I find Ben's inclusion on this list interesting, given his history with Joyent/the node community.
Still, the inclusion shows that not all bridges are burned, which makes me happy.
So Ben Noorddhuis was a major contributor to NodeJS and a volunteer (that is, not a Joyent employee). It turns out Ben rejected a pull request that would have made pronoun in the document gender neutral. The documents were already grammatically correct, but whoever made the pull request had a political preference for using a non masculine pronoun. Ben rightly saw this a trivial change. But the political harpies made an issue of it. Joyent put an embarrassing and immature blog posting which essentially called Ben an "Asshole" and said that if he was an employee he'd be fired. https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun Ben, on the other hand, handled himself quite well. https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6845286
The request is/was/remains a relevant one. Language is important, it is after all the one of the few tools to describe percieved reality.
a) Talk is cheap, action matters, and the PC police's main strategy is to complain until other people change, instead of enacting change themselves. Accommodating them is useless, they will simply find something new to complain about. Apologies are always insufficient, defiance is considered a declaration of war.
b) Language is indeed important, and redefining concepts like "privilege", "misogyny" and "harassment" to mean whatever the club of the perpetually offended thinks they mean is damaging to sane discourse.
Mikeal is overtly political. Isaac is political from time to time since he's strongly aligned with the identity politics mob that attacked ben noordhuis back in the day. I really hope identity politics doesn't creep into the io.js governance.
Oh, wait...
It confuses me deeply that this fact could turn people off of the project regardless of its other practical and technical merits.