Is this sarcasm? io.js would not exist if joyent hadn't made significant mistakes, e.g. failing to ship a new release for years, also this political point scoring alienated a lot of people - https://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun
Failing to ship a new release, how is that Joyent's fault? It's core developers who are to blame.
I don't understand the point of the link you sent me. How would a gender neutral alienate people? The person they were talking about here wasn't an employee.
But why would Joyent consider rejecting a PR for gender pronouns as a fireable offense? Probably a website defacement / practical joke.
Edit: FYI - I don't follow this. I don't understand why a fork even exists.
You really are out of the loop. The core developers were frustrated at Joyent not pushing their code, so they jumped ship. Joyent was the steward of the codebase, and they were at fault for not incorporating the developers' work.
How would a gender neutral alienate people?
It's the manner in which they handled the issue that was alienating. Screaming about how tolerant they are, all while screwing over one of their primary contributors, demonising him, and saying he'd be fired rather than retrained. They were soapboxing for cheap political points rather than actually being tolerant and understanding. It's why I actually laughed out loud when you described Joyent as a company that doesn't get involved in politics.
The irony is that the developer in question isn't a native speaker of English, and his native tongue is a gendered language, which likely contributed to his blase attitude on the matter. A little understanding, tolerance, and mature discussion and correction (instead of soapboxing) would have gone a long way.
his native tongue is a gendered language, which likely contributed to his blase attitude on the matter.
I can't some people have such amazing talent, earn our trust, yet display a shocking display of actions that go against their interest.
Linguistics and humanities is basically the art of diversity. Yet, for some people, diversity is just a word to convey a twisted oppression.
You mean the same core developers of io.js, who clearly are shipping now that Joyent is out of the loop?
That wasn't a rejection because of gender pronouns. That was a rejection because one pronoun was changed from the docs, instead of all of them. This leads to:
- minor change, not suitable for a PR
- inconsistency, either change all of them to match, or leave them alone
Because community pressure, basically. When there's an angry mob outside about to burn your company down, do you just give them who they want or let your company burn and have everyone else fired too?