
Ben Noordhuis's Departure - clloyd
http://blog.nodejs.org/2013/12/03/bnoordhuis-departure/
======
selmnoo
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-29568...](https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568172)

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.

~~~
patcon
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
Having said that, he didn't deserve a public shaming by the sponsoring
organization. Unfortunately, that seems like it was political :/

~~~
girvo
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.

------
parennoob
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-...](http://strongloop.com/strongblog/collaboration-not-derision-in-
the-node-community/)

~~~
rmgraham
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
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!"

~~~
shawndrost
"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."

While it's actually hard to believe, I think the (very trivial) commit that
was rejected broke the build for two reasons:

1) The project in question has a CLA requirement.
[https://github.com/joyent/libuv/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#...](https://github.com/joyent/libuv/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#contributor-
license-agreement)

2) The project in question has a commit message policy that is CI-enforced.
[https://github.com/joyent/libuv/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#...](https://github.com/joyent/libuv/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#commit)

Can anyone else confirm? I haven't seen this fact discussed publicly (although
knowledgable people seem to allude to it).

------
kirinan
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
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
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
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
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
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.

~~~
malandrew
Please explain to me what view you think Ben was forcing upon the community,
because I do not think the view you and others nerd-raging here is aligned
with reality.

Ben was forcing the view that the commit policy had not been followed, which
_is a view that the rest of the community agrees with_. This all got blown out
of control when someone misinterpreted Ben's actions and started a
bikeshedding tempest in a teacup instead of figuring out why Ben considered it
a trivial change.

I don't know about you, but everyone who went off the deep end in that thread
basically joined a lynch mob based on misunderstanding and failure to seek
clarification for the commit reversion. The burden was on those who were upset
to seek clarification instead of brandishing pitchforks and torches.

I don't think anyone who has contributed to the NodeJS repo joined because
they wanted to bikeshed over gender issues. I'd be surprised if anyone (other
than the author of the commit that started all this) joined to commit with
that as a primary intent (or secondary, tertiary, etc.).

~~~
wpietri
The view forced was that the change was trivial.

That's the same view you're trying to force here. But at least Noordhuis has
the virtue of possibly believing that. You clearly don't; you've got 9
dismissive, rage-y comments on this article. That's not how people react to
trivia, which you were helpful enough to define as of little importance.

I think you correctly recognize the topic, which is the politics of gender
inclusion, as important. It's just that you disagree with the people who
proposed and support this change. I'd rather you were honest enough to say
that, rather than trying to get us to swallow the notion that this this
totally unimportant thing is totally important.

~~~
malandrew
I agree gender issues are important. Pull requests are the wrong place to
begin that debate. NodeJS was not started as a asynchronous framework for
server side javascript with gender inclusive comments.

The project was never gender exclusive. The comments could have easily used
the pronouns she instead of he. Whoever wrote the comment chose he for
whatever reason. Had someone else who has a different gender pronoun
preference written the code being commented on, then it would have been
different. It doesn't really matter because it's irrelevant to the purpose of
the project.

Yes, I disagree with people wasting the committer's time with something that
simply does not matter. Pronouns don't matter. He, she, it, user, dog, cat,
lamp. If it's not code or comments that further clarify the _code_ in question
who cares because it simply does not matter. Knowing or not knowing the gender
of the example user in the comment doesn't change anything about the code.
Were we really supposed to believe that it was only going to send the nsent
flag is the user is male and that we are not sending the flag if the user is
female.

People should either code or not code, but they should not pretend to
contribute with trivial pull requests that have been one huge net negative
addition to the project due to the shitstorm kicked up. That's all the
original pull request has accomplished ... one big massive net negative
addition to the community. What an excellent way to make your point and endear
people with your cause. I hope they are happy with the turd they left in the
pool.

You know what statistic I would love to see. Lines of code contributed by
those who think the change is trivial versus those that think it is not
trivial. That's the only worthwhile objective measure of "important" that
really matters. I bet you that the conversation on that PR is actually really
really short once you eliminate everyone who has never contributed a pull
request.

~~~
wpietri
> Pronouns don't matter.

You keep turning your opinions into supposed statements of fact. Given how
little you know about this topic, you're just embarrassing yourself.

Pronouns matter. The politics of it may not matter to you, but they matter to
a lot of other people. They also matter in terms of reader perception. E.g.:
[http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/27784423?uid=3739560&u...](http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/27784423?uid=3739560&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21103133803253)

We are coming out of centuries of systemic gender discrimination. The tech
industry still has substantial problems in this regard, and is under intense
scrutiny, internal and external. Arguing to ignore improvements in favor of
the status quo is arguing to support gender discrimination. Arguments like
that are especially suspicious from somebody on the good side of gender
privilege. Especially double-talk arguments about how vitally important it is
to resist this one specific trivial patch.

Also, you can't blame the shitstorm on the person submitting the pull request.
After all, you keep asserting that it's trivial, the very smallest of things.
The shitstorm started with the rude, dismissive rejection of the pull request.
If you'd like to blame something, blame that.

~~~
malandrew

        "Also, you can't blame the shitstorm on the person 
        submitting the pull request."
    

Why not? You can't unilaterally decide that that person cannot be to blame
here.

They could have made a contribution of utility (bugfix or feature for example)
and included that minor comment change within that pull request, instead of
using a pull request as their own personal soapbox. Github issues and pull
requests are not forums for debating the politics of gender issues. As someone
who had never once submitted a prior pull request with utility to libuv, Alex
Gaynor should have made his change silently as part of a bugfix or feature and
moved along. His behavior was antisocial.

