I felt like he got thrown under the bus with that whole uproar, and was glad to see him in there.

With 1098 commits to libuv, which represents 35.2% of all commits to that project and the most number of commits from any single individual, and 1409 commits to node (13.8%, 3rd after Ryan Dahl and Isaac Schlueter), I'd say that him "getting thrown under the bus" is a huge understatement of what happened.

I don't think he got "thrown under the bus" - he moved to a position were others did not want to defend him or even just keep on. Unsurprisingly, I would add, he should know the other people.

Still, the inclusion shows that not all bridges are burned, which makes me happy.

I don't see truth in your statement that core people did not want to defend him. Shitstorm happened mostly by outsiders/ignorants. He didn't want to continue in such a climate. Joyent wrote a blog post that ruined their reputation. - Good net effect one year later is that node might free themself from Joyent and become much more open/inclusive.

Could someone make (or provide a link to) a summary of the melodrama for outsiders ? It being not too partisan for one side or the other would be a plus.

I was interested myself, so I did a little google-foo.

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

Wow I'd never actually read that Joyent post, it is truly ridiculous!

Wow. I really cannot understand how you see Joyent's actions as immature and embarrassing.

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.

Because everyone who doesn't live in one of the SJW/progressivist cult bastions realizes that:

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.

Ben Noordhuis's primary language isn't English, and he was following established PR protocol, so I think he should be given a little bit of leeway.

My comment starts with "I (don't) think". Feel free to think otherwise, but my statement has truth - I know what I think.

Even though he stopped being part of core, he has remained active in Node.js development. It's part of his job at StrongLoop I suppose. A fresh start with an open governance model at least should mean that most politics are set aside.

Except "identity politics" aka inclusiveness are at the heart of their open governance model... Or did you miss the drama over their code of conduct; that they were going to one and how they solicited and followed advice from noted social justice advocates in drafting it.

It confuses me deeply that this fact could turn people off of the project regardless of its other practical and technical merits.

I hope so. Pretty much everyone on that list except isaac and mikeal are apolitical.

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.

A great way to stop identity politics becoming an issue is to bring it up unprompted through a throwaway account on Hacker News. Anonymously singling out specific members of the community that you dislike and labeling them as bad actors is particularly helpful.

Oh, wait...

How do we know that Isaac identifies as a "he" ?

The fact that opinions like these are still a thing says more about the opinion than his commitment to the node/io/libuv community. edit: obvious commit statistics below/above.

What happened?