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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"comments must be accurate," is not a rule you should bend. Bending it even a little leads to last programming and shit code.
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I would've rejected the PR too, but not for violation of that rule, but because one-line changes that merely fix a comment waste everyone's time reviewing it, and are often just to build someone's resume. I've even seen some that remove trailing whitespace.
If you want to fix it alongside other changes, go for it (and the reviewer said as much on the PR). But if you're only interested in sending in drive-by commits to build a resume or something and aren't actually interested in helping, then it should be rejected as noise.
If there's a broader pattern of this, maybe that's cause for concern. But if it's literally just this instance, I could see the dev being annoyed at drive-by PRs.
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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.
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Is there any source for this?
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It also can be a reasonable take though, and you'll need more context to distinguish it.
In this case, Lunduke has a history of injecting politics where it doesn't belong, which is a shame because I used to watch some of his content (esp. his "Linux sucks" series). But now it's filled with nonsense.
My point is, don't write someone off because they don't want politics or political correctness in their project. Write them off when they use that excuse to silence things they don't like and allow things they do.
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You're free to fork and use a more restrictive license, that's one of the cool things about BSD licenses. It's not like it's something dumb like the CDDL, which is incompatible with the GPL (and many other licenses) and the reason ZFS can't be directly included in the kernel.
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Politics aside, I'd be curious to see how far something like this can go. Can't not think of Opera Software - even they were not successful while they were using their own proprietary tech.
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Tankies are annoying, but they're not on the same level as fascists.
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I see zero reason to out the "transphobic" label on the dev.
Think and read before labelling people.
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There is nothing political about acknowledging peoples' existence.
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DDG search is garbage, I'm sorry... Whenever I switch to a browser that defaults to it, I'm reminded why I always switch it back to Google (unfortunately). Even Yandex is better, and that's prob Russian spyware.
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I might agree if it was another Chromium browser or something, but this uses its own rendering engine and thus directly opposes Google's dominance on web standards. Currently, there are only 3 major rendering engines:
- Blink - Chromium browsers (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, etc)
- Gecko - Firefox browsers
- WebKit - Safari, GNOME Web (Epiphany), and Konqueror
Ladybird and Servo (Mozilla R&D project) are new ones, and Ladybird seems to have more traction.
Engine diversity is important. Browser diversity... a bit less so.
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Here are two on Linux:
- GNOME Web (was called Epiphany)
- Konquerer - KDE
Those are the two biggest desktops on Linux. In fact, when I run Tauri (like Electron, but uses your system webview instead of bundling it), it uses GNOME Web on my system.
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TBH, it is very difficult to me differentiating between the different flavors of authoritarians.
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I would’ve rejected the PR too, but not for violation of that rule, but because one-line changes that merely fix a comment waste everyone’s time reviewing it, and are often just to build someone’s resume.
That's exactly what I was talking about. You're taking what they said reasonably, because you're probably a reasonable person! However, look at what they're actually saying. The issue wasn't framed as being a "drive-by," though later that's what they claimed. It was about ideology. It was about politics. They didn't pull up rules about one-line changes to justify not accepting them, they pulled up rules about talking politics.
The problem wasn't that it was a meaningless PR, the problem was that it was a meaningful PR that they disagreed with.
And, quite frankly, disagreeing with that does make you an asshole, at the very least, and a transphobic misogynist, at worst. There were at least a few PRs open about similar issues, too.
Look, I'm not calling him a transphobe or a misogynist; I'm just saying this was an asshole thing to do, and it was done in an asshole way, and that allowing this sort of thing to exist, especially in FOSS, is not good. That's all.
Check this out: https://mkultra.monster/tech/2024/07/03/serenityos-and-ladybird
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True, but that only applies if it's misleading. For example:
// pythagoran theorem distance = abs(p2.x - p1.x) + abs(p2.y - p1.y);Fixing that makes sense because it's wrong and misleading (it's actually Manhattan distance), and a quick glace is insufficient to tell the difference.
But fixing a typo or something that wouldn't be confusing is just noise and should only be fixed with other changes. For example, I intentionally misspelled Pythagorean in my comment above, fixing that to be the right spelling would be a useless change, even if the distance formula used the hypotenuse. It wouldn't be an unreasonable policy to reject PRs that only fix spelling or similar to reduce noise for the maintainers.
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Oh shit. I despise Discord, why not a normal forum?!
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Existence? Because somebody used a wrong pronoun?
