So a pull request, involving a change in the documentation to use gender-neutral form, to libuv, (one of the libraries Node.js relies heavily upon) was rejected, applied, reverted, and re-applied over the course of two days. Things got escalated quickly and heated words were exchanged via tweets, blog posts and github comments. And now, Ben Noordhuis, one of the core contributors, has said he will likely step down from libuv and Node.js development. For some people, outcome of this whole incident is a signal for commitment to equality and inclusion of all human-kind, not only for gender-bias in STEM fields, while for others it’s just a bay area political correctness fad (as some developers call it) or an exaggeration of a simple mistake by a non-native English speaker. Nevertheless it’s interesting to observe how the collective behavior of a diverse community shapes the future of open source software amidst all this high drama. Here’s some quick links for the interested reader.

• The pull request which started all this 2 days ago – Removed use of gendered pronouns
• Then the merge commit was reverted setting things on fire – Revert “doc: Removed use of gendered pronouns”
• The response from Joyent – The Power of a Pronoun
• Response from StrongLoop – Collaboration not Derision in the Node Community
• One good thing that came out of the discussion – Guidelines for contributing to the project
• A good discussion on HackerNews about the brouhaha – link
• Another great blog post – The Open Source Bikeshed
• Wikipedia article on Parkinson’s law of triviality, also known as bike-shedding which sums up the behavior – link