Hi. I pushed the button on the fork and I wrote one of the drafts of VALUES.md.
This fork is not about Rod. This fork is not about excluding or kicking anyone out or punishing people for CoC violations.
This fork is about an ongoing frustration with Node Core (and, tbh, Foundation) leadership where it has been very difficult for collaborators to represent their interests -- with most of the project's actual power concentrated on a few individuals with priorities that are different from many of their contributors. This is about establishing a governance system that spreads out power more, and that is better able to represent the interests of the people who are actually there, contributing, and working with the project.
This fork happened because the Documentation WG fell apart after trying really hard to charter.
This fork happened because the Inclusivity WG fell apart after trying really hard to charter.
This fork happened because Node leadership was essentially unwilling to so much as ask one of its members to step down after repeatedly antagonizing and sometimes harassing members of their own community.
This fork happened because URMs/women/etc
have been leaving Node or significantly reducing their involvement due to the organization's refusal to take their needs seriously.
This fork happened because the TSC still exists/existed even though it was essentially vestigial and largely ineffective -- a relic of a time when the Node Foundation was still picturing itself as the toplevel of an umbrella. But now they're under the Linux Foundation so that was no longer necessary or appropriate.
This fork happened because there are a couple of individuals who have disproportionate amount of representation in Node leadership: participating in the CTC, the TSC,
and the Board, all at the same time.
This fork happened because every time the word Promise is so much as mentioned in the Node issue tracker, there's something resembling a small civil war, and Node's technical leadership has been unable to direct those discussions in such a way that they can happen positively and peacefully. Instead, any time a contentious technical issue comes up, it gets dragged on until people literally end up leaving the project because they can't even anymore.
This fork happened because Michael Jackson Script is still a thing, except it's not, because it's
still not there.
This fork happened because the only way Node's leadership ever seems to get off their asses and actually
do something is when you set a fire so big they can't just ignore it -- because their default attitude is to ignore anything the few folks at the top vaguely dislike and hope that it goes away.
This fork happened because Node Core has a very narrow perspective on what's important to the project, and an even narrower perspective on what "technical" means, and has repeatedly shown to be utterly incapable of serving the needs of anything but commits to .js and .cpp files.
This fork happened because a nonzero number of Node Core folks believe "diversity" means "just add more languages" -- so they believe it is not worth putting the time into serving the needs of folks in countries where they are marginalized. Instead, the only "diversity" efforts that they ever seem to actually act upon are just timezone and language accessibility serving people from prestigious/dominant social groups in other countries. These are worthwhile efforts, but Inclusion must begin at home.
This fork happened because
node-eps is an insult to the Node community and an example of the level of internal politicking that the rest of the community is not privy to, or allowed to be privy to. Because a repository intentionally designed to be a dumping ground for "ideas we don't want to deal with by annoying people we don't wanna talk to" speaks volumes about the project's structure.
This fork happened because for all their talk about separation of money and technical concerns -- the whole reason for the Core/Foundation split -- Core ends up consistently favoring concerns related to sponsors and Enterprise interests above those of its contributor community.
So no, I don't actually give a flying fuck about Rod Vagg himself. Behold my field upon I which I grow my fucks, and you shall see that it is, indeed, barren. The reason that was the straw that broke the camel's back was because several people spent months building a case and negotiating and trying to find away to remove a figure from a
single governance committee (let's be clear: no one ever proposed or even considered trying to remove Rod from the project), and that all of that work was ultimately ineffective -- and the
governance reasons why it was ineffective, demonstrated the futility of trying to influence Node Core as a collaborator, and the ass-backwards priorities the project has when it comes to the health of its own community.