~~~
Lazare
Or as an alternative, he could have privately emailed an existing contributor,
discussed the change, and got support. If it had come from Isaac or Bert to
start with, it would have sailed through without objection.

I really feel like a pull request was the wrong vehicle for what the original
submitter was trying to accomplish.

~~~
wpietri
I see what you're saying, but I disagree.

If open-source projects adopt an "email first before pull request" approach, I
think that's a big mistake. That will mean a lot of dialog with people who
aren't actually going to do the work, and a lot of missed patch opportunities
from people who have done or will do the work but are put off by the
uncertainty of a policy like that.

Regardless, if a pull request is the wrong vehicle, then the correct response
isn't, "Request rejected! Go away." It's "Let's talk about this more." It was
a two-line change that made the project better. (At least, nobody has so far
claimed that the gender-exclusive language was better.) I think that's enough
of a positive signal to be worth following up on, and certainly not the dire
insult that some believe it to be.

~~~
Lazare
I see your point, but I'm not suggesting a general "email first before pull
request" policy, which I agree would be a big mistake.

I feel like this was actually a very unusual situation.

~~~
wpietri
Ok. If it's not a policy, then I don't think there's any way you can expect a
potential contributor to know that a particular pull request must be preceded
by discussion. In which case, I think the burden falls on the person reviewing
the requests. In this case, Noordhuis. The submitter did their bit by making a
positive change and offering the patch.

------
dekz
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/3...](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/3051faface454d516929/raw/3fe5038504f29d3310db272d078197c4ef7132d8/gistfile1.txt)

~~~
xs_kid
Joyent was clearly trying to harm the reputation of Ben and of his employeer
StrongLoop

~~~
malandrew
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.

------
rdtsc
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
> But one impression I get from Node.JS and its surrounding community is
> arrogance and immaturity.

s/Node\\.JS/javascript/;

~~~
nostrademons
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.

------
cliftonk
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.

~~~
Lazare
I dunno, I'd label it more as outright, actively aggressive.

------
Zikes
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)

~~~
goldenkey
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

~~~
jacalata
_I can 't stand white knighting especially when it befalls other men in armor_
what does that even mean?

~~~
djur
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
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.

~~~
goldenkey
ceol, if you disagree with me, fine. But calling me a "massively wrong
asshole" and claiming I came from a sewer-pipe on reddit, is just downright
dirty.

My point about the white knighting, was that Cantrill from Joyent is pretty
much taking an apologetic stance as if Ben committed a chauvinistic crime
against women in programming. He's taking a steaming dump on Ben, in order to
look 'politically correct', and defender of woman's rights, for him and his
company. That's when white knighting is sick..when it stomps on the ideal of
being a decent person in order to appeal to the hounds thirsty for banter and
apologies and discourse about an issue that doesn't even exist.

First of all, Ben didn't have any intent, second of all, this whole fuss is
just..politics..and purely distressing circumspection for those with too much
time on their hands. Go back to coding...at least there's output...

Oh and have you seen this? [http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/18/can-this-
startup-steal-nod...](http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/18/can-this-startup-
steal-node-from-joyent-vcs-bet-8m-on-it/)

Could be why Cantrill has it _out_ for Ben.

------
michaelsbradley
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)

------
Tomte
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...

------
arunoda
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.

------
bowlofpetunias
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
Yep. Joyent's new corporate strategy: hunting witches. Nailed it.

~~~
doe88
Which would indeed explain the sheer violence of the blog post.

------
__pThrow
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
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.

------
tkorri
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
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.

------
lolwutf
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.

------
xs_kid
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/Wl8Od9vb1...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/nodejs/mqSf47HhmyY/Wl8Od9vb1QwJ)

------
htp
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)

------
Lazare
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.

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

~~~
vbtechguy
Indeed on Ben's side in this but personally, I don't think Ben should of
stepped aside/left.

------
aabalkan
For those who don't know the background of the story:

[1] [http://werd.io/2013/gendered-pronouns-in-software-a-quick-
pr...](http://werd.io/2013/gendered-pronouns-in-software-a-quick-primer)

[2] [http://strongloop.com/strongblog/collaboration-not-
derision-...](http://strongloop.com/strongblog/collaboration-not-derision-in-
the-node-community/)

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.

~~~
chc
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.

~~~
yebyen
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
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."

~~~
yebyen
I understand that StrongLoop did not fire him, but the project has more stake-
holding companies than just his employer.

Hopefully you can understand how even if Joyent was not his direct employer,
their publicly stating that he "should be fired" was the main impetus leading
up to his departure.

This is why I said that _legally_ he was not fired. You can't be fired by some
random collaborator or Joe off the street. It's your employer's job to pay
your salary, and to fire you if that's what's needed too. That is not what I'm
talking about.

Consider that you can be "fired" from an open source project where you don't
receive a salary and like your coworkers, you are providing labor on a
volunteer basis. That's not what happened here, but if you take the StrongLoop
and the salary out of the picture, it's exactly what happened. Joyent (and the
rest of us who are not part owners of StrongLoop) are not getting his labor on
an unpaid basis anymore.

------
aquadrop
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
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).

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

~~~
DanBC
Because threads like these are tainted by hateful mra idiots who joined HN in
droves about 8 months ago.

~~~
jcromartie
> 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.

------
malandrew
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
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
Who owns the trademark?

~~~
drderidder
Joyend. I mean Joyent.

------
xs_kid
"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.

------
Myrmornis
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
Don't you think genocide or human trafficking trumps that?

~~~
Myrmornis
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).

------
aktau
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.

------
mmgutz
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.

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

------
dccoolgai
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.

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

------
lettergram
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.

------
caseman72
I think each of the people who comment on github should have to do it in Dutch
(and try to get the pronouns correct).

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

