•  LukeZaz   ( @LukeZaz@beehaw.org ) 
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      212 days ago

      I’ve no love lost for the developers in question. But between the original two PRs and associated comments being from over three years ago, and the “trans woman [being called] 'spam” comment being said about a PR that seems pretty strongly to me to be meant as a sarcastic insult rather than a genuine contribution, I can’t help but find it a little unconvincing.

      It’s not without merit by far. I feel that Kling’s blog post not addressing the drama was in poor taste and may indicate a lack of self-improvement regarding the initial fuckup, and saying you want to “avoid alienating people” when closing a PR that aims to improve inclusivity is more than a little pathetic. I also understand not wanting bigots to be able to just bury their past and pretend they were never bigoted. It’s just that the fiery response this has gotten still ends up feeling a bit disproportionate given how old the truly insulting issues were. Am I missing something?

        •  LukeZaz   ( @LukeZaz@beehaw.org ) 
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          I saw that one. It’s what I was referring to when I said “saying you want to ‘avoid alienating people’ when closing a PR that aims to improve inclusivity is more than a little pathetic.” Criticizing the maintainer response there was one of the good parts of the blog post.

          But the outcome of that doesn’t really much change the fact that the sarcastic PR was sarcastic, and thus calling that PR spam is reasonable, whereas claiming they called the trans woman herself spam is not. To be clear, however: I’ve no issue with the sarcastic PR itself, only the framing of it in the blog post.

    • I wonder why that person decided to stir drama now. I guess they must’ve been upset after Ladybird got a good amount of investment money or something?

      Seems like a lot of exaggerated claims of malice to me, even for Github drama. Assuming someone is transphobic for closing a trans person’s PR quite the stretch.

      •  masterspace   ( @masterspace@lemmy.ca ) 
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        Didn’t they fly off the handle on someone for politely pointing out that the text shouldn’t use the word “he” and assume that every user is male?

        That’s not political, thats flat out unprofessional. I would think it’s a pretty junior mistake if any of my colleagues filed a non-gender neutral PR in the first place, and would flat out fire them if they ever reacted to a review that unprofessionally.

        • I found both sides rather aggressive to be honest. The implication that the use of “he” implies that the author assumes every user is male comes with an implied accusation of some form of misogyny. The aggressive defence again at the implication went too far, but the implication of malice was unnecessary, especially for an unknown outsider butting in.

          Furthermore, the “generic he” has also been acceptable English for centuries, and has only been starting to be phased out in the past few decades. In high school, some of my English study materials still came from thirty years before, and certainly didn’t contain gender neutral words like “postperson”. Singular “they” may have been around since the 14th century but that doesn’t mean it was commonplace. My native language doesn’t have an equivalent for the singular they, so I’ll probably use “he” in wrong places. Accusing me of not considering female users because I’m not a native English speaker certainly won’t make me want to help you (though I’d probably just ignore you rather than shut you down; then again, I’m not recovering from substance addiction like the original author was back in the day, so that’s not hard for me to do).

          •  millie   ( @millie@beehaw.org ) 
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            I mean, the whole point is kind of that the problem is getting defensive rather than making a change.

            That’s the root of a lot of these problems. People are intimidated by ‘wokeness’ because they think that caring about how they affect other people means that if they have the wrong idea they’re irredeemable. Clearly that isn’t compatible with continuing to feel alright about themselves, so they become defensive and double down. But the reality is, if they’d just like, quit it with the callousness and cruelty they’d be eliminating the problem to begin with.

            Lack of acknowledgement of there being an issue becomes the primary motivator for making the issue worse.

            It’s like becoming a hoarder because you’re too embarrassed to acknowledge what a mess your house is to clean it. Rather than pick the trash up off the floor, they shout about how clean their house really is and how deluded we all are for talking about the smell.

          • I found both sides rather aggressive to be honest. The implication that the use of “he” implies that the author assumes every user is male comes with an implied accusation of some form of misogyny.

            No, it didn’t. Go read the PR, it’s extremely polite. I in fact, would challenge you to try and think of a more polite and less accusatory way of bringing up the same issue. I can’t.

            Furthermore, the “generic he” has also been acceptable English for centuries, and has only been starting to be phased out in the past few decades.

            Yeah, you know what else has only been around for the past “few” decades? Literally every single computer and piece of software ever made, you know what literally none of them do? Refer to their users as “he”.

            You want to make it sound like it’s a simple ESL mistake? That’s fine you’re welcome to believe that, but do you know how I respond to translation mistakes when I’m speaking a foreign language? I laugh and say oops, sorry, my mistake I’ll fix that. I don’t say “don’t bring your politics into this”.

            I’m sorry but you are making up a fantasy to try and believe that the author wasn’t being an explicit asshole.

