[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

[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

[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-...

[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#...

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

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

[centrinoblue]

Issac Roth is not an asshole. The quote about firing Ben was a joke that didn't translate well.