6 ms·

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.

by 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.
    - Lazare 13y ago
      Well, I admit to not being 100% clear on the CLA. I was going of comments in one of the other threads from someone who seemed to know what they're talking about, but didn't show proof. Still though, I would make the reverse point: I think the initial rejection was a bit dodgy, but the reversion was clearly justified. Really, the reversion had nothing to do with the CLA; rather it was made by Isaac, who did NOT have authority to make that commit, and as far as Ben knew, it was unauthorized. Reverting it was justified. (In fact it was authorized by Bert, but Ben didn't know that. Yeah, Ben could have checked with Bert first, but I doubt I'd have done that in his shoes. If I was making a commit to a project I didn't have authority to, I'd probably make a public note who had told me it was okay. Isaac didn't.) ...still, either way, I agree with your conclusion.
  - HaloZero 13y ago
    I thought Isaac accepted the Pull Request and merged it in? Doesn't he have the authority?
    - Lazare 13y ago
      No. Not on the libuv project. At the time of the controversy, the core developers of libuv were Ben Noordhuis (bnoordhuis), and Bert Belder (piscisaureus), both working for StrongLoop. Nothing is meant to be committed to the libuv tree without one of them signing off on it. To quote Ben's commit message: "@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." But the very first comment on Ben's revert is from Bart: "I signed off on it. Just leave it as-is, no need to revert." In short: Isaac did accept the pull request. He did not have the authority. Someone with authority (Bert) did accept it, however it was reverted (by Ben) under the mistaken belief that no one with authority had accepted it. A simple communication breakdown; why Bert didn't commit it himself (or why Isaac didn't note that he was committing it with Bert's authorisation) I'll never know.
- Zikes 13y ago
  Semantics. It's the same as saying "no", and then saying "no" again. Really, if there's one thing I thought feminists had taken to heart it's "no means no".
  - rosser 13y ago
    if there's one thing I thought feminists had taken to heart it's "no means no". I'm a dude, and this comment seriously offends me. I'm sure you thought you were being funny or something, but I dare you to make that kind of quip to a woman's face, and see if you don't begin realize why by the way her expression changes.
    - Zikes 13y ago
      I am quite serious. "No" is a powerful word, and the "no means no" slogan is about enforcing the power of that word and the expectations our society place on it no matter the context. Women and sexuality do not have an exclusive claim to protection from having someone force their ideals or their actions upon you or, as in this case, your repository.
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
      - eropple 13y ago
        This may fly as rhetoric on /r/MensRights (and yeah I mention that because I went and looked) but it doesn't hold true in...like...reality. "No means no" as popular phrasing most specifically does refer to unwanted sexual contact, originating specifically in the context of date rape--and no, to forestall the tired MRA argument, male- or female-initiated sexual contact. And it was not Noordhuis's repository at all, as can be evidenced by the whole "/Joyent/" part of the URL. I don't know Mr. Noordhuis. I think his behavior was stupid and Joyent's moreso. I think your behavior, and your motives, are appalling.
        malandrew 13y ago
- mcantelon 13y ago
  He claims he reverted it because the commit was pushed through without going through the required process. My guess is the whole affair was the boiling over of tensions that existed long before the pull request.
- waterlion 13y ago
  Can you explain why you are ignoring the fact that he was following the procedure (i.e. had no choice, the committer wasn't in the Committers file) and clearly didn't realise that the commit had been accepted by someone else? So many people seem to be wilfully ignoring the facts and I can't understand why. Can you explain?
jbigelow76 13y ago
>Here's hoping Ben now finds a workplace that appreciates him for his talents and respects him as a person. Did Ben leave strongloop as well? Reading between the lines regarding stepping away form Node.js vs just the responsibilities that come with being a core contributor looks ambiguous.
- selmnoo 13y ago
  That was the impression I got from some idle IRC chat, but after checking for myself I can find no concrete evidence verifying if he's parted ways with Strongloop or not.
xs_kid 13y ago
That was Joyent defending their control over to project, remember that Ben & StrongLoop were a menace for Joyent: http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/18/can-this-startup-steal-node-from-joyent-vcs-bet-8m-on-it/ http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/18/can-this-startup-steal-nod...
- Lazare 13y ago
  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?
  - xs_kid 13y ago
    Before of this incident each company (Joyent & StrongLoop) had two core members in the project, now StrongLoop have only one: Bert Belder
  - janjongboom 13y ago
    I would not be surprised to see StrongLoop fork node.
    - petercooper 13y ago
      Not exactly a fork but they do have their own distribution: http://strongloop.com/strongloop-suite/strongnode/ http://strongloop.com/strongloop-suite/strongnode/
    - drderidder 13y ago
      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.
  - mcv 13y ago
    Man, corporate political games in an open source project. I don't feel like I can possibly have an informed opinion on this, but I certainly feel played for having voiced a less informed opinion on the original discussion.
sneak 13y ago
> 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. 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. If he's butthurt over such a tiny change (one that is entirely legitimate, all things considered) in documentation, they're right for calling him an asshole. Seriously, go look at the diff that he had such an issue with: https://github.com/alex/libuv/commit/1ff9d18d398fb9f35b72fa0174048e1f36ec5020 https://github.com/alex/libuv/commit/1ff9d18d398fb9f35b72fa0... He could have just smooshed the big green button and scored one for the "not pointlessly defaulting to masculine terms" team, but instead he had to turn it into an "omfg no this is stupid" debate. Inequality doesn't change by embracing the status quo simply because that's how we've always done things. As much as Joyent look like turds here, they did the right thing. If he'd worked for me, I'd have fired him for such assholery too. We're talking about a one-line documentation change of "him" to "they", for fuck's sake.