          • I found both sides rather aggressive to be honest.

            This was what I thought as well. The PR was a simple request that I thought wasn’t political at all, just a matter of inclusion which I thought fit. Kling got aggressive thinking it was a political move or some shit then the rest piled on calling him names and such.

            I think he just thought it was bringing politics into his project, I don’t think he was taking any sides at all but people made up their minds. His silence is a bit concerning, probably ignoring it all but, whatever, It’s his project.

          •  masterspace   ( @masterspace@lemmy.ca ) 
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            There are a million and one ways to phrase everything in the English language, it’s flexibility is one of its most notable features. There is literally no instruction or label that requires non gender neutral language to be in it unless you’re talking explicitly about gender.

            Go ahead and name a label or instruction that you think requires you to use the word he and doesn’t have a gender neutral equivalent.

              • SIngular they never fell out of usage, but it was considered non-standard English dialect for about three hundred years. Standard formal grammar rules from the 18th century until the last quarter of the 20th defaulted to he/him where gender was unknown or irrelevant. Singular they was grudgingly accepted as standard about ten years ago. Until then, every major style guide forbade singular they in favor of “he or she” or recasting the sentence to avoid pronouns altogether or to semantically justify plural they. Other languages have either found their own solutions or decided that their traditions are good enough and kept them.

                Personally, I just avoid pronouns whenever possible, especially if someone is likely to throw a tantrum over an honest mistake due to a lifetime of custom. I’ve never been particularly upset at singular they, but I also don’t take offense if someone follows the older formal grammar rules either.

          • Sure, there is no ethical consumerism under capitalism. But I can do harm reduction. When someone says or does something shitty, I can avoid or stop using their product. In your example, if a road worker came out publically with some transphobic nonsense, I could raise that to my local road authority and they would likely lose their job. Are there more people that have shitty views in this theoretical? Maybe, but they will be less likely to spew them if they know there are consequences.

            •  jerkface   ( @jerkface@lemmy.ca ) 
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              there is no ethical consumerism under capitalism

              What is the source for this quote? I most often hear it used to argue in a fatalistic way in favour of continuing to do whatever harmful thing it is a person wants to continue doing. I don’t think it is true, certainly not for those who are struggling for survival. Ethical doesn’t necessarily mean that there is no harm. It means that the harms have been considered and a meaningful attempt at balancing those harms according to some ethical framework has been made.

              • I’m not sure of the origin, but that is a fair point. I typically us it in the context of there is no way to find a harm free source of anything in a capitalist society, so you have to find the path with the least amount of harm in it. That is basically what you are saying, but just tweaking the stated definition of ethical.

                •  jerkface   ( @jerkface@lemmy.ca ) 
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                  “Ethical” does not mean “good”, “moral”, or “right”, it means something more like, “consistent with an explicit set of ethical axioms.” It’s meaningless to say something is unethical without stating or at least implying a specific ethical philosophy.

                  Carnism says that it is sometimes acceptable or even good to be cruel and violent to animals. Veganism says that it only is in cases of absolute necessity. A researcher or scientist for a cosmetics company might follow all the ethical requirements of their profession, and yet by any other standard, do unforgivable harm both to animals they experiment on and to the humans they mean to exploit with their research.

            • Is it harm reduction if all the bad people couldn’t make an honest living? Would it be better or worse if they were living on the street? Do you think they might resort to criminality also?

              • Given that what these people are being criticized for are not intrinsic traits, those people have the option to change their behavior in order to not be ostracized. I am certainty not under any obligation to give anyone my business.

                “What if all the bad people lost their jobs?”

                Well, that certainly might encourage them to rethink whether being bad is working out for them.

                And yes, I’d say that route sounds to me like it will reduce harm in several ways.

      • Sometimes terrible people can do good things. Those good things should be supported. Judge a project on it own merits.

        The thing here is that Ladybird and SerenityOS are both the community and the code. One cannot live without the other because the code will always need its community to develop it. And in this case, it is not possible to support them without supporting the people who, y’know receive the money. I think nobody is arguing against an independent browser engine - the argument is against the implementation of it.

            • Do you think they’d stop being bad people if they couldn’t make an honest living? Would it be better or worse if they were on the street? Do you think they might resort to criminality also?

              Do you feel better knowing they aren’t getting your money? Even at the cost of them ever doing anything good for anyone?

              • Do you think they’d stop being bad people if they couldn’t make an honest living? Would it be better or worse if they were on the street? Do you think they might resort to criminality also?

                I don’t think anyone deserves living in the street. I don’t think they will stop being bad people whether or not I support them. It seems you’re trying to move the goal post.

                Do you feel better knowing they aren’t getting your money? Even at the cost of them ever doing anything good for anyone?

