• Dzso@lemmy.world
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      15 hours ago

      If that’s true, shame on them. But it doesn’t mean their browser isn’t good.

    • SaltySalamander@fedia.io
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      18 hours ago

      I truly couldn’t give a single solitary fuck what opinions the devs of software I use have, no matter what that opinion is. As long as they’re not trying to shove that opinion down my throat via their software, their opinions literally have no effect on me whatsoever. You either, whether you want to believe that or not.

      • mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de
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        17 hours ago

        I think the problem is that certain views are much stronger indicators of someone being willing to eventually shove their views down your throat. If I was a big corporation shopping for, say, spam filter software, I’d rather sign a 3 year contract with a regular company than, for example, a company that is openly fundamentalist Christians. Why? Because the Christians are much more likely to start randomly making ridiculous changes that only make sense to other Christians, like spam filtering out anything with the word “Allah”, etc. They may not do that now, but I need to look further than just right now because I don’t want to get locked in to an ecosystem that is going to turn sour. Sure I can always switch, but why not just choose the one that has less risk of that at the onset?

        Now some beliefs that I disagree with are less like this than others. For instance if the devs disagreed with me about their favorite movies, I’m not going to take that into consideration, because that’s not the sort of thing or the sort of person who is likely to abuse their power to aid that cause. But transphobia? That is exactly the sort of thing that someone, as has been proven many times now, will sit on and downplay until they are given power and influence to act on it. Using their software contributes to their influence, especially in the browser world.

        Lastly, all other things equal, I’d rather use the product of a smart team full of smart people, than a dumb team full of dumb people. Transphobia is a dumb belief to have, it is a result of being unintelligent. Many smart people (and let’s be honest, especially developers) won’t want to work with someone like that. Whether you think that’s reasonable or not, it’s hard to deny. It’s certainly hard to picture any great trans developers wanting to contribute. So a lot of things add up, especially when looking a few links down the causal chain, to make it more than just a matter of whether they believe differently than I do.

        • zarkanian@sh.itjust.works
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          13 hours ago

          This article appears to be pretty even-handed.

          My assessment? Get fucked, Ladybird. I don’t want to trust my web security to people who think like this, especially since web security is very political and will only become more so as the Trump administration continues.

          • Optional@lemmy.world
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            3 hours ago

            TL;DR;

            A few days later, someone pointed out an issue in SerenityOS where a new contributor offered to update the documentation to include gender-neutral language instead of always assuming the person building the project was a man. Kling rejected it with the statement: “This project is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics.”

            …Kling and the Ladybird project doubled down on rejecting active inclusion in the name of being “apolitical.” Others tried to explain that rejecting inclusivity is inherently a political decision.

            If you’ve watched enough of these things play out, it’s usually the doubling down that causes a lasting split, more than the original disagreement.

            So not some kind of JK Rowling transphobia or even stock republiQan misogyny as much as a fairly tone-deaf executive position on documentation that became a thing.

            Making documentation gender-neutral is not radical or ‘political’ other than it’s trying to reflect the reality that more than just men use and create code. It seems like Kling thought his project was under threat of takeover by some radical pansexual furry anarcho-collective (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and said something stupid like “documentation isn’t a place for political debate” which, is sort of true and also not relevant to the change requested.

            As the article states, the real issue is the doubling down. That’s not good.

          • PushButton@lemmy.world
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            8 hours ago

            After reading this, in particular the “The Facts” section, my understanding is: he got pulled into making a political statement about gender and he didn’t want to get involved with that.

            Yet again, that “crowd” didn’t like Ladybird’s refusal to play, therefore that “crowd” does what they’re known best doing: cry high and loud on the internet playing the victim.

            In a sense, that “crowd” shoved their political agenda down his throat, and that’s the only thing I personally find reprehensible here.

            • yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de
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              4 hours ago

              Refusal to make a “political” statement is very much political when the politics in question is about acknowledging non-men exist. There is no politically neutral choice when there are two options who are both political.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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        17 hours ago

        Exactly. How FOSS devs spend their time and money isn’t my business, what is my business is foundation financials and whether the software is reliable and safe to use.

        I strongly disagree with Lemmy devs on politics and how they run their instances, but that doesn’t impact me so whatever.

        As long as ladybird devs don’t go out of their way to be jerks to trans people, I’m good. The worst I’ve seen is rejecting pronoun changes in code comments and docs, which isn’t a big deal.

    • neuracnu@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      17 hours ago

      I think this may be the issue to which you are referring:

      https://hyperborea.org/reviews/software/ladybird-inclusivity/

      While this is troubling to read about, this narrative’s lack of evidence or references keep me from accepting it at face value. Old mastodon chatter (and perhaps deleted posts or scuttled instances) may be difficult to retrieve, but GitHub discussions shouldn’t be hard to find.

      So I’m withholding judgement for the moment.

      UPDATE: Commenter [email protected] wrote this terrific comment that provides confirmation of the above narrative, corrective action that the LadyBird engineering team has taken taken, plus some vitally important context of the entire kerfuffle. A+ work.

    • NotAnonymousAtAal@feddit.org
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      20 hours ago

      some context and/or link would help for everyone who just learned about this project and knows nothing about the devs

      • fuzz@sh.itjust.works
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        20 hours ago

        I’ll just copy a comment I made a while back. It was about the usage of “he” instead of gender neutral pronouns in the documentation:

        So I looked further into this, and while I found awesomekling’s comment to be a cause of concern, I’m hoping it’s a cultural misunderstanding due to his Swedish background.

        That comment is from 3 years ago, and since then there was a commit merged, that had the sole purpose of fixing these pronouns.

        • cygnus@lemmy.ca
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          19 hours ago

          I’m hoping it’s a cultural misunderstanding due to his Swedish background.

          Jag pratar inte Svenska but I know enough that it has gendered pronouns just like English. Actually, it’s better than English in that it preserved the neuter singular pronoun (which used to be “thou” in English) so there’s even less excuse in terms of linguistic background.

          • lime!@feddit.nu
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            19 hours ago

            this is incorrect. we recently added a neuter singular pronoun. “hen” was introduced in 2009, and not widely used until like 2019. Also, in technical documentation, masculine pronouns were taught as the default to use (both in swedish and in english) when i was in university in the early 10s. this has changed now, but it definitely wasn’t on the table when kling was in school.

            • cygnus@lemmy.ca
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              19 hours ago

              Interesting, thanks for the correction! I thought it was a medieval form that stuck around.

              Masculine being the default was the case for English (and French) too, but not anymore, and certainly not by implying anything other than the masculine is “political”.

              • lime!@feddit.nu
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                19 hours ago

                yeah smaller languages have taken longer to adapt to that change, because it started in the anglophone world and the concepts of gendered language don’t translate well. it’s like how the word “man” in english used to mean “human” and not be gendered at all, and when language is updated to remove the – now gendered – word and then translated, the translation stops making any sense because the context of a word is so different.

                i always give massive leeway when language is involved, because the culture around progressive language is basically 99% centred on the US.

                • cygnus@lemmy.ca
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                  19 hours ago

                  Not really. Mandarin for example has different characters for “he” and “she”, but they are homophones (“ta”, or “tamen” plural) so you can’t tell who’s who in spoken language. Hungarian doesn’t use gendered pronouns and Finnish doesn’t either (actually, now that I think of it, that may be where you borrowed yours - isn’t it “hen” too?)