- jonpaul 13y ago
  You're forgetting two key points: 1) Ben is not a native English speaker, so as stated by Ben, he didn't realize it was a big deal. 2) The committer didn't sign a CLA yet.
  - nknighthb 13y ago
    1) Non-native speakers should know better than to pass judgement on linguistic issues without consulting others. 2) Ben rejected the change over 40 minutes after the submitter stated he had submitted a CLA.
    - sanxiyn 13y ago
      I have issues with 1. Native speakers of English already enjoys tremendous privilege in open source world -- see antirez of Redis, another non-native speaker's take on this: http://antirez.com/news/61 http://antirez.com/news/61 -- and it should be native speakers who should be understanding of failings of non-native speakers, not the other way around. Check your privilege!
patcon 13y ago
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.
- patcon 13y ago
  Having said that, he didn't deserve a public shaming by the sponsoring organization. Unfortunately, that seems like it was political :/
  - girvo 13y ago
    A lot of people across the various forums that discuss this stuff seem to be missing this. It is politics, pure and simple. Joyent and Ben had... an interesting relationship, as far as I'm aware.
- patcon 13y ago
  Having said that, he didn't deserve a public shaming by the sponsoring organization. Unfortunately, that seems like it was political :/
- towski 13y ago
  I think most of the biggest core contributors are unable to project that kind of emotional intelligence. Because, well, they are programming, not working PR
- yawboakye 13y ago
  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?
  - patcon 13y ago
    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-node-from-joyent-vcs-bet-8m-on-it/ 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?
rodgerd 13y ago
> Here's hoping Ben now finds a workplace that appreciates him for his talents and respects him as a person. He'd better find one that respects him more than he appears to respect women. What's oddest about this is the amazing volte-face Bryan Cantrill appears to have performed. It wasn't that long ago he was adressing gross deficiencies in Solaris' performance compared to Linux on SPARC hardware with snarky, personal, and rather sexist jokes: http://www.cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html http://www.cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html (On edit: added more about Cantrill's own background in this area...)
- jacalata 13y ago
  I don't think he appears to really disrespect women. I would say that he is, as are most guys in tech, ignorant of issues around sexism and arrogant enough to believe that if he is not aware of an issue it does not exist. Having read his responses, I think he seems like a reasonable guy who could stand to understand the world better. edit: it wasn't that long ago? 16 years ago I was in elementary school. That's like 3 tech aeons ago.
  - DanBC 13y ago
    > I would say that he is, as are most guys in tech, ignorant of issues around sexism He's also speaking English as a second language.
    - sampo 13y ago
      I am speaking English as a second language, and my native language does not have gendered pronouns, and the gendered pronouns bother me every day, I cannot make myself blind to them. Then again, if his native tongue also has gendered pronouns (as it appears to do), he should be aware of the issue, not because of English, but because of his native language has the same issue. Well, perhaps his native language user community has not yet started the same discussion, though.
      - dubcanada 13y ago
centrinoblue 13y ago
Ben's a good person. The community bears responsibility for this loss
RyanZAG 13y ago
Just a note: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/nodejs/mqSf47HhmyY/m8QpZE9mJoEJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/nodejs/mqSf47HhmyY/m8QpZE9mJ... These are the guys in control of nodejs. They appear to be both immature and highly profit driven with far more interest in themselves than the platform. If this isn't a red flag for investing time in nodejs, I don't know what is.
- IsaacSchlueter 13y ago
  You say "profit driven" like it's a bad thing. I thought this was a forum about startups.
  - RyanZAG 13y ago
    It's a good thing for the startup, sure. But it's definitely a very bad thing for a third party choosing to use nodejs as a critical part of their infrastructure. You guys might take nodejs off on a direction that is beneficial to you and not to me, and I'm not in a position to fork the project myself if that happens.
    - IsaacSchlueter 13y ago
      > and I'm not in a position to fork the project myself if that happens You don't have a github account?
  - davidw 13y ago
    > 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!
    - pquerna 13y ago
      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)
znowi 13y ago
Jesus. Take a look at this "patch": https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015/files https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015/files Ousted the guy because he referred to "user" as a "he" in the comments? Are you fucking kidding me? I'm all for gender equality, but the amount of drama that came out of this is just insane and disturbing for the hacker community. I can not see it as anything more than pure politics and gender issue as a convenient pretext. Joyent has lost all credibility for me. And Ben has taken the place of the tech drama queen of the year.
- jacalata 13y ago
  No, it was not because the original documentation used "he". It was because of his rejection of a suggested update, followed by his revert of the update when committed by another guy.
  - vor_ 13y ago
    As I understand it, Ben was following commit rules.
- ebrescia 13y ago
  Absolutely agree. As a woman in tech, these types of discussions make me sick to my stomach. What an absolute waste of time and energy (except for those using it for political gain, I suppose, but they rarely achieve that through these types of shenanigans.)
centrinoblue 13y ago
Did Ben actually confirm he was leaving? If you read hist post on the subject he says: "I'm probably going to step back from libuv and node.js core development." Did I miss something?
smrtinsert 13y ago
Joyent looks better to me honestly.

