[patcon]

I'd never heard of Ben before this whole ordeal, but he unfortunately projected like an asshole, with zero damage control instincts and no apparent sense of urgency for reconciliation. If you can't contribute to a positive space, you should probably find a less public project where you're free to exercise your lack of emotional intelligence.

[patcon]

Having said that, he didn't deserve a public shaming by the sponsoring organization. Unfortunately, that seems like it was political :/

[girvo]

A lot of people across the various forums that discuss this stuff seem to be missing this. It is politics, pure and simple. Joyent and Ben had... an interesting relationship, as far as I'm aware.

[yawboakye]

Do you realize the gravity of losing someone like Ben on a project like Node? I know you'd never get around to improving/contributing to Node but how does what you said get us closing to anything?

[patcon]

I know. I think my answer was simplistic. I said I'd never heard of Ben, but I was actually primed by reading this article right before stumbling upon the debacle: http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/18/can-this-startup-steal-nod...

Having only ever had positive experiences with Isaacs in non-node-core capacities, I suppose I immediately jumped on "their side". So I guess I came to the conversation on biased terms.

Could it be that he's just not someone to be a project lead? Someone can be a prolific contributor (and a good person -- not demonizing him), but still not be the right folks to lead a project, right?

[towski]

I think most of the biggest core contributors are unable to project that kind of emotional intelligence.

Because, well, they are programming, not working PR

[mcv]

Ben didn't handle it well, and certainly could have explained himself a bit better. And I disagree with him on the commit; minor language improvements that make the language more inclusive are still valuable, and rejecting them means you're rejecting part of the community.

But the amount of crap he got was totally out of proportion. The commiters should have been able to simply discuss this and decide to handle this better next time.

Maybe this fairly minor incident was blown way out of proportion because of the Joyent-Strongloop friction.

[vor_]

Ben isn't a native English speaker and was following the repo's rules. Joyent publicly shaming him and saying they'd fire him over a gendered pronoun in the documentation is an absurdity. There is prior history between these folks as rivals that explains Joyent's animosity toward Ben.

[rohamg]

He did explain himself a day later: https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568...