In fairness, these projects have different objectives. Ladybird aims to be a full browser, Servo doesn’t.

Ladybird is a brand-new browser & web engine …

Servo is a web browser rendering engine …

There is Verso, which aims to build a browser on Servo, but it’s still very young (though, I suppose that applies to LB as well). Ideally, I’d like to see all these projects grow into complete solutions. I think that’d be healthier for the internet. It’s just really difficult to support Ladybird with Andreas as he’s acting right now.

Disappointing and unsurprising. He and Bryan are very similar, complaining that “social justice warriors” are “ruining open source” whenever they see pushback against shitty actions, then getting right back to doing way worse.

Whenever I post such things, I get a small wave of displeased people. Rarely get thanks, though. Even if it takes a bit of effort, and I inevitably find yet more stuff. That’s ok, praise obviously isn’t the point.

But it demoralized me a little, how there’s always downplaying. It’s never enough. I can say Brendan Eich is homophobic, ideally you shouldn’t support him, and someone will tell me he invented javascript, and that makes it ok (my entire point is thus null, I am overreacting).

Your thanks encourage me to uselessly annoy and present no arguments a bit longer. Thank you.

Downvoted for stating a relevant, verifiable fact. Incredible.

we’ve created the Ladybird Browser Initiative , a US 501©(3)

The inaugural board of directors:

• Andreas Kling (President)

I’m a bit hesitant to comment further because this thread is already quite long, but assuming it’s a genuine question I can send a DM and we can talk there, if you want?

Seeing that you replied to a comment that’s almost a week old, I wouldn’t be surprised if you do.

I really hope no one reading thinks this redditor behavior is as cool as the author does. Dude seemingly can’t get the point they’re arguing against, so this is all that’s left, I guess.

Yeah buddy, this is to sleep better at night. You’ve shown you’re not stopping the high-school tier debate club logic and the goofy-ass mic-drops.

Sure, ignore him being pals with the homophobe CEO and welcoming Mr. genocide because he made cool tech. Because being a developer puts you above mere ethical issues, and saying “I’m apolitical” makes you immune to criticism.

And lets ignore that it’s been changed since. People ‘never’ change, so lets fuck up their entire career and public image for life.

Andreas hasn’t changed, that’s half the point of my comment. The PR was sent by someone else, merged by someone else, disguised with a different title, and all after his departure announcement. Someone approached him about it later, and Andreas himself admits he hasn’t changed his mind. Did you read nothing? Where’s this change you’re so confident about?

And I’m not ruining his career, that’s absurd. I couldn’t manage, even if I wanted to. Look at the niche forum we’re in. Even so, I’ve defended his work, his skill, the very idea of Ladybird, the need for more browser engines, even the tooling. But unless people shut up and never criticize him, it’s just not enough for you.

If you think that comment outweighs all the positive impacts Andreas is making, that’s your prerogative. I’m not interested in holding everyone up to such high expectations.

“Don’t unnecessarily chum up to homophobes and genocide defenders” aren’t high expectations. They’re ridiculously low-hanging fruit, considering our history. Absolutely pathetic excusing of his actions.

It’s a little complicated, but it doesn’t look good. If you’re interested, I wrote a comment about it.

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.

What’s surprising is his complete lack of care that Eich is probably still against gay marriage.

It’s not just a few interactions, it’s Andreas’ entire attitude around these topics. You absolutely can judge people and guess their beliefs from their online actions. Connect the dots, why don’t you?

I’m not “separating the art from the artist” when the artist is alive and frolicking with a homophobe. That’s very much relevant to me, I see LGBT folks being harmed every day due to such indifference.

Maybe I’m the odd one out, and do tell me if you think that’s the case, but when I can, I don’t support homophobes with my wallet nor my words.