by selmnoo 13y ago

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.
  - Lazare 13y ago
    Well, I admit to not being 100% clear on the CLA. I was going of comments in one of the other threads from someone who seemed to know what they're talking about, but didn't show proof. Still though, I would make the reverse point: I think the initial rejection was a bit dodgy, but the reversion was clearly justified. Really, the reversion had nothing to do with the CLA; rather it was made by Isaac, who did NOT have authority to make that commit, and as far as Ben knew, it was unauthorized. Reverting it was justified. (In fact it was authorized by Bert, but Ben didn't know that. Yeah, Ben could have checked with Bert first, but I doubt I'd have done that in his shoes. If I was making a commit to a project I didn't have authority to, I'd probably make a public note who had told me it was okay. Isaac didn't.) ...still, either way, I agree with your conclusion.
- HaloZero 13y ago
  I thought Isaac accepted the Pull Request and merged it in? Doesn't he have the authority?
  - Lazare 13y ago
    No. Not on the libuv project. At the time of the controversy, the core developers of libuv were Ben Noordhuis (bnoordhuis), and Bert Belder (piscisaureus), both working for StrongLoop. Nothing is meant to be committed to the libuv tree without one of them signing off on it. To quote Ben's commit message: "@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." But the very first comment on Ben's revert is from Bart: "I signed off on it. Just leave it as-is, no need to revert." In short: Isaac did accept the pull request. He did not have the authority. Someone with authority (Bert) did accept it, however it was reverted (by Ben) under the mistaken belief that no one with authority had accepted it. A simple communication breakdown; why Bert didn't commit it himself (or why Isaac didn't note that he was committing it with Bert's authorisation) I'll never know.
Zikes 13y ago
Semantics. It's the same as saying "no", and then saying "no" again. Really, if there's one thing I thought feminists had taken to heart it's "no means no".
- rosser 13y ago
  if there's one thing I thought feminists had taken to heart it's "no means no". I'm a dude, and this comment seriously offends me. I'm sure you thought you were being funny or something, but I dare you to make that kind of quip to a woman's face, and see if you don't begin realize why by the way her expression changes.
  - Zikes 13y ago
    I am quite serious. "No" is a powerful word, and the "no means no" slogan is about enforcing the power of that word and the expectations our society place on it no matter the context. Women and sexuality do not have an exclusive claim to protection from having someone force their ideals or their actions upon you or, as in this case, your repository.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - eropple 13y ago
      This may fly as rhetoric on /r/MensRights (and yeah I mention that because I went and looked) but it doesn't hold true in...like...reality. "No means no" as popular phrasing most specifically does refer to unwanted sexual contact, originating specifically in the context of date rape--and no, to forestall the tired MRA argument, male- or female-initiated sexual contact. And it was not Noordhuis's repository at all, as can be evidenced by the whole "/Joyent/" part of the URL. I don't know Mr. Noordhuis. I think his behavior was stupid and Joyent's moreso. I think your behavior, and your motives, are appalling.
      - malandrew 13y ago
mcantelon 13y ago
He claims he reverted it because the commit was pushed through without going through the required process. My guess is the whole affair was the boiling over of tensions that existed long before the pull request.
waterlion 13y ago
Can you explain why you are ignoring the fact that he was following the procedure (i.e. had no choice, the committer wasn't in the Committers file) and clearly didn't realise that the commit had been accepted by someone else? So many people seem to be wilfully ignoring the facts and I can't understand why. Can you explain?

