), they choose to take the easy route and fill themselves with self-righteous indignation over an open source maintainer who reverted a commit for a trivial documentation change that he thought violated commit procedures. Obviously he is a rampant misogynist and needs to be crucified. The real irony here is that the people with the pitchforks are generally more sexist than those they choose to lambast, seeing as they feel so compelled to defend poor defenseless women from all aggressors (real and imagined).
ravisarma 13y ago
To answer your question: Yes. https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482dcc8d1c41c14333fcb48 https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d... (please scroll). However, that's not a necessary criteria. Substitute "he" for some other term, say "white person", and I doubt you'll see the need for a specific member of the excluded segment to speak up. The real argument is around the second part of your comment. Which can be recast as whether male as the default gender, when used in texts, is a matter of concern for the development/opportunities of women. I think so. Along with salary differences, etc. We do not have to reach to Simone de Beauvoir to make that point... here is a link to a current analysis/view: http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/gender-sensitive-language/ http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/gender-sensitive-langu.... Quote: > Moreover, these issues are important for people concerned about issues of social inequality. There is a relationship between our language use and our social reality. If we “erase” women from language, that makes it easier to maintain gender inequality. As Professor Sherryl Kleinman (2000:6) has argued, > > [M]ale-based generics are another indicator—and, more importantly, a reinforcer—of a system in which “man” in the abstract and men in the flesh are privileged over women. > > Words matter, and our language choices have consequences. If we believe that women and men deserve social equality, then we should think seriously about how to reflect that belief in our language use.

htp 13y ago

This is the kind of thing that helps me understand why people don’t want to contribute to open source: You can get flamed just for making code public [1]. Contributing to someone else’s project and missing the bar for quality is one thing, but this person _shared some potentially useful code_ and several Internet-famous people took a dump on her project. Wrapping your head around software is already hard enough without having to worry about getting trolled or potentially destroying future opportunities. Or the case we have here: a couple of actions get taken out of context and have meaning read into them where there wasn’t any, and now people think you’re a misogynist. Why contribute and deal with all of that potential noise, when you can do _just about anything else_ and not have to worry? [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5106767 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5106767

gotofritz 13y ago

That's it, I'm out. I'm dropping node for dart.

aktau 13y ago

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.

dccoolgai 13y ago

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.

xs_kid 13y ago

"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.

Zelphyr 13y ago

Oh my GOD I can't believe this is actually a thing.

mmgutz 13y ago

Ridiculous. First Ryan Dahl, now Ben. Why does the guy who wrote the blog post still have a job? That is the most unprofessional post I've read on a company blog.

caseman72 13y ago

I think each of the people who comment on github should have to do it in Dutch (and try to get the pronouns correct).