                  • lime!@feddit.nu
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                    19 hours ago

                    i’m not really talking about the grammar, but about the cultural meanings of the words. there may be implied gender in a mode of speaking even in a language without gendered pronouns. my grandmother would always assume people i was talking about were male if i didn’t use a gendered pronoun (like i would be talking about a colleague by referring to them as “my colleague”) because that’s the “cultural default” here still. it has changed a lot in the past five-ten years but it’s still the default.

                    and i actually don’t know where we got “hen” from. i do know that it was not originally meant to be an actual gender-neutral pronoun, but as a placeholder where gender is unknown or unimportant. it was created to replace the more cumbersome “han/hon” in legal texts, and not meant to be used to refer to specific people. but we do that anyway because it helps adoption.

                    looking it up it does seem to be taken from finnish! their word is “hän”, which would be pronounced about the same. i learned something.

      • cygnus@lemmy.ca
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        20 hours ago

        There was a pull request to change “he” to “they” somewhere in the code and the dev refused, saying people should leave “their politics” out of it. I wouldn’t say it’s transphobic specifically - it may also be misogynistic. Either way, it doesn’t look good.

        • lime!@feddit.nu
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          19 hours ago

          i can offer some context to that, but first let’s clear up that all the documentation has since been updated to use second-person pronouns, making it both friendlier and gender neutral. kling is fully on-board with that change.

          the issue came in right after the big wave of people doing drive-by “code of conduct” PRs. there was a plague of accounts that only did that, and had no other connections to either projects or people. this is obviously a form of political activism, and while it’s not malicious, it does get in the way for volunteer developers of big open-source projects who are usually already swamped with work they’re not paid for. so creating these giant documents that have not been pre-discussed with the team doing the project is disruptive and misguided. having a code of conduct is good, but it needs to match the project.

          anyway, in the middle of this a big PR comes in which changes shitloads of documentation. the standard PR view doesn’t show each change, it just shows “n files changed, +n lines -n lines”, and a description talking about “gender-neutral language”. now, kling is not a “typical” developer. he’s a former addict who started doing serenity and ladybird as therapy/rehab. i don’t know what that’s like, but i imagine it means you don’t have a lot of mental overhead for things you don’t want to do. so kling saw the description and the massive change set and didn’t want to deal with it.

          it took a while but he was convinced to change it. if he had not, i would not be as charitable.

          • LucidNightmare@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            10 hours ago

            Thanks so much for this layout of everything. I wasn’t even aware of what was going on, and your comment put it all together. Cheers!

          • neuracnu@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            17 hours ago

            This is very valuable context.

            For citations, the only references I see to “pronouns” in their github project is in a section called “Human language policy” in CONTRIBUTING.md (link). Here’s the relevant part:

            In Ladybird, we treat human language as seriously as we do programming language. The following applies to all user-facing strings, code, comments, and commit messages: … Use gender-neutral pronouns, except when referring to a specific person.

            That sounds pretty cash-money to me.

            There’s one additional reference in a pull request discussing whether or not to use “we” when referring to recommendations of the engineering team (as in “we recommend” vs “it is recommended”). Minutia.

            I’m not as interested in litigating this matter than I am in putting it to bed (along with any and all definitive citations and evidence such that I can refer back to this comment thread in the future when the question inevitably comes up again.)

          • cygnus@lemmy.ca
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            19 hours ago

            Thanks for the context - I still intensely dislike the “political” reaction, but people can learn and change. I also don’t like that Canadian arch-jackass Tobi Lutke is a major supporter of the project; he’s a bit like Brendan Eich. I’ll reserve judgment until the browser launches. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on it.

            • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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              17 hours ago

              Brendan Eich

              I honestly don’t understand the hate here. I get that he supported the bill to ban gay marriage and that’s terrible, but I’ve also heard that he left his politics at the door and treated everyone with respect, including the LGBT people at Mozilla. I honestly think he would’ve been a better CEO at Mozilla because he’s interested in the tech. His largest problem was making a personal contribution with his own money to an unpopular cause, and someone dug it up looking for dirt.

              Isn’t that exactly how people should act? Leave your politics at home and work well with others. I work in a diverse group with a mix of immigrants, likely gay people, atheists and religious types, Trump supporters and critics, and even a couple furries. None of that matters and we work well together. In fact, most of the turnover we’ve had has been over compensation because our company has been stingy recently, and they all say they wouldn’t have considered leaving otherwise.

