It hadn't been accepted, as far as Ben knew, by someone with the authority to make that decision, it didn't follow project guidelines, and the contributor hadn't signed a CLA. The revert had nothing to do with grammar and language.
AFAIK this is not the case. The contributor had not signed a CLA when he first submitted the pull request, but evidently did sign it well before Isaac merged in the change (he claimed to have done so very early in the original PR thread). As far as I can tell, procedure was followed.
It seems pretty clear that Ben acted somewhat inappropriately — maybe not with his initial rejection, but when he reverted Isaac's merge and "chided" him. The important thing to remember, though, is that one bit of prickly behavior shouldn't be enough to brand someone "an asshole." Heaven knows I've gotten annoyed and said things I've regretted on more than one occasion.
Well, I admit to not being 100% clear on the CLA. I was going of comments in one of the other threads from someone who seemed to know what they're talking about, but didn't show proof.
Still though, I would make the reverse point: I think the initial rejection was a bit dodgy, but the reversion was clearly justified.
Really, the reversion had nothing to do with the CLA; rather it was made by Isaac, who did NOT have authority to make that commit, and as far as Ben knew, it was unauthorized. Reverting it was justified. (In fact it was authorized by Bert, but Ben didn't know that. Yeah, Ben could have checked with Bert first, but I doubt I'd have done that in his shoes. If I was making a commit to a project I didn't have authority to, I'd probably make a public note who had told me it was okay. Isaac didn't.)
...still, either way, I agree with your conclusion.
At the time of the controversy, the core developers of libuv were Ben Noordhuis (bnoordhuis), and Bert Belder (piscisaureus), both working for StrongLoop. Nothing is meant to be committed to the libuv tree without one of them signing off on it. To quote Ben's commit message: "@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."
But the very first comment on Ben's revert is from Bart: "I signed off on it. Just leave it as-is, no need to revert."
In short: Isaac did accept the pull request. He did not have the authority. Someone with authority (Bert) did accept it, however it was reverted (by Ben) under the mistaken belief that no one with authority had accepted it. A simple communication breakdown; why Bert didn't commit it himself (or why Isaac didn't note that he was committing it with Bert's authorisation) I'll never know.
He claims he reverted it because the commit was pushed through without going through the required process. My guess is the whole affair was the boiling over of tensions that existed long before the pull request.
Can you explain why you are ignoring the fact that he was following the procedure (i.e. had no choice, the committer wasn't in the Committers file) and clearly didn't realise that the commit had been accepted by someone else?
So many people seem to be wilfully ignoring the facts and I can't understand why.
if there's one thing I thought feminists had taken to heart it's "no means no".
I'm a dude, and this comment seriously offends me.
I'm sure you thought you were being funny or something, but I dare you to make that kind of quip to a woman's face, and see if you don't begin realize why by the way her expression changes.
"No" is a powerful word, and the "no means no" slogan is about enforcing the power of that word and the expectations our society place on it no matter the context.
Women and sexuality do not have an exclusive claim to protection from having someone force their ideals or their actions upon you or, as in this case, your repository.
"No means no" specifically refers to a campaign against rape. It is not some general defense of the right to refuse anything and the sanctity of the word "no". The word "no" in itself isn't some kind of sacred word, and it should not have general power in all contexts that's enforced, as you seem to be proposing.
Apart from the analogy seeming silly and over-dramatic when applied to a... pull request to a software repository... it doesn't even make sense based on how open-source projects I've worked on in the past operate. There is nothing particularly out-of-bounds about making a suggestion a second time, even if it was rejected the first time. Situations and personnel change, and discussions recur. Linus even actively encourages it himself, and many pull requests are accepted after three or four "nos" from Linus. This does not mean that Linus encourages you to initiate sexual advances with people who've asked you to stop, though, because that situation is not at all similar!
This may fly as rhetoric on /r/MensRights (and yeah I mention that because I went and looked) but it doesn't hold true in...like...reality. "No means no" as popular phrasing most specifically does refer to unwanted sexual contact, originating specifically in the context of date rape--and no, to forestall the tired MRA argument, male- or female-initiated sexual contact. And it was not Noordhuis's repository at all, as can be evidenced by the whole "/Joyent/" part of the URL.
I don't know Mr. Noordhuis. I think his behavior was stupid and Joyent's moreso. I think your behavior, and your motives, are appalling.
To be fair here, the only reason that /joyent/ is in the name is because Ryan Dahl entrusted the project to Isaac Schleuter, who works at Joyent (and was working at Joyent at the time of the bequeathment).
TBH, I was always bothered by having the project move from Ryan's account to Joyent. Ideally it would have moved to Isaac's or another, new organizational account "nodejs" should have been made, where all the core Node.js projects could have lived.
I'm quite frankly appalled at Joyent, the company, having made a statement via a spokesman about an extremely valuable contributor of the project. Joyent is a guest in the open source community. It is a sponsor and it enjoys brand benefits. But it is not a member of the community. It's engineers are and if anyone from Joyent (or anywhere else) was going to call out Ben, then they should have done so speaking for themselves on their own personal blog. This is the kind of stuff that makes me want to keep companies at an arms length of any open source project. There are only two entities in an open source project, the individuals and the group. Any entity beyond those two can only serve to split the community or inject more politically charged discourse into conflicts.
AFAIK, engineers from both Joyent, Strongloop (Ben's company) and Nodejitsu have all been core contributes of Node.js, but that Joyent has gotten most of the name recognition.
Agreed almost entirely (I think that many companies have shown themselves capable of being very responsible stewards of open-source projects, it's only in a couple of communities that I see this sort of thing happening), but what-should-be doesn't really change anything. It probably should be under its own project--but it's not, it's under Joyent's and the actions on the project reflect on them. I think Joyent overreacted terribly and did themselves more damage than the tempest in a teapot otherwise would have caused, but I get the motives behind it.
The only reason I replied is because the tenor of Zikes's posts throughout this discussion have been consistently of the "I'm not touching you I'm not touching you we both know I'm being a dick but I'm not touching you!" variety and this straight-up mistruth about something rather important ground my gears.
It hadn't been accepted, as far as Ben knew, by someone with the authority to make that decision, it didn't follow project guidelines, and the contributor hadn't signed a CLA. The revert had nothing to do with grammar and language.