jbigelow76 13y ago

>Here's hoping Ben now finds a workplace that appreciates him for his talents and respects him as a person. Did Ben leave strongloop as well? Reading between the lines regarding stepping away form Node.js vs just the responsibilities that come with being a core contributor looks ambiguous.

selmnoo 13y ago
That was the impression I got from some idle IRC chat, but after checking for myself I can find no concrete evidence verifying if he's parted ways with Strongloop or not.

xs_kid 13y ago

That was Joyent defending their control over to project, remember that Ben & StrongLoop were a menace for Joyent: http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/18/can-this-startup-steal-node-from-joyent-vcs-bet-8m-on-it/ http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/18/can-this-startup-steal-nod...

Lazare 13y ago
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?
- xs_kid 13y ago
  Before of this incident each company (Joyent & StrongLoop) had two core members in the project, now StrongLoop have only one: Bert Belder
- janjongboom 13y ago
  I would not be surprised to see StrongLoop fork node.
  - petercooper 13y ago
    Not exactly a fork but they do have their own distribution: http://strongloop.com/strongloop-suite/strongnode/ http://strongloop.com/strongloop-suite/strongnode/
  - drderidder 13y ago
    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.
- mcv 13y ago
  Man, corporate political games in an open source project. I don't feel like I can possibly have an informed opinion on this, but I certainly feel played for having voiced a less informed opinion on the original discussion.

sneak 13y ago

> 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. 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. If he's butthurt over such a tiny change (one that is entirely legitimate, all things considered) in documentation, they're right for calling him an asshole. Seriously, go look at the diff that he had such an issue with: https://github.com/alex/libuv/commit/1ff9d18d398fb9f35b72fa0174048e1f36ec5020 https://github.com/alex/libuv/commit/1ff9d18d398fb9f35b72fa0... He could have just smooshed the big green button and scored one for the "not pointlessly defaulting to masculine terms" team, but instead he had to turn it into an "omfg no this is stupid" debate. Inequality doesn't change by embracing the status quo simply because that's how we've always done things. As much as Joyent look like turds here, they did the right thing. If he'd worked for me, I'd have fired him for such assholery too. We're talking about a one-line documentation change of "him" to "they", for fuck's sake.

jonpaul 13y ago
You're forgetting two key points: 1) Ben is not a native English speaker, so as stated by Ben, he didn't realize it was a big deal. 2) The committer didn't sign a CLA yet.
- nknighthb 13y ago
  1) Non-native speakers should know better than to pass judgement on linguistic issues without consulting others. 2) Ben rejected the change over 40 minutes after the submitter stated he had submitted a CLA.
  - sanxiyn 13y ago
    I have issues with 1. Native speakers of English already enjoys tremendous privilege in open source world -- see antirez of Redis, another non-native speaker's take on this: http://antirez.com/news/61 http://antirez.com/news/61 -- and it should be native speakers who should be understanding of failings of non-native speakers, not the other way around. Check your privilege!

patcon 13y ago

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.

