Disclaimer: My opinions are my own and do not reflect in any way the opinions of my employer.
> [Mikeal Rogers] How about we start assuming that individuals are responsible for their own actions rather that shills for their current employer. This is a non sequitur. The action you are responding to is equally a Joyent corporate blog post and a post authored by Bryan Cantrill, as the post stands currently these ownerships are inseparable. Additionally, Joyent's lack of action (e.g., apology, editing or removal of the post, disciplinary action against Bryan) are an implicit endorsement by Joyent of the opinions stated therein. Additionally, we now have Isaac's explicit (personal) endorsement of Bryan's post, both of which reinforce my original point: the lack of empathy and ironic hypocrisy by (at least these two) Joyent employees and implicitly Joyent when dealing with members of the community. Thanks Ben for having the fortitude to set a key fact (regarding your perception of the events) straight: >>> [Jorge Chamorro] [Right, it's about @izs blatantly] stepping over the guy who is in charge of libuv and pissing him off. >> [Mikeal Rogers] No part of this is accurate > [Ben Noordhuis] On the contrary, it's 100% accurate. If we establish the facts, we can collectively as a community discuss civilly without insult, politics or emotional bias, what our concerns are and how individuals with the power to do so can affect them. If you're uninterested in the facts for any reason (e.g., having heard them repeated ad nauseum) skip to "Conclusion" below. *Finding of Facts* >From the public discourse, there's only one logically consistent narrative: libuv received a pull request (PR) for a two-line correction of 3 male-gendered pronouns to non-gendered pronouns. This failed 2 aspects of libuv's commit requirements; 1 explicit, no signed CLA; and 1 implicit, a policy of not accepting "trivial" pull requests. Regarding the CLA, Alex Gaynor claimed to have signed the CLA in the comments just an hour or so before the PR was closed. This remains to be verified. Regarding whether the PR was "trivial" is subjective, with history illustrating that community members, libuv committers, and genders falling on both sides of the argument. After Ben closed the PR explicitly based on the policy of not accepting trivial changes, Isaac Schlueter reversed Ben's action by opening and accepting the PR. Ben then attempted to revert Isaac's commit. In doing so, he felt it necessary in the commit message to publicly chastise Isaac's perceived violation of his commiter privilege granted by the project owners Ben and Bert. However, per the first comment by Bert, it seems Isaac did in fact have Bert's permission to accept the PR. This was clearly never publicly communicated to Ben. Later, Bryan Cantrill, Joyent VP of Engineering, on Joyent's corporate blog (See "The Power of a Pronoun") emphatically stated that in lieu of Ben's actions stated above, were Ben a Joyent employee, he would have unequivocally been fired for reinforcing that pronouns should be gendered, specifically male. Bryan repeated the word "fire" four times. Near the end of the post, Bryan directly referenced "dealing with assholes" as advice to the community for dealing with "Ben's unacceptable behavior." In response, Issac Roth, Strongloop CEO, posted "Collaboration not Derision in the Node Community." In it, Isaac Roth pointed out that in Ben's attempt "to interpret the commit rules" he "made a mistake by not understanding how important the gender pronoun change was in the pull request." He goes on to suggest that there were significant cultural factors responsible for this mistake. *Conclusion* If we're going to discuss anything, let's focus on what the above says, if anything, for the present and future of the community and the node.js project. We are all in this together and share the same community and the same vested interests. Why not just move on? When a party feels injured or concerned about the new direction the relationship is headed in, a conflict occurs to address and rectify the insult or direction. These constructive conflicts are out of a desire to continue a relationship, not to create further injury. Moving on without *directly *addressing their concerns disregards their involvement while demonstrating a lack of empathy to all others. *My 2 cents* I think Isaac and Bryan lack the requisite empathy to understand their own hubris: that this was a misunderstanding initiated by a combination of a literal lost in translation, a misunderstanding about requisite permissions and finally a lack of communication amongst project leads, independent of the politicization of gendered pronouns. Politics are inevitable, but there's no need to sensationalize them like Bryan and Isaac have done when an empathetic understanding of the situation would have better served everyone involved. This last point is what I am so concerned and disappointed about regarding the future of node.js: unilateral hubris by Joyent's node.js embassadors. Some obvious possible actions going forward would be for Joyent to address the facts either by refuting them or by acknowledging them and consequently retracting Bryan's post. The same relative actions are available to Bryan and Isaac as well. I care about the node.js community because I've made my home here these past 4 years. I lead the node.js training and education initiative here at LinkedIn where I am now training up to 30 employees a quarter because I LOVE node.js. I don't want node.js or Joyent or Isaac to burn; I want us to pick up after ourselves so we don't live in a mess. If someone leaves our house, on anything but good terms, we should always consider how our individual and shared actions lead up to it, and whether we can do anything differently. I see many things that should have been done differently in how this was handled. I hope those involved agree and will do their best to clean up instead of just "moving on." I, personally, would find it very difficult to remain in a household that treated me as Ben was treated. I'm not demanding anything of Joyent, Isaac or Bryan, but I don't see any growth here or assurance that this will not happen again. Sincerely, Adam Crabtree On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 2:19 PM, Alex Kocharin <[email protected]> wrote: > > 10.12.2013, 01:56, "Mikeal Rogers" <[email protected]>: > > > On Dec 9, 2013, at 12:38PM, Ben Noordhuis <[email protected]> wrote: > > On the contrary, it's 100% accurate. The reason I stepped down is not > because of the Twitter brouhaha, I was unmoved by that. It's because > I feel I can no longer trust Isaac to do the right thing and that > makes working together impossible. > > > Bert was fine with the change, Bert force pushed out your commit, do you > share the same distrust of Bert? > > > You do realize that an action (pushing "merge" button) and a signing on > (saying "well fine you can merge it if you want") are two entirely > different things, right? > > > -- > -- > 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. > -- Better a little with righteousness than much gain with injustice. Proverbs 16:8 -- -- 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.