It’s like voting with your wallet, but for free. Image is a tool, just like capital, and I feel that contributing to theirs is a form of (albeit minor) support. Maybe I should’ve used supporting, or another word. Point is, Andreas does that, and I think it’s because he likes Brendan. Thinks he’s great, shouldn’t have joined the people decrying him for being a homophobe.

People who care about LGBT folks don’t usually like homophobes, and aren’t usually against decrying them. I don’t think this is a good sign for Andreas. That’s the kind of thing that you need to keep in mind when you see that first PR.

Are you trying to convince me that making a neutral meme about a shitty person’s success is equatable to supporting/being a nazi?

No, I tried to make that clear. I actually don’t get how you read it that way. Also, the meme isn’t neutral when you consider how he views Eich, just like it isn’t originally neutral towards Gaben and Steam when gamers use it.

Dream, sorry if managed to bungle up and completely misinterpret that point. I feel like I was answering with something important to note, but can’t even tell anymore. I’m physically tired, so maybe I should’ve returned later. In any case, I hope this won’t bother you for long.

I honestly can’t tell if there’s a disguise. Maybe there isn’t! He seems to genuinely and stubbornly believe in the apolitical-centrist stuff, which you wouldn’t think him capable of since he’s so intelligent when it comes to programming… but programming intelligence is not necessarily applicable anywhere else.

You’re defending him—intentionally or not—because you’re giving legitimacy to the idea that, somehow, the party that kicked him out is in the wrong, not the guy that defends genocide. It’s likely there would be complaints regardless of their official reasoning, because Vaxry’s problem is beyond reason.

I feel it all comes to the same unhinged idea that because someone is a bad person, everything they touch, create or any person engaging with them is also a bad person.

Not at all? There’s a chance I edited my comment after you replied. I’ve made many edits, and I’m not exactly keeping track. Please reread the end of it:

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 they get their shit sorted.

I hope the project succeeds, that it helps the internet. Doesn’t mean I must like or support the person behind it, specially when they’re acting this way. I believe there are others like me. I would like them to be informed as well.

The idea that I am not allowed to praise Brave browser features because of something unrelated its founder did is ridiculous.

Good news: I never said that. Go on, praise Ladybird. Someone asked about details on “Andreas’ gender issue,” I replied with details. Because I’m tired of people defending it in isolation, I brought more details. Any criticism is of Andreas actions, based on Andreas’ own actions.

I refuse to believe a reasonable, healthy mind sees someone cheering for queerphobes and thinks there’s nothing wrong with that. “He’s just interacting, he doesn’t do the bad things” has to be the most insane or trollish response to this, because it shows you don’t understand or outright don’t care about how this harms people.

By that absurd logic, if I like interacting with Nazis on the daily it’s fine, so long as I don’t actually pull the trigger on the jews myself. When people call me out, I’ll just say I’m apolitical. That’s how Andreas describes himself, by the way. Apolitical.

I’m not calling Andreas an outright Nazi, to be extra clear. If I had to take a guess, I’d say he’s a right leaning “thinks he’s a centrist and apolitical” person who doesn’t see the harm in many of the things he supports or is otherwise sheltered from them. This seems to be a trend among self-described centrists.

I’m baffled by your comment.

Read again, it’s not just interacting, he’s praising, promoting, and gladly and voluntarily engaging with these people. Not “the wrong people.” Say it with me: far-right misinformation propagandists, queerphobes, a genocide defender. Not “wrong”, with scare quotes, but actually shitty people. And I’m not even done with that comment.

About your ridiculous defense of vaxry, I’m going to be straight with you: violating CoC or not is irrelevant. If you manage a community that toxic, don’t see anything wrong with it, and don’t want to do anything about it, it is normal to want nothing to do with you. No magical binding social contract is necessary for this—if you suck, people don’t want to deal with you.

Collaborating in FDO isn’t a natural right, it’s a privilege earned by contributing. Vaxry made people not want to be there. Vaxry was detracting.

Your entire reply reeks of “it’s not that bad,” which to me reads as “I don’t think those things are bad” and sincerely makes me not want to talk with you further if that’s truly the case.

