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
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?
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.
Well that sucks. There are so many alternatives with just as much support
skia doesn’t actually have that many alternatives, and skia is well maintained used by a large amount of projects. and none I am aware of are nearly as mature as skia is.
I mean, to be fair, Skia appears to be good - Firefox and LibreOffice also use it for example. I believe GNOME Web will also use Skia in GNOME 47. It certainly seems that people are moving away from Cairo and into Skia. For what reason? I don’t know.
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.
No, that’s a takeaway from the post by the dev about Ladybird. It’s what he said, more or less.
Who cares? It’s run by reactionary incels, transphobes, and racists. https://cmdr-nova.online/2024/07/03/serenityos-and-ladybird/
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?
You seem to have missed this third PR, that was genuine, three days ago. It seemed to be the cause of the trans woman’s sarcastic PR. The author of the article does mention it.
“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.”
Yeah, you don’t sound unhinged at all.
no it’s not, and nobody worth listening to cares anyway.
please stop bringing up this absolute nothingburger.
reactionary incels, transphobes, and racists
All that because they declined a silly PR that replaced ‘he’ with ‘they’ 🤡 What are you doing on Lemmy by the way? Do you know what the developers think about your political views? Or is that not trendy to discuss this week? Instead of fighting useless online battles, go and help someone if you are that highly morale. But of course you won’t, that would require some effort.
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.
Someone found a way to weaponise bikeshedding.
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).
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.
…you know what literally none of them do? Refer to their users as “he”
You’re either deliberately lying or haven’t bothered to actually look.
I’m waiting. A screenshot, video, link to the GitHub file, etc. will do.
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.
I misread your username as masterrace and it made me uncomfortable. I do not need to know anything about your intent to label you as a fascist supremacist because it is easy to not make these mistakes in English. So, I can say for sure that you purposely meant to use hate speech.
I would fire anybody instantly that displayed disgusting and immoral behaviour like you. We should get a community together and cancel you IRL.
This comment is totally normal and reasonable. /s
Lmao, bruh. Your inability to read properly is not my problem.
Again, name a time you think you need to use the word “he” in a software instruction or label and I’ll point out how you don’t. Don’t worry, we’ll wait for you to think of one.
And again, I didn’t say they should be fired for making that mistake, I said that’s a junior ass mistake to make. I said they should be fired for being childish, immature, and defensive in the face of valid criticism. You might want to reflect on how childish, immature, and defensive you’re being in response to calling someone else that.
Masterclass comment.
Part 1 - criticize my reading comprehension and then immediately demonstrate a lack of reading comprehension by asking me to defend a point I did not make. At what point did I suggest that using “he” was required? As you say, “well wait”.
Part 2 - demonstrate a lack of self awareness by attacking my attempt to raise your self-awareness. I even used the sarcasm tag and you still didn’t get it. I doubt further dialogue will help so I will not try again.
Minor Part 3 - “defensive”? I do not remember having to defend myself ( before this comment I guess you could argue ). As a bystander, I was calling you out for your behaviour. If you understand that as “defensive”, we are back to reading compression. Do you ever consider context or definitions when choosing your insults? Or do you just decide that people are members of some class of enemies and then respond as if you are talking to them generically? Real question. No public answer required — it is just for you. This is my last comment. Any attempt at education will have been totally lost by going further.
Stay gold.
If you get enough words out I suppose you really can convince yourself that you’ve made a coherent point when all you’ve done is made up different scenarios and missed the point.
You’ve successfully raised my self awareness in that I’m now aware that if someone else makes up a scenario where they explicitly can’t read, they could draw wild conclusions and get offended.
That’s not unprofessional. That’s just how English works.
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.
While I don’t disagree, it is possible that Kling picked up the writing style of he/him for unspecified gender. Kling is Swedish, and Swedish only recently made their gender neutral pronoun official. On the English side, it seems he/him for unspecified gender started getting pushed in the 1800s, though I can’t find info on when they/them regained usage.
Given their reaction thinking that it was politics to correct, I find the idea the idea that it was an innocent translation issue a little hard to believe.
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. <shrug>
Who cares? It’s run by reactionary incels, transphobes, and racists.
Wait until you find out who runs Lemmy development.
wasnt it leftists?
Lemmy devs are awesome. 1 more reason to use the platform.
Aren’t they just communists?
Self described tankies.
What did they do?
Good news, most folks at beehaw know and the admins have decided to move to a new platform
Correct. We’re moving to Sublinks very soon. Buckle up.