              You can disagree on very important things and still work well together, it’s called professionalism. I dislike Eich’s views, but I believe he had way more professionalism than his loudest critics.

              • cygnus@lemmy.ca
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                4 hours ago

                he supported the bill to ban gay marriage and that’s terrible,

                but I’ve also heard that he left his politics at the door and treated everyone with respect, including the LGBT people at Mozilla

                How on earth can you reconcile these two statements? “I respect you so much I’ll pass a law to make you illegal”?

                • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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                  2 hours ago

                  I don’t understand how you can’t.

                  In a business setting, it’s called “professionalism”, and in a personal setting it’s called being a nice person. Most of my family is against gay marriage and don’t believe in gender fluidity, yet when my sister in law said her child is non-binary and would like to be referred to with they/then, they complied. Why? Believing those things doesn’t mean you hate LGBT people, it just means you disagree about policy. They love my sister in law and her kids, so they’ll do what they can to help them feel comfortable around them and want to participate in family gatherings.

                  I personally believe strongly that marriage should be available to all consenting adults, but I also believe gay marriage goes against God’s plan. Why? I believe everyone has the right to make their own choices and whether that’s acceptable to God isn’t my business. Maybe I’m misreading things, IDK, but my personal religious beliefs only guide my personal decisions and I believe I am supposed to love everyone regardless of their lifestyle. Whether someone else is sinning isn’t really my business, nor should it impact my love for them. And maybe they’re not sinning, again, IDK, it’s not my business.

                  I support same sex marriage (my church doesn’t) because I believe in freedom of choice, and that policy merely increases options for others and doesn’t decrease mine. Likewise for most LGBT policies, like bathroom use or gender change on IDs, you do you. We had an LGBT candidate at work (pretty obviously trans), and I was happily surprised that wasn’t an issue for my very conservative coworker during the interview (they’re an observant Muslim with conservative social views), and I went out of my way to make sure we both corrected for any subconscious bias we might have.

                  I don’t know Brendan Eich, maybe he’s actually a terrible person, idk. What I do know is he had a long career at Mozilla (nearly 20 years), and there were no public complaints about him until he was chosen as CEO. From all accounts, people were only mad about his $1k donation to prop 8, not about his conduct at work or anything of that nature. The board even asked him to stay in another capacity, but he left because he loved Mozilla and obviously he wasn’t able to be an effective leader if his presence encouraged people to recommend against using Firefox and other Mozilla products.

                  To me, it’s a crazy overreaction, he donated a pretty modest amount one time, six years prior, and had no complaints during his position as CTO. He absolutely got brigaded because someone decided to dig up donation records. If they didn’t, he probably would’ve been a successful CEO and refocused on the tech, instead of whatever nonsense the follow-up CEOs have been doing.

                  I disagree with Eich’s political views, but also think he was the best person for the CEO role. He seemed like a competent professional, and he was certainly technically competent given his long technical career at Mozilla.

                  • Pup Biru@aussie.zone
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                    1 hour ago

                    Most of my family is against gay marriage and don’t believe in gender fluidity, yet when my sister in law said her child is non-binary and would like to be referred to with they/then, they complied.

                    no, that’s fucked up… less fucked up than making a big deal of it, but it shows a huge lack of empathy… people close to them that they know quite well are validating that non binary people exist - that it’s not just people “looking for attention” and all that other garbage that people throw out there and they still don’t think they should be treated with respect and as equals by society

                    that’s “i don’t respect you but i don’t want to make a scene”

                    this is why the rate of self harm in the queer scene is so fuck high… because families suddenly don’t respect people they’ve know and loved their entire lives

            • lime!@feddit.nu
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              19 hours ago

              yeah that ties in to my other comment; it’s not political in american english culture (well it is, but only to chuds), but other countries don’t have the same context for this stuff. and when those cultural barriers are crossed without knowing the differences, there is bound to be friction.