patcon 13y ago
Having said that, he didn't deserve a public shaming by the sponsoring organization. Unfortunately, that seems like it was political :/
- girvo 13y ago
  A lot of people across the various forums that discuss this stuff seem to be missing this. It is politics, pure and simple. Joyent and Ben had... an interesting relationship, as far as I'm aware.
patcon 13y ago
Having said that, he didn't deserve a public shaming by the sponsoring organization. Unfortunately, that seems like it was political :/
towski 13y ago
I think most of the biggest core contributors are unable to project that kind of emotional intelligence. Because, well, they are programming, not working PR
yawboakye 13y ago
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?
- patcon 13y ago
  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-node-from-joyent-vcs-bet-8m-on-it/ 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?

rodgerd 13y ago

> Here's hoping Ben now finds a workplace that appreciates him for his talents and respects him as a person. He'd better find one that respects him more than he appears to respect women. What's oddest about this is the amazing volte-face Bryan Cantrill appears to have performed. It wasn't that long ago he was adressing gross deficiencies in Solaris' performance compared to Linux on SPARC hardware with snarky, personal, and rather sexist jokes: http://www.cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html http://www.cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html (On edit: added more about Cantrill's own background in this area...)

jacalata 13y ago
I don't think he appears to really disrespect women. I would say that he is, as are most guys in tech, ignorant of issues around sexism and arrogant enough to believe that if he is not aware of an issue it does not exist. Having read his responses, I think he seems like a reasonable guy who could stand to understand the world better. edit: it wasn't that long ago? 16 years ago I was in elementary school. That's like 3 tech aeons ago.
- DanBC 13y ago
  > I would say that he is, as are most guys in tech, ignorant of issues around sexism He's also speaking English as a second language.
  - sampo 13y ago
    I am speaking English as a second language, and my native language does not have gendered pronouns, and the gendered pronouns bother me every day, I cannot make myself blind to them. Then again, if his native tongue also has gendered pronouns (as it appears to do), he should be aware of the issue, not because of English, but because of his native language has the same issue. Well, perhaps his native language user community has not yet started the same discussion, though.
    - dubcanada 13y ago

centrinoblue 13y ago

Ben's a good person. The community bears responsibility for this loss

RyanZAG 13y ago

Just a note: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/nodejs/mqSf47HhmyY/m8QpZE9mJoEJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/nodejs/mqSf47HhmyY/m8QpZE9mJ... These are the guys in control of nodejs. They appear to be both immature and highly profit driven with far more interest in themselves than the platform. If this isn't a red flag for investing time in nodejs, I don't know what is.

IsaacSchlueter 13y ago
You say "profit driven" like it's a bad thing. I thought this was a forum about startups.
- RyanZAG 13y ago
  It's a good thing for the startup, sure. But it's definitely a very bad thing for a third party choosing to use nodejs as a critical part of their infrastructure. You guys might take nodejs off on a direction that is beneficial to you and not to me, and I'm not in a position to fork the project myself if that happens.
  - IsaacSchlueter 13y ago
    > and I'm not in a position to fork the project myself if that happens You don't have a github account?
- davidw 13y ago
  > 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!
  - pquerna 13y ago
    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)

znowi 13y ago

Jesus. Take a look at this "patch": https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015/files https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015/files Ousted the guy because he referred to "user" as a "he" in the comments? Are you fucking kidding me? I'm all for gender equality, but the amount of drama that came out of this is just insane and disturbing for the hacker community. I can not see it as anything more than pure politics and gender issue as a convenient pretext. Joyent has lost all credibility for me. And Ben has taken the place of the tech drama queen of the year.

jacalata 13y ago
No, it was not because the original documentation used "he". It was because of his rejection of a suggested update, followed by his revert of the update when committed by another guy.
- vor_ 13y ago
  As I understand it, Ben was following commit rules.
ebrescia 13y ago
Absolutely agree. As a woman in tech, these types of discussions make me sick to my stomach. What an absolute waste of time and energy (except for those using it for political gain, I suppose, but they rarely achieve that through these types of shenanigans.)

centrinoblue 13y ago

Did Ben actually confirm he was leaving? If you read hist post on the subject he says: "I'm probably going to step back from libuv and node.js core development." Did I miss something?

smrtinsert 13y ago

Joyent looks better to me honestly.