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if there's one thing I thought feminists had taken to heart it's "no means no".

I'm a dude, and this comment seriously offends me.

I'm sure you thought you were being funny or something, but I dare you to make that kind of quip to a woman's face, and see if you don't begin realize why by the way her expression changes.



I am quite serious.

"No" is a powerful word, and the "no means no" slogan is about enforcing the power of that word and the expectations our society place on it no matter the context.

Women and sexuality do not have an exclusive claim to protection from having someone force their ideals or their actions upon you or, as in this case, your repository.


"No means no" specifically refers to a campaign against rape. It is not some general defense of the right to refuse anything and the sanctity of the word "no". The word "no" in itself isn't some kind of sacred word, and it should not have general power in all contexts that's enforced, as you seem to be proposing.

Apart from the analogy seeming silly and over-dramatic when applied to a... pull request to a software repository... it doesn't even make sense based on how open-source projects I've worked on in the past operate. There is nothing particularly out-of-bounds about making a suggestion a second time, even if it was rejected the first time. Situations and personnel change, and discussions recur. Linus even actively encourages it himself, and many pull requests are accepted after three or four "nos" from Linus. This does not mean that Linus encourages you to initiate sexual advances with people who've asked you to stop, though, because that situation is not at all similar!


This may fly as rhetoric on /r/MensRights (and yeah I mention that because I went and looked) but it doesn't hold true in...like...reality. "No means no" as popular phrasing most specifically does refer to unwanted sexual contact, originating specifically in the context of date rape--and no, to forestall the tired MRA argument, male- or female-initiated sexual contact. And it was not Noordhuis's repository at all, as can be evidenced by the whole "/Joyent/" part of the URL.

I don't know Mr. Noordhuis. I think his behavior was stupid and Joyent's moreso. I think your behavior, and your motives, are appalling.


To be fair here, the only reason that /joyent/ is in the name is because Ryan Dahl entrusted the project to Isaac Schleuter, who works at Joyent (and was working at Joyent at the time of the bequeathment).

TBH, I was always bothered by having the project move from Ryan's account to Joyent. Ideally it would have moved to Isaac's or another, new organizational account "nodejs" should have been made, where all the core Node.js projects could have lived.

I'm quite frankly appalled at Joyent, the company, having made a statement via a spokesman about an extremely valuable contributor of the project. Joyent is a guest in the open source community. It is a sponsor and it enjoys brand benefits. But it is not a member of the community. It's engineers are and if anyone from Joyent (or anywhere else) was going to call out Ben, then they should have done so speaking for themselves on their own personal blog. This is the kind of stuff that makes me want to keep companies at an arms length of any open source project. There are only two entities in an open source project, the individuals and the group. Any entity beyond those two can only serve to split the community or inject more politically charged discourse into conflicts.

AFAIK, engineers from both Joyent, Strongloop (Ben's company) and Nodejitsu have all been core contributes of Node.js, but that Joyent has gotten most of the name recognition.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/nodejs/hfajgpvGTLY


Agreed almost entirely (I think that many companies have shown themselves capable of being very responsible stewards of open-source projects, it's only in a couple of communities that I see this sort of thing happening), but what-should-be doesn't really change anything. It probably should be under its own project--but it's not, it's under Joyent's and the actions on the project reflect on them. I think Joyent overreacted terribly and did themselves more damage than the tempest in a teapot otherwise would have caused, but I get the motives behind it.

The only reason I replied is because the tenor of Zikes's posts throughout this discussion have been consistently of the "I'm not touching you I'm not touching you we both know I'm being a dick but I'm not touching you!" variety and this straight-up mistruth about something rather important ground my gears.


You should downvote or ignore trolls, especially if they're that obvious.

The fact his comment isn't grey says something about the HN community.


  > this comment seriously offends me
"So fucking what?" © Stephen Fry http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqPcjm-X5GQ




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