                I feel better that they aren’t getting my money because they cannot be empowered to hurt the people I care about. I think they can do good things without my support. This seems like a weird thing to say.


                Also, this is clearly sealioning. It’s really not a good way to make conversation.

      •  Recant   ( @Recant@beehaw.org ) OP
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        303 days ago

        The piece was definitely slanted.

        Was what the devs did great? No. Does the whole project need to be outcast/abandoned due to what language they use? No. There needs to be nuance with these issues. Open source does not owe individuals anything and that is why it is provided without warranty. On the flip side, individuals can choose not to use it.

        We should be promoting open source software and not have infighting when open source software doesn’t have much mass market appeal to begin with.

        • We should be promoting open source software and not have infighting when open source software doesn’t have much mass market appeal to begin with.

          Just as a side note, I want open source software / free software to have appeal because it is good for people. If the way the promote it to the masses is enabling awful people, I’m really not interested anymore.

        • Letting fascists loose on github doesn’t make open source software more appealing. Look at how much worse twitter is to be on after relaxing the moderation standards. Now imagine that for open source. We need to make sure open source is approachable to everyone and that means being careful with our language and not being dismissive when someone opens a PR to make the language more approachable to all

          •  millie   ( @millie@beehaw.org ) 
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            Absolutely this. Twitter-level toxicity coming out in this thread from outside instances is already a bad indicator of the kind of communities that are peripheral to open source.

          • That is literally the comment that started all of this. Prepare to be convicted and sentenced in the court of public opinion.

            I am serious, the only comment by the dev in question was “This project is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics.”

            • Non-technical is not the same as political, not even close. I explicitly chose that term because it’s not considered subjective by anyone, but especially not by the people who think gender-neutrality is somehow NOT political. If you claim that it is, they just quip back with “a person’s right to exist is not a political issue but a human rights one”, which of course was never even the debate, they just twist things around to fit their narrative.

              • I explicitly chose that term because it’s not considered subjective by anyone, but especially not by the people who think gender-neutrality is somehow NOT political.

                All words are subjective. “Non-technical” is not really the magic word you think it is. Could you clearly define it? I can’t personally.

      • No, I’m actually with them on that one. The he / they issue in of itself is tiny, I agree, and if they’d just changed it from gendered to gender neutral language then nobody would’ve even cared. Most of us tend to write in a gendered way out of habit or because we think about our own gender, and in a casual conversation that isn’t that important. But this is about a piece of software that, surely, is not just meant for male audiences. It’s just unprofessional to address someone as male by default. Most importantly though, being this stubborn on having the user specifically male is just a weird hill to die on, but even weirder if that particular action is the one that is actually causing the drama - which they allegedly claim wanting to prevent by dismissing “politics”. And I’m sorry, but changing a “he” to “they” is not politics, it’s just including non male users. Nothing more, nothing less. So why is it such an issue to not just address specifically male users? It really only would be because those people hold some very questionable views, which, in my opinion, clash heavily with the whole concept of free and open source software, which is supposedly for everyone. So if your actions and views are this flawed, how can you be trusted on such an important project?

        Also, in regards to this news… “no code from rivals” also is just a stupid thing to say and do. There’s plenty of good open source code that they could and probably even SHOULD use. But whatever. I’m not gonna support this project and predict it will fail anyway.

        • The thing is, as some other people have pointed out, the guy is not a native english speaker, and many latin based languages simply don’t have any gender neutral pronoun and make use of the neutral masculine instead. Many of these languages have seen some people propose new ways to handle pronouns to change that recently, most of which are somewhat controversial. It’s easy for a native speaker of those languages to assume the same is true in english (especially since the use of “he” as a generic neutral is, as far as I can tell, still valid, although clearly out of fashion). Once you take all of that into account, the proposed change can easily be viewed as someone trying to simply push one of those controversial ideas instead of a widely accepted generic masculine, which would clearly fall into politics in the sense of “real world beliefs and social issues irrelevant to the topic at hand”. The rest seems to simply be a pretty childish ego war between him and some mastodon users which could have been solved by either side taking 5 minutes to explain their point of view on this matter.

          Now, even without this context, from what I can tell, the issue at hand was a single instance of " he" used to describe a generic anonymous user in the dev VM… Seeing that as unprofessional because it addresses someone as male by default surely is a bit of a stretch.

          About that “no code for rivals”, I don’t think is as stupid as many mention. Right now when it comes to web browsers (at least ones with wide compatiblility and features), there’s only 2 choices : chromium-based and firefox. So someone trying to bring some fresh blood is welcome, and in order to avoid having the same issues as the chromium-based ones, you need to make sure you are not overly dependent of your competitor’s code. Granted, this is a pretty strict approach, but it doesn’t prevent them from using the same libraries and techs, it just means that any code written specifically for a different browser shouldn’t be copy/pasted.

