In November 2013, Ben Noordhuis, one of the maintainers of the libuv project, summarily rejected a pull request that removes gendered pronouns from the project's documentation. Noordhuis commented, "Sorry, not interested in trivial changes like that." and immediately closed the pull request without merging it.
A different committer, Isaac Schlueter, subsequently accepted the pull request, but Noordhuis reverted this change and chided Schlueter for having accepted it.
While the comments on the pull request are mostly supportive, they also contain an impressive litany of derailing and silencing tactics, including accusations of White Knighting and of political correctness, the Many bad things in the world argument, the You're the sexist argument, characterization of people who support the change as crazy, describing them as being engaged in a witch hunt, and other such concern trolling.
As a result of this incident, libuv maintainer Bert Belder submitted a contributor's guide to the project, which Noordhuis approved. The guide includes the clause
When documenting APIs and/or source code, don't make assumptions or make implications about race, gender, religion, political orientation or anything else that isn't relevant to the project.
A few days later, Noordhuis elected to step away from libuv and Node.js.
Responses
- http://alexgaynor.net/2013/nov/30/gender-neutral-language-faq/
- http://jacobian.org/writing/dear-node-community/
- http://www.joyent.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun
- http://strongloop.com/strongblog/collaboration-not-derision-in-the-node-community/
- http://deirdre.net/pronoun-power/
- https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015#issuecomment-29568172
- http://www.garann.com/dev/2013/a-theory-on-tech-community-drama/
- http://hueniverse.com/2013/12/empathy/
- https://gist.github.com/trevnorris/7729322