EDIT: So, I checked your profile, and you have a giant comment thread on things you dislike about DEI, and you also do mental gymnastics to defend the right. Cool, cool. And a comment equivalating “what if kamala did the sieg hail” to the question “what if elon did it?”

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, which he’s not a fan of.
    • Worth noting: Firefox, Vivaldi, Zen and even Brave (to their credit) are all active on Bluesky, the most popular twitter alternative that isn’t Threads. Vivaldi hosts their own mastodon instance. Mozilla used to as well, but it didn’t take off. Nonetheless, their twitter activity dropped heavily on their 2.4M followers account. Zen (a young firefox fork driven mostly by a student’s free time and donations) is also active on mastodon.
    • Even Servo, the browser engine, is active on Bluesky and Mastodon.
    • Ladybird, predictably, has an X account and a discord server.
    • For fun, I would like to share with you, dear reader, my favorite comic about the state of twitter (all within 10 min of scrolling—Elon’s pushing it hard).
• Other quirky things about Andreas that could be irrelevant in isolation but… please, put the pieces together. I’m begging you, look at the full picture. Is there truly nothing off about all of this?
  • Thinks the left doesn’t contribute to Open Source, and the right does all the work.
    • Hey, remember that time Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, called himself a “woke communist” on a public rant on the fediverse? He must be having an identity crisis now, huh.
  • Self-described centrist and apolitical.
    • I can elaborate on why this isn’t good, but I think most people get it.
  • Wary of people publicizing likes.
    • Someone once implied that if people didn’t like Andreas’ views now, they would’ve abhorred his Liked list before Elon made those private. It’s a random person’s word, so don’t take it as fact, but I need to share this because I’ve seen similar situations before, and it fits the pattern.

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 cannot support it until Andreas gets his shit sorted.

P.P.S. I’m tired, of all this.

that means everyone who disagrees on that point is arguing in bad faith

It doesn’t, that’s not my point. Bad faith implies they’re lying despite knowing better, which isn’t what I described. I never claimed bad faith, I said they’re factually wrong in this instance, and that their discourse is harmful regardless of their beliefs.

Just as not all anti-vaxers argue in bad faith, but are wrong nonetheless. Like many other groups who honestly and earnestly defend(ed) everything from racial segregation to genocide. I’m not saying these groups and the harm they cause are equivalent—this should be obvious, but I’m saying it anyway.

Everyone was wrong about something at one point.

When one being wrong hurts innocent people, something has to be done. I expect folks in aforementioned groups to stop being wrong about those things at some point. Otherwise, it’s up to the rest of us to act to protect the victims, not the moral standing of the aggressors because they’re sincere.

This attitude of “only one side follows facts and it just happens to be mine” is so amnesic, you never were always on the right side.

That’s a gross misrepresentation of my position, which I hope is born of misunderstanding or lack of knowledge on the topic. I tried to clear up any misunderstandings. If you don’t think they’re wrong or causing harm, I’m willing to have a conversation about this to explain it, if you want.

The problem isn’t opposition. It’s spreading misinformation, framing critics as luddites, refusing to acknowledge their misunderstandings about the relevant technologies and how they impact others. There’s no “two sides” to it when one of the sides thinks 2 + 2 is 5.

Recently, a thread cropped up about indie devs putting “No GenAI used” stamps in their pages, and the amount of people questioning the value of the initiative or outright criticizing it is absurd.

People saying disingenuous things like “It’s just another tool, I didn’t hear anyone complaining about the brush on photoshop”, and “games already used AI, are you also against procedural generation?” or the ridiculous “I need AI to make things. Why are you all against me learning and growing as a person?”

There is a vocal, often severely technically-uninformed crowd that strongly likes GenAI, doesn’t care about and refuses to understand the harm it causes, and needs everyone to be like them so they can stop receiving backlash for contributing to creator exploitation.