          •  millie   ( @millie@beehaw.org ) 
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            52 days ago

            Nothing about being a non-native English speaker requires you to stubbornly continue to use specific language. I have many non-native English speaking friends. Generally they actually want to know how their words are being taken, and will make corrections to be sure they’re not saying the wrong thing.

            You know, like, as one does when learning another language. I’m not going to insist on using English grammar rules while speaking Spanish and then just tell all the Spanish speakers to stop being so political at me when they correct me. That’s nonsense.

      • And then another, where a trans woman is called “spam.”

        With comments like this it’s clear the author is just overreacting. They were clearly calling the PR spam, not the person. (And this is coming from someone who was definitely angry with them for denying the original PRs and stuff.)

    • “reactionary”. Self-aware much?

      I do not know either of you.

      That said, on the one hand we have a guy that trivial research reveals has been dramatically transparent about his own life, struggles, and frailty in a really humble and disarming way. He shares his talent freely not only with code but mentorship and teaching. He has created a thriving and closer-knit community working together to do interesting and valuable things ( OS and browser ). His somewhat famous tagline is “well, hello friends”. He has also showcased both his wife and other females on his channel. Unless I misunderstand the term “incel”, you are demonstrably and factually wrong on that front at least. The biggest complaint I could find about him elsewhere is that his is “too neutral”. Perhaps that is at play here.

      On the other hand, we have somebody directly peddling destruction, slander, and hate ( you ). And why? As far as I can tell, the only contribution the SerenityOS founder has made to this “discussion” is the sentence “This project is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics.”. Is that really it? Overreaction?

      That sentence spawned all of this? I must have misunderstood which of you we were labelling as “reactionary”.

      Regardless of if the project should have accepted the commit or not ( a valid debate ), I cannot possibly side with this reaction. It is awful.

      Downvotes welcome. I would rather be ethical than popular.

      • his wife and other females

        His wife and other women. The word “female” is an adjective and should not be used as a noun unless referring to e.g. animals. Like myself, you are (probably) non-native speaker of English so I don’t weigh this all too heavy, but others might since it is considered somewhat disrespectful to women.

      • You’re wasting your breath. These people cannot be defeated with logic. You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t use reason to get into in the first place.

        At the very least they will claim “gender neutrality and/or a person’s right to exist is not an ethical OR political issue.”

    •  Luci   ( @Luci@lemmy.ca ) 
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      153 days ago

      Oh didn’t you hear? It’s fine now because a PR was finally accepted well after being called out and stepping down stepping aside from the project

      /s

      • Teaching changing minds, influencing… it needs plenty of repeating and sleeping on things. To be fair, when all else fails applying pressure has its place as well. Nevertheless small victories are still victories.

        The ability of Ladybird’s team to face scrutiny of all kinds is important for them to eventually gain traction in the browser market. But I’m still hopeful, and we need more options.

  • saying ‘no code’ from rivals seems highly misleading, and I can’t seem to see a hard citation for this, in fact, it very directly contradicts this same sentence from the article

    He also said that unlike SerenityOS, Ladybird will “leverage the greater OSS ecosystem,” meaning that it will use other open source libraries for some features.

    it would be better to say they aren’t relying on libraries and features from rivals. not that they will use “no code” from them, good code is good code afterall

    •  Luci   ( @Luci@lemmy.ca ) 
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      273 days ago

      What I got was that there would be no Google or Mozilla specific code/libraries, but FOSS libraries for common media formats would be included so that the project can reach a wider audience.

      • What I got was that there would be no Google or Mozilla specific code/libraries, but FOSS libraries for common media formats would be included so that the project can reach a wider audience.

        AFAIK They use Skia, the rendering library made by Google so this does not appear true either.

      • Honestly, I’m not sure that’s quite a good takeaway. The article itself was pretty much a bland nothing burger and the articles that were cited were, again, pretty bland. The biggest thing I can find is that they won’t be facing off another browser and then it’s like, well duh.

        It’s just one of those things. It just feels like the original dude said one thing and the author interpreted it a completely different way.

    • They are not PR people, don’t expected that of just normal people having fun. No one is promising “chrome killer coming in six months”.

      Thig is that for SerenityOS they want to make everything from scratch, ssh, ssl, libraries, utils, text editor… even the browser. They could have just porr Firefox, but that was not the point. To use it you had to complile whole OS.

      But since browser got some attention and sone complex sites (like guthub and twitter) started working in it, to make project more viable they are dropping this constraint for browser. I guess they migt use some gui library, ssl lib, codecs… stuff like that. But, I expect, they will not use others code for rendering engine and js, but continue with implementation from documentation.

      While some in this thread say they are racist, homophobic and stuff. Maybe some are maybe just not polished for public speak, do we really think everyone in google is totally clean?