GitHub - LadybirdBrowser/ladybird: Truly independent web browser
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Konqueror is more or less dead as a browser. I don't even think kwebkitpart is maintained anymore since QtWebkit was abandoned with Qt6.
It had a release this month, that doesn't sound dead...
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Fascism, just like Communism or even a Dictatorships are not inherently bad.
We as humans key in on the oppressive authoritarianism of them as the evil in the system.
That’s why I’d recommend you lump them all together as “oppressive authoritarianism” until one of them proves us otherwise, and not to need to find the nuances between them to prove they’re bad.
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.
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Existence? Because somebody used a wrong pronoun?
You're right, words are meaningless and language has no bearing on society at large. after all, fuiebt eidiowb rhe efifo quifopim.
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It really depends on the project.
If you're a larger project, you can see a ton of these from people hoping to land a commit to put "contributor to X" on a resume somewhere. Those add up and are really distracting and possibly automated. They waste everyone's time, especially if they spawn a bunch of conversion like this did.
If you're a smaller project, it doesn't matter as much. I work with ESL coders too, so I get it (1/4 of my office is ESL immigrants, and ~2/3 of the broader team is ESL). I fix comments all the time, I just include them with other changes.
So it depends. But in general, a high profile project should reject this noise to discourage this behavior.
In theory that's fair reasoning. Unfortunately the dev made it clear that his reasoning was based on politics
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I see zero reason to out the "transphobic" label on the dev.
Think and read before labelling people.
Calling pronouns political is a straight up dog whistle
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Someone else posted a writeup about it.
It wasn't in documentation, but a code comment. No user would see this.
One part was a rejected change on the README, which was trying to remove this "white supremacist language":
## On ideologically motivated changes
This is a purely technical project. As such, it is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics or religious beliefs. Any changes that appear ideologically motivated will be rejected.
Someone changing "he" to "they" in a comment as their only change could absolutely be seen as "politically motivated." My understanding is that if changing the comment was part of some larger useful change, it would be fine (as would using "she" or "they" in a new comment), but just changing the gender of a pronoun in a comment is a useless change.
If the comment said "she," would someone have been motivated to make this change? Probably not. Should changing this from "she" to some other pronoun (he or they) also be rejected? Yes, on the same grounds as changing it from "he," it's not a useful change and just wastes everyone's time. If you're in the code already, then go ahead, correct silly language like this if you care to.
Inclusive pronouns are not political, full stop.
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Sure, but there's no transphobia here. Stop spreading nonsense.
Ok, you keep saying that but never explain why/how. Like, why refuse such a small change so aggressively?
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Alright, read up on it a bit more. Sadly the language choices (C++ now, maybe Swift later) rubs me the wrong way for something that needs to be incredibly secure against attacks. I really really support additional browser engines, but likely not this one.
Thus I think Servo is a better choice for those looking to contribute. IMHO.
Quite happy to see Servo coming along again. I am still excited for Ladybird and it seems more likely to deliver a truly viable browser sooner.
I am not a Swift dev but I think it has decent memory safety as well. I think it is one of the reasons Ladybird is moving to it. They evaluated Rust and decided it lacked the OOP features they needed.
The C++ that Ladybird writes is also very good. They have their own standard library (written for SerenityOS) which is very modern including memory safety and security. Still C++ though of course.
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Isn't servo mostly a Mozilla-led project? I thought servo would probably just replace gecko as the engine firefox used if it ends up succeeding
Servo is developed by Igalia at this point. Mozilla is not involved.
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in my mind it's kinda the point of Ladybird to have a permissively licensed implementation of web standards, I like permissive licenses if only because they reduce legal risks
I prefer permissive licenses but how do they reduce legal risks?
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Inclusive pronouns are not political, full stop.
I never said they were.
Someone changing “he” to “they” (original PR that started all this) in a comment as their only change could absolutely be seen as “politically motivated.”
Look at the fallout in the comments on those PRs, it quickly devolved into politics and quickly away from any technical merit.
If this exact same change were included with other changes, I highly doubt anyone would've cared about the comment. The issue isn't with the text of the comment, but with the likely motivation and the actual merits of the PR. Many projects immediately reject tiny PRs because they clog up the review queue, and that appears to be what's happening here, plus all the political nonsense in the issue comments.
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Transphobic main dev ruined the project for me
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11 day old pro transphobia account, hmm
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In theory that's fair reasoning. Unfortunately the dev made it clear that his reasoning was based on politics
Did he? I only saw him point to the rule against politics.
He should have said it's because the PR isn't worth the time, but it also seems motivated by something that's against the rules (i.e. why make a PR that only fixes gender in one comment? There was a later PR that was accepted that fixed it in several places).
So without more evidence, I cannot say what the dev's motivations for rejecting the PR were, aside from the apparent rule breakage mentioned. They didn't say they disagreed with the change (i.e. that the change was wrong), just the proposal of the change (i.e. seems more motivated by virtue signaling instead of improving the dev experience). And you can look at the comments and see justification for that position, since it quickly devolved into actual politics with people accusing the dev of being a Nazi.
Maybe if you showed a pattern across more than just this incident (i.e. over months or years), but this sounds more like people being stubborn than tolerant.
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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.
That would not have changed much, since browser engines are million-manhours projects and a small group of devs doing that voluntary, just isn't enough.
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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
