libuv

branch name uses a very common word as well - as long as updating your CI config isn't too much work. To show a bit of empathy the other way as well, maybe people get tired of too many changes like that (e.g. if most of the stuff you review is just people poking the docs by rewording stuff to be able to say that they contributed to project X). Or maybe people love to take principled stances and to argue idk > ...it’s not the use of the gendered pronoun that’s at issue (that’s just sloppy), but rather the insistence that pronouns should in fact be gendered. Yeah, odd thing to get so fixated on when the they/them version is more accurate in this circumstance. While I don't cause drama when I see gendered ones (again, most people here have English as a second language), I wouldn't argue with someone a bunch if they wanted to correct the docs or whatever.

ve of his own volition_ because he felt he was unwanted, which was true given his behavior. Was it worth it? I don't know, ask Ben. [0]https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40ee14dc0f82c482d...

t to the top. "I'm more tolerant than you; I accept trans in my bathroom!" If you are even slightly interested in history and sociology, you should be very attentive to the next few months/years. As a more libertarian/right-wing individual, it is a glorious thing to see. I just hope that the leftist didn't push the pendulum so far that it's going to come back with a vengeance and destroy everything it its path.

speaker of English and calling him out publicly in the way you did was an absolute classic case of what you do NOT do. In a community run project, the dynamics are different to being in a corporation. The first rule is: you are dealing with a lot of people, from a lot of different backgrounds. There is lots of room for misunderstanding. The absolute golden rule around dealing with a popular project is to try to wrangle this appropriately and with as little heat as possible. So let's review what you did: 1. You posted one of the most inflammatory, aggressive posts I've seen in a very long time. You took no time to talk to Ben about his position and to talk him around to making an apology and reversing his decision. 2. You compete with StrongLoop. You basically told your competitor that they should fire one of their best developers to the project. Your company may have been a main initiator of Node.js and you see it as largely the steward for the project, but your own employee reversed the decision of a major contributor. And this is where you really stuffed up. For some time there had been rumblings about how Joyent was biased about the way they accepted commits and directed the project - rightly or wrongly. There was a perception of bias towards Joyent's interests. That's not necessarily a correct viewpoint. But you started a chain of events you now can't control. Joyent has finally setup a Foundation, but has now got a fork competing with the core project. StrongLoop is one of the groups backing io.js. A large number of your core developers are publicly backing io.js. 3. Community leaders, like yourself, aren't meant to send abusive messages over blogs. You called him an arsehole. You called for his sacking. Let's underscore how tone-deaf you have been, and completely clueless over how to run an open source project: "While we would fire Ben over this, node.js is an open source project and one doesn't necessarily have the same levers. Indeed, one of the challenges of an open source project that depends on volunteer effort is dealing with assholes" You don't realise how much damage you did. I agree with gender neutral language in technical writing. Many others do as well. If you had dealt with this differently and not decided to become a self-aggrandizing pundit, then you would have probably shown that Joyent can deal with controversial matters maturely and civilly, play nicely with others, resolve conflict, and you'd have the high moral ground. Now you just look like a bully, and I'd say you were the catalyst for the io.js fork. You also opened yourself up to your own past, which you also regret. As I say - you've basically given us all a text-book case study into how not to manage an open source project. P.S. FWIW, I upvoted you.

but not being offended by the fact that the project reinforces the gender binary is supremely ironic. As an open source developer, these kinds of discussions bother me immensely because it elevates some topic of discussion as being more important than the code and technical decisions. Any discussion that is not about code, technical decisions, API design, algorithms, abstraction boundaries, accurate documentation, etc. can generally be categorized as bikeshedding. I don't value bikeshedding. I don't want open source to be welcoming of bikeshedding where bikeshedding discussions of any kind are given the time of day. A certain amount of discussion around of appropriate naming is warranted, but there is a line that you cross where making software welcoming to easily offended people starts making the process fraught for people just trying to make technical decisions because they now have overly sensitive people in their midsts that they must cater for. Making technical discussions fraught hurts open source a lot more than the gain you get from being welcoming to people who are easily offended. The Ben Noordhuis debacle [3] springs to mind. libuv is a project where Ben is the #1 committer to the project with 1071 commits (35.6% of the total) and his commits are likely to be the overwhelming majority of new features and non-trivial code changes. Ben's sin was simply one of not allowing commits with no technical value. If the change had come in as part of a larger pull request where actual code was changed, I'm sure there would have been no controversy at all. Instead Alex Gaynor did a drive-by single commit to libuv (his only commit to date) and the whole thing blew up and Ben was made out to be the bad guy by many people who probably never made a commit to libuv and probably never will. This resignation letter from a Debian TC member[1] is what I think of every time we leave room for discussion about anything but technical issues. Open source used to be about code first and foremost and we all lose when (code < people's feelings) evaluates to true. I'm honestly at the point where I apply the follow heuristic to the opinions of people when it comes to bikeshedding about open source: function validOpinion(person, opinion) { if (hasPublishedOpenSourceCode(person)) { return opinion; } else { throw new Error('Invalid opinion'); } } If you don't publish open source code, your opinion does not matter. [0] http://www.zdnet.com/blog/violetblue/when-software-offends-t... [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/11/msg00071.html [2] http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=137392506516022&w=2 [3] https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29538...