Charles Nutter of JRuby Banned by Rubinius for Harassment | Hacker News Reader

Charles Nutter of JRuby Banned by Rubinius for Harassment

rubinius.com

13 pointssandGorgon8 comments

Interesting "Mr. Nutter inserted himself into a public Twitter conversation" means replying to a tweet that was @ directed to him? He was explicitly invited to participate in the conversation. I'm confused here. That seems like a very wide stretch, right? He was replying normally, not "butting in" to someone else's conversation, it seems to me.

Now, I don't know what else has happened in the ten years, as I don't follow ruby drama, and only this isolated (and frankly it's very weak on its own) episode is given. I do wonder though, as this blog post mentions, if this decision was tied up with the introduction of the Code of Conduct. For example: Want to ban someone -> install code of conduct -> ban someone.

So, instead of a code of conduct being a guideline for good behaviour, instead of implementing one as a positive change for the community, its could have been written and implemented just to target and exclude one individual. I'm guessing here, of course, but the CoC was written a little only 2 months ago I think, and it does seem like Mr Nutter was in his bad books for over 10 years. We cannot know. I'd guess that you wouldn't need a Code of Conduct to ban someone, right?

If you run the project you should be free to control who contributes. My query is with Codes of Conduct as a tool of power. I wonder about Codes of Conducts as a form of control, rather than diversity and inclusiveness. It can be used to exclude and make people feel less welcome - it can be a powerful weapon for good and ill. The document does not make those who enforce it good or evil.

Is this supposed to make Charles Nutter look bad? It actually makes the poster look unhinged. The poster can't possibly ban Nutter from "any discussion of Rubinius on any public forum". That's a deeply insane thing to believe one can demand.

Further he was accused of "inserting himself into a public Twitter conversation" where the very screenshots in this blog show that he was replying to a tweet directed @ him. He was included into the conversation by someone else and did not "insert himself"

That was my impression as well. My guess is the banner is young and unable to cope with people having ideas other than his own, or possibly has a mild paranoid/delusional disorder. The two examples didn't seem at all unreasonable.

I'll second that. The addition of "principles of conversation" was a nice passive aggressive touch.

The context of the tweet seems to be about Rubinius' versioning, to me, it is crazy. Not knowing if your prod 2.10 is the same as your local development 2.10, absolutely bonkers.

  > In Rubinius, a "version" is a label on a git commit. To find exactly which commit (uniquely identified by its SHA) the version labels, you deference the corresponding git tag. [1]

Rubinius is so unwavering about their versioning process that they have asked to be removed from dev tools like rbenv and chruby. [2]

@brixen then offers conflicting statements on where he stands with regards to this:

Advocating removal:

  > Honestly, given the amount of time I've wasted with rbenv, RVM, and chruby bugs and insisting on telling me how Rubinius should build and package, it would be better if none of them installed Rubinius. [3]

Denying removal:

  > I didn't request that Rubinius be removed; that's @sstephenson's revisionism... [4]

[1]: https://github.com/rbenv/ruby-build/pull/860#issuecomment-16...

[2]: https://github.com/rbenv/ruby-build/issues/862#issuecomment-...

[3]: https://github.com/rbenv/ruby-build/pull/860#issuecomment-16...

[4]: https://github.com/rbenv/ruby-build/issues/862#issuecomment-...

  > Of course, choosing to build a system with a fundamental flaw in it is something they are perfectly free to do

I'm actually a bit dizzy from shaking my head.

So Nutter saying that having N versions called X.Y is silly, is what got him banned? Did I read that right? Let's hope the other 'abuse' was more tractable.

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