Perhaps against my better judgement, I want to try to clear up a few things.
First of all, to characterize Ben's departure, or the whole recent drama, as being over pronoun usage, is a radical oversimplification. Every group has internal tensions, and ours is no different. It is normal and healthy for projects like Node to gradually cycle new members in and out as people's interests, skills, and motivation shift over time. Remember that Ryan guy? He sure wrote a lot of code. When he left, people said that Node wouldn't survive. The tech press called it a "mic drop", even though it was 6 months in the making (of course, how would they know that Ryan and I worked closely for a long time planning his departure?) And yet, here we are. People sometimes give me credit for being his replacement, but that's really unfair praise. When he left, we suffered from that loss, and we just had to figure out how to carry on. Same for Igor, Felix, Paul, and all the rest who once were extremely engaged and are now either watching from the sidelines, or not even watching at all. That's life, and growing pains suck for a little while, but it's actually a sign of health. Most of the time, we announce new project member additions, but do not announce project members leaving. Typically, leaving the project happens gradually, and there's really no point making any kind of public announcement about it. This is the second time that we've done so. (The first was Ryan handing off the project lead spot to me.) Ben made the decision to leave, and publicly stated this on GitHub and in an email to the core libuv team. I wrote this message (and sent it only after getting feedback from the rest of the team), because I felt that it was important to call out the good things he's done for us and wish him the best. Ben's done a ton of work on Node core and libuv, including writing code, managing issues, reviewing patches, and mentoring newcomers. For that, we should all be thankful. He's not a sexist or a bigot or a horrible person, and perhaps after some time he'll be more involved with Node again. Who knows? There was (and still is) a lot of negativity in the air, and the best thing we can all do is let the dust settle, and move on. This FUD around "What if you're the next Ben?!" is ridiculous. It's a bit like seeing someone break up with their significant other, and wondering if you can be friends with them, since they are no longer with that other person you also like. "If he broke HER heart, he can break mine!" But it doesn't actually work that way. Similarly with the complaints about how no one spoke to Ben privately. (Which is absurd on the face of it--how could you even know what we said to one another in private? That's how privacy works!) I understand that, from the outside, an event like this seems like it happens in one flash, and certainly there were some rather sudden fireworks last week. But no one decides to join or leave a project overnight like that. Ben is a smart guy with many talents. He'll do fine, I'm sure. We all enjoy the addictive dopamine rush of conflict. We all have opinions about who did what wrong, and fears that they might do it to us. Some people will try to serve their own interests by fanning the flames to generate press, or try to push the community in a direction that suits them, or take a cheap shot at a project that they see as a threat to their own. The best thing we can do is keep calm and get back to what we were doing. The future is much bigger than the past. Let's get to it. On Fri, Dec 6, 2013 at 7:34 AM, Mihai Ene <[email protected]> wrote: > Thank you Ben for your great contributions! We're sad this happened. > > 'nuff said > -- -- Job Board: http://jobs.nodejs.org/ Posting guidelines: https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Mailing-List-Posting-Guidelines You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "nodejs" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs?hl=en?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "nodejs" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
