So it turns out that this whole mess was one man on a virtue signalling mission, who presented himself as project representative while not even being an active maintainer and without knowledge or consent of people who actually work on this project, and who just got himself booted for violating his own Code of Conduct.
This is a really nice response, to be honest. He did a good job admitting the mistakes, taking appropriate action, and addressing what could have been done better. It set a tone of a professional, level-headed response to what was a semi-rogue, rash decision.
What’s really interesting is that James considers Vice to be evil misogynists but that he "collaborated" with them because it benefitted him. He sees no irony in this and feels no guilt of association. Really makes you think...
This response painted a picture of being honest, but skipped the part about why James Kyle was removed. Granted that he wasn’t contributing to the project (in recent times). Granted that he made a spurious (?) change without informing or consulting anyone.
But is it right to just remove people because they made a mistake, even a slightly grave one? What conversations happened in the background? Was he unrepentant and adamant? Without knowing the answers to those, this looks like a knee jerk reaction based on concerns and issues raised by many.
I personally would think that community based open source projects would spend more time communicating and checking if a consensus can be arrived before such decisions.
To reiterate, I’m not saying the decision to remove him was wrong. What I’m saying is that this post doesn’t seem to explain what went on behind the scenes and why this decision was taken and if there were no other resolutions available or considered.
If you look into it a bit, he’s a bully — quote-tweeting people to insult them, lobbing f-bombs at people for what could be a civil disagreement, and so on, all while proclaiming a moral high ground.
But.
No matter how deserved the ejection was, I would not want to see an apology like this expand to include a list of complaints against a member. That would be stooping to their level. Keep it classy and avoid the details.
> But is it right to just remove people because they made a mistake, even a slightly grave one? [...] this post doesn’t seem to explain what went on behind the scenes
The apology omitted the details in an (in my view wise) attempt to take the high ground, but Kyle has been having a full fledged meltdown lately, and that includes a lot of bullying and harassment on both twitter and github (and perhaps on other platforms).
> if there were no other resolutions available or considered.
Even if there was, Kyle hasn't been a contributor to Lerna for some time, and he stated during the controversy that he'd abandoned the project in favour of a competing project Bolt. In the circumstances, keeping Kyle on the team would seem to have no benefits, and removing him has no costs. Even if there were other resolutions (like, I dunno, giving him a stern talking to and telling him not to do it again?) why would that be preferable?
The two of them planned this together. I think Stockman realizes it was a mistake, but why was Kyle removed for something they did together? Neither are trustworthy from here forward.
The post says that it was for CoC violations. That there were such violations is clear on its face. As just one example he labeled thousands of specific people as racists without any justification. That’s not reasonably characterized as a “mistake”.
