linuxmemes

(until they get a new lead dev, Ladybird is definitely not any type of “Good”)

Is there any Servo-based browser? If not, it should be called Serval.

I'll give my take on it. Something many fail to grasp is that it's not about a singular thing, you need to look at the context. Let's go through some of it:

• Andreas Kling, lead developer of (now-)Ladybird, rejects PR that changes "he" to "they" in documentation.
  • This is the most frequently mentioned example of Andreas' issues.
  • The "he" in question referred to any user, where "they" is already commonly used instead by everything from companies, to news, to the Linux Kernel docs (an arguably much more important software project).
  • Andreas' exact words: "This project is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics."
  • This code was eventually merged 3 years laters in a different PR, this time described as "Grammar fixes" (it changes even more pronouns to gender neutral than the original did).
    • This PR was merged two hours after its creation and, coincidentally, around a month after Andreas announced his stepping down from the project.
    • An unrelated post by the contributor, same day.
  • Someone got his attention and tried to explain to him why that's not cool; he doubled down, assuming the worst from the original contributor.
• Andreas Kling likes interacting with far-right, queerphobic, or otherwise controversial persons.
  • Here's him calling Brendan Eich, known homophobe, kicked out of Mozilla for... being a homophobe, now CEO of the foremost crypto browser, infamous for its bravery and attracting like-minded fans, "Senpai."
    • A far more impressive man than Andreas will ever be.
    • Brendan's great ...Also shouldn't have decried him in the past for being a homophobe (he did to fit in).
    • Memeing about Brendan Eich's secret to success.
  • Here's him welcoming Vaxry, infamous for the toxic community of his hyprland project to the point of being kicked out of the freedesktop.org project. He's also on record saying "I do believe there could be arguments to sway my opinion towards genocide". There is a print of this, somewhere. I will find it and put it here.
  • Here's him doing a talk with Bryan Lunduke, tech's premier transphobe anti-DEI, anti-Woke conspiracy theorist with a classic far-right victim-complex.
    • Trudging through Bryan's slop wears on the mind, but here's another example of him being ridiculous. Highlight of the article: "There are multiple Software and Computer organizations which have declared their support for the Trans fetish over the last few years..."
      • Read anything by Bryan, then look into what he's talking about. There are at least as many examples, as there are times Bryan has touched upon LGBT topics or linux in recent years.
    • Here's relatively prominent KDE developer Niccolò's hour long video detailing how Bryan is a horrible, lying "journalist," and how people need to stop giving him a stage.
  • He also often interacts with other various degrees of right-leaning users on twitter, a platform he describes as full of positive energy, unlike Mastodon.
• Other funny things about Andreas that could be irrelevant in isolation but... look at all of this.
  • Thinks the left doesn't contribute to Open Source. No idea how he measured lurkers' political leanings.
  • Self-described centrist/apolitical.

Would I look at that PR and say I'm not touching Andreas with a ten-foot pole? Maybe that's excessive. Would I ignore all the rest and say he's just misunderstood? Hell no. For all its issues, I do hope Ladybird succeeds as a new browser engine because the internet needs more of those. But I'm not touching or otherwise supporting it unless Andreas gets his shit sorted.

It’s the other way around. KHTML begat WebKit and Blink, then we got QtWeb.

A single line of documentation? How about looking into some context? Hurt feelings my ass, Andreas isn't some innocent, silly little guy who never does anything questionable.

And which cause exactly are you talking about? Because I don't know about you, but I'll stand for real, marginalized people over lines of code on a screen any day.