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
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.
