https://github.com/joyent/libuv/commit/804d40e
Joyent received a lot of flak because people believe that Ben was a Joyent employee (he actually worked for Strongloop). Joyent came out with a post separating themselves from Ben, saying that they were in support of gender neutral language:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGkVM1B5NuI#t=3059
To date, Bryan Cantrill remains CTO of Joyent. The corporate position appears to be that blatant homophobia by employees is acceptable, but improper pronouns are terminable offenses.
What's sad is that he seems to be talking about introducing 'drag' within the company and yet I doubt he realizes the irony given 90% of his talking content is just that.
> to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered
is not what Ben was doing, and nothing Ben said on the subject could have given that impression. "Empathy is a core engineering value", and when you ascribe untrue motivations to people, you are completely failing at it.
His crime was the tone of voice. I don't think it's worth forcing someone off a project for that.
"Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that."
Among other things that might change your impression of Ben: 1) The work that the PR required from him was much more than clicking the merge button. 2) He's a non-native speaker of English and at the time he reverted the commit, he was under the impression that the difference was academic. 3) In his spare time, he teaches young people (especially women) to code.
1) a) the merge was accomplished trivially by another maintainer; the idea that there was "more work" required of ben is demonstrably false.
1) b) he undertook more work to revert the existing commit, also see 2)
2) a) at the time he reverted the commit, there was substantial explanation on the issue on why it was important.
2) b) because Ben failed to check with his own colleague, he was unaware the commit had in fact been signed off - there was no rule problem here, apart from "not telling Ben".
3) lots of people do nice things and are assholes in other circumstances.
Apart from the sarcastic tone of his post ("if this gets us scores of female contributors" indeed), the grapevine says he was pretty deeply offensive to Issac over the issue as well.
Egalitarianism (and all kinds of society-improving imperatives) are important, but if someone submits a change that is objectively a small number of bytes (regardless of the social ramifications) and doesn't follow the procedures, then they are causing him a problem.
He could certainly have phrased it better (which I characterised as 'tone of voice'), but as you get your daily work done you can't always be aware of the huge weight of people with a cause ready to descend when you slip up. People need the latitude to have an off-day. Who knows what else was on his mind.
I know Joyent wasn't his employer, but if I slipped up as part of my work and got a tirade of abuse as he did, I would hope my employer would support me not stab me in the back.
It kind of throws into contrast Joyent's. http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun
IMO argentpyro explained the incident in a pretty neutral manner.
(And the amazing speed at which things escalated)