GitHub - LadybirdBrowser/ladybird: Truly independent web browser
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I'm surprised this got any kind of attention.
Here's the turn of events from my perspective:
- Someone submits a 1-line PR changing the gender used in a code comment
- PR rejected on the grounds that the change is "politically motivated"
- Submitter got mad, and proposed removing the rule against "politically motivated" changes
- Someone wrote a blog post about it
Here's my analysis:
- Stupid change - don't make PRs that simply correct an irrelevant typo in a comment somewhere; some people do this to put stuff on a resume (look at how much FOSS work I do!), and it just wastes everyone's time
- Stupid response - it should've been rejected because it's a useless change, not because it's "politically motivated"
- Stupid proposal - do you really want to waste a bunch of time fighting over wording in a comment? Because that's the kind of crap you get without a rule like this.
- This is all about an irrelevant change to a comment? Why is this getting so much attention?
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Ladybird says 2026. Given the current state and progress, I believe it may be quite usable by then. I use it sometimes for basic surfing and leaving forum comments. It works surprisingly well often though it is still far from general use. I think the dev team tries to use it themselves for things like Discord and GutHub. They did a demo last month where it “almost” ran Gmail.
I am not sure that Servo has set a timeline. I expect it to take longer.
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I prefer permissive licenses but how do they reduce legal risks?
Copyleft licenses are harder to comply with, they usually come with clauses that can be interpreted in different ways, termination clauses, etc.
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I donate to Ladybird and Servo, and I hope they succeed. We need serious competition and a check on Mozilla (not to mention Chrome and Safari).
That said, I'm sad that neither Ladybird or Servo are licensed under strong copyleft licenses. We need user-oriented browsers now more than ever, and strong copyleft enables that. I worry that, even if these engines are successful, they will be co-opted by proprietary browsers and eventually superseded by them.
This happened before - both Chrome and Safari ultimately derive from KHTML, Konqueror's browser engine. If KHTML had been licnesed under the GPL instead of the LGPL, Chrome and Safari may have been free software today (or at the very least, it would have been much more difficult for Apple and Google to get started).
That said, I wish Ladybird the best. There donation = no influence policy is excellent, and I really, really hope they can stick to it in the long term.
How does one have a donation = no influence policy?
Huge companies donate to make open apps like this reliant on them. Then they threaten to pull the donation if that doesn't happen...
Strong Copyleft licenses protect from this by allowing others to fork and keep an app going without being taken advantage of.
If Google donates 1 billion dollars tomorrow, and over several months, Ladybird will expand to use that money.
Then Google can threaten to stop the donations unless LB does something like "make ad blockers worse"It's a web browser. The only money they will make is from donations. Unless they do something wonky with their business model, like charge. Then no one will use it anyway.
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I donate to Ladybird and Servo, and I hope they succeed. We need serious competition and a check on Mozilla (not to mention Chrome and Safari).
That said, I'm sad that neither Ladybird or Servo are licensed under strong copyleft licenses. We need user-oriented browsers now more than ever, and strong copyleft enables that. I worry that, even if these engines are successful, they will be co-opted by proprietary browsers and eventually superseded by them.
This happened before - both Chrome and Safari ultimately derive from KHTML, Konqueror's browser engine. If KHTML had been licnesed under the GPL instead of the LGPL, Chrome and Safari may have been free software today (or at the very least, it would have been much more difficult for Apple and Google to get started).
That said, I wish Ladybird the best. There donation = no influence policy is excellent, and I really, really hope they can stick to it in the long term.
No.
If khtml had been GPL, it simply never would have been used for chrome or safari, some other engine would have been picked.
Anything but real open source for these types of companies
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Lunduke used to be somewhat interesting, and I enjoyed his "Linux sucks" series, but he really has doubled down on political nonsense.
I disagree with Lunduke videos, specailly when he tried to bork Rust as a bad language without knowing single shit of rust programming. But if he was left wing we weren't having this conversation. People from moderate right should be excluded? I'm not talking about Lunduke here, but In general.
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I should be an idiot. I dont see a direct relationship between race and sexual orientation. Even if the PR was rejected because a pronounce how the hell this is white supremacist?
Well, didn't the Nazis also discriminate against gay people?
That said, it's a massive leap to go from "rejects 1 line PR that only changes gender in a comment" to literal Nazi...
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Stay vigilant. Content about "Political correctness gone mad!" is step one of the alt-right pipeline.
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Tankies are annoying, but they're not on the same level as fascists.
Both facists and tankies have genocided disabled people and selectively killed anarchists.
As a disabled anarchist, they end up seeming pretty similar to me.
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11 day old pro transphobia account, hmm
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It had a release this month, that doesn't sound dead...
If you look at the kwebkitpart commits, it looks like it's been nothing but localization for years.
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If the latter is Safari, then WebKit-based browsers are available for Windows and Unix-likes too.
Which are? Please list a few current ones that have reasonable backing and at least a mid-size community.
I wasn't thinking of such and meant
vimborsurf. -
“Don’t Be Evil” happily indexing while Bingcrosoft sleeps
Maybe disabling JavaScript helps?
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I disagree with Lunduke videos, specailly when he tried to bork Rust as a bad language without knowing single shit of rust programming. But if he was left wing we weren't having this conversation. People from moderate right should be excluded? I'm not talking about Lunduke here, but In general.
Exactly!
I dislike tech people who mix politics into their work, even if I agree with their opinions. If you do both, just keep them separate, like separate YouTube channels or blogs or whatever. Lunduke doesn't do that, and many of his tech takes are colored by that as well, so I ignore him.
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If you look at the kwebkitpart commits, it looks like it's been nothing but localization for years.
That's really too bad.
We lost this war with operating systems when Linux ate the BSDs' lunch, and it's happening again with browsers. I hope GNOME Web sticks around.
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The main issue I have right now: the jurisdiction of this is in the US, and to be honest, I don’t trust the US that much when it comes to privacy laws regarding the (near) future.
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Don't you think for a second that talking like this is indicative of extremism, polarization, even fanatism? It is ok to take political posture, but this is excessive
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No.
If khtml had been GPL, it simply never would have been used for chrome or safari, some other engine would have been picked.
Anything but real open source for these types of companies
To be fair, kubernetes comes from Google.
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Fascism, just like Communism or even a Dictatorships are not inherently bad
No offense but what the fuck are you even saying
Fascism is absolutely inherently bad, there is no removal of its evil, oppressive, and authoritarian traits after which anything is left.
In their defense, if everyone was perfect everything would be perfect.
But you're absolutely right. As long as humans are human there's no way to separate human nature from authority. And as a result, any system that doesn't strictly limit scope and authority is inherently bad.
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Looks interesting but does it support absolutely vital extensions like ublock origins?