Is it anywhere near ready yet?
It’s a lot of work, give them time
I’m not the one saying they’re gonna switch to it very soon
I can’t give you a date. However, I can say it will be very soon.
Great! Must have missed the announcement as usual but no matter, looking forward to it!
When was this announced lol. I’m guessing from our side it will be business as usual though?
oh boy I can’t wait for all of the integrations to break
also is it just me or is deciding what software you use and do not pay for based on the political views of the people who create it (who again in no way benefit from its use by people who don’t donate) incredibly fucking stupid
Don’t call people “incredibly fucking stupid”. Be(e) nice.
i’m not calling people stupid, i’m calling an idea stupid. is that also not kosher?
It is absolutely a reasonable interpretation to assume you were referring to the people making the decision you didn’t like. And even if it wasn’t, calling an idea a group of people have “incredibly fucking stupid” isn’t much different, as it carries an implication of how you see those people.
If you feel other people are getting offended too easily at what you say, I recommend spending extra time on your posts to ensure you avoid saying derogatory things you don’t intend for. Something that looks good to you can be incredibly insulting to others who read differently from you, and since conversation is a two-way street, that’s the kind of thing we all need to be aware of.
@AVincentInSpace @remington The Lemmy devs are infamously difficult to work with. They’ve repeatedly shown an unwillingness to even acknowledge the existence of the many problems that instance admins face. That has been a big driver in Beehaw’s decision to move platforms, not just because of a difference in political views, and they’ve been pretty open about discussing it. You’re way off-base.
Do you know what topic brought you here?
“Hey guys, let’s not use this free software, because of their views.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t use this other free software because of their views.”
“Why are you guys worried about which free software you use based on their views?”
“We can all tell you aren’t new, why are you complaining about our unofficial pastime?”
It’s almost like the philosophy behind a software matters to its long-term stability. Like, as if devs might find reasons to, I don’t know, reject PRs, ignore bugs, and trash their users when they come to them for help.
Weird that the content of someone’s mind might affect their actions or be an indicator of what level of trust they should be extended!
If this is provably the case, then I agree, we should stop using Lemmy. If not – and I say this as a proud supporter of the vast majority of seemingly-pointless ideological bullcrap – it is nothing but pointless ideological bullcrap.
Programming is a form of communication. When you develop a piece of software, it will intrinsically be biased to boost the kinds of messages you believe in. This is both because you as a person think about problems a certain way, and because the code you write is meant to convey to others how you were thinking about the problem you were trying to solve. Who heads projects and how they communicate with their community matters to what the product produced will become, not just because of how the leads will think about the problem, but also because people who don’t get along with them won’t wind up contributing. Beehaw requested moderation tools that the lead lemmy Devs didn’t view as valuable. The result is beehaw, reasonably, gave up on getting PRs merged and issues tracked in the issue tracker, instead choosing to look at Sublinks which was explicitly started in response to Lemmy’s devs not behaving well with their own development community.
And for anyone saying Sublinks is splintering the Lemmy Dev community, no, lemmy’s devs did that themselves
I wasn’t making any judgement on this, although if I were, I would point out that one of the benefits of open source is the ability to fork projects and move away from the elements you have a philosophical issue with, such as what the OpenOffice developers did when Oracle purchased Sun and started imposing their unplayable rules. What I was half-jokingly pointing out was some guy coming in deep into the conversation of highly opinionated people and acting like the conversation wasn’t about their various opinions.
The demo on that link is literally Lemmy lol
why do something original when we can just copy because we say we don’t like the devs?
Its better to fork than recreate the wheel.
Well, PRs are better, but when the devs ban their contributors or don’t accept PRs, then at some point its best to fork. Lots of people have come to this decision
I’m looking forward to switching to Sublinks but it isnt ready
Is it maybe that they’re using the Lemmy frontend, but Sublinks for the backend? But yeah, still a bit weird…
Probably because the project is just taking rust and making it Java…
Because they hate/don’t want to learn rust and think Java is a superior language
Because they hate/don’t want to learn rust and think Java is a superior language
You know, that’s not what I’ve read. It’s worth mentioning that it doesn’t just use Java.
They do mention in the link they are moving away from the lemmy frontend too. If the development process is more inclusive though, it’s not a bad thing honestly, especially if it has previously excluded some developers
Will it federate with Lemmy? I would miss you folks.
It’s my understanding that it will…I believe that’s, also, what it means when they (Sublinks developers) said it would be “Lemmy compatible”.
then what’s the point if you’re still not getting away from the same people?
