The Power of a Pronoun
Who?
Github: Ben Noordhuis
Date:
Why?
The Node.js foundation made a post that a longtime contributor, Ben Noordhuis, was stepping away from both Node.js and libuv.
A few days prior to this announcement, the steward of Node.js at the time, Joyent, made this announcement.
Now what prompted all of this? Ben made the decision to reject a pull request that was trying to get rid of the use of a gendered pronoun in the libuv code. In response to the pull request, Ben said the following:
The request was then merged by the Node.js project lead at the time, Isaac Schlueter. In retaliation to Isaac’s actions, Ben then attempted to revert that merge.
@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.
This reverts commit 47d98b6.
A few days later, Ben attempted to clarify their actions. They also said:
I’m probably going to step back from libuv and node.js core development. I do it more out a sense of duty than anything else. If this is what I have to deal with, then I’d just as rather do something else. Hope that clears things up. Thanks.