Y’all just don’t even bother moving your eyes over the text before you post, do you?
That’s like saying what is the point of misskey (and its forks) when it can be seen by people on mastodon. Isn’t that the whole point of the fediverse?
That could also mean client API-compatible, meaning Lemmy apps would work with it, which doesn’t speak to federation.
Maybe so. We should, probably, ask @Penguincoder@beehaw.org about this.
Oh nice. Hadn’t heard a platform had been decided upon.
I am overjoyed to hear that we’ll be staying in the fediverse and I can stay with beehaw.
It will be “Lemmy compatible”, so hopefully all of Lemmy apps should work fine.
That’s splendid, though I’ll continue to use the web interface of beehaw honestly.
I do, I feel like we desperately need some more competition/options in the browser engine space.
What does that have to do with the code tho
Sometimes terrible people can do good things.
Those good things should be supported.
Judge a project on it own merits.People still use the Autobahn.
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.
It sounds like you’re arguing that bad people shouldn’t be paid to anything good.
I don’t support bad people. Those bad people can change and become good people. Until then, why would I support and pay those that hurt my friends?
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.
This is known as a “false dichotomy” and is very lame.
Is it?
Are you saying you would support bad people under the right circumstances?
“What about the good things Hitler did?” Is not the flex you think it is. Also, using the Autobahn does send support to Nazis
Using Lemmy without donating to the developers does not send support to them. Same goes for Ladybird, does it not?
Adding to popularity does support them.
Yeah, it EMOTIONALLY supports them. Dude. It’s okay. It also supports the users who get value out of it in actual material ways.
A. Not a “dude”
B. I’ll pose the same rhetorical as I did to the other person that didn’t think popularity was support:
If you see two pieces of identical software, one with 1000 downloads and one with 100,000, which would you choose?
I guess that’s true when you’re a company trying to sell a product. For an open source project more popularity might just mean more hassle. Sure, it may increase your employment opportunities somewhat, but seeing how entitled and demanding users of os-software can be, I’m sure some devs wish their projects were less popular.
you’re kidding, right?
If you see two pieces of identical software, one with 1000 downloads and one with 100,000, which would you choose?
That would depend on the feature set
I’m sure a few bad people make a living maintaining it, and all the roads you depend on everyday.
Bad people are everywhere, doing all sorts of jobs you appreciate.
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.
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.
“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.
Wow, what a slippery slope you’ve made.
It’s your idea.
All I did is assume all good people agree with you.
I think you meant that using the Autobahn does not send support to Nazis. Slight typo there :P
Ope, yes indeed
Great analogy and perspective.
It’s not that great an analogy because the autobahn isn’t still maintained by Nazis.
That’s your opinion on what is and isn’t a great analogy.
Hopefully the maintainers of the project will be more considerate in the future.
It’s not my opinion, it’s an objective flaw with the analogy where the comparison doesn’t entirely work. It’s not a big deal, by their nature analogies tend to be imperfect.
I don’t understand the analogy, can you tell me what the deal with the Autobahn is? We don’t have an Autobahn where I’m from.
The Autobahn is a very well engineered German highway system. It is well known but was also was constructed during Nazi Germany.
While it was built by evil people, it still is a fantastic highway system that is used today.
Time and place, phneutral. Time and place.
Oh didn’t you hear? It’s fine now because a PR was finally accepted well after being called out and
stepping downstepping 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.
Imagine that talking with people about issues and not just shouting and brigading them actually works. Who would have known.
Like the first time it came up, politely with a complete PR, and it was just shut down?
you mean this one https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814 three years ago? yeah that was not the nicest reaction. Bridgading in that old thread and the thread about the accepted and merged PR was not nicest reaction as well.
Also the merged PR was way more of substance and didn’t just replace
hewiththeyin that one line whereas there were several occasion where that issue occured in the same file. If the original one would have been merged, the documentation file would be inconsistent.As someone who hasn’t bothered to read any of the detail about this whole mess until just now, the comments from three years ago were all relatively civil, even if the response by the developer was dismissive. That this was corrected within 6 weeks and people are still talking about it is pretty impressive, though. Looks like people are trying to make enemies, not converts.
Looks like people are trying to make enemies, not converts.
Yeah and it’s fecking sad, no even embarrassing.
Yes, that one.
Boring hit piece that way overblows some issues on the topic.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Non-technical discussion should just be banned.
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.
