some context and/or link would help for everyone who just learned about this project and knows nothing about the devs
Comment on Firefox is fine. The people running it are not
cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone 4 weeks agothe ladybird devs have a history of major transphobia though
NotAnonymousAtAll@feddit.org 4 weeks ago
fuzz@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks 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 4 weeks 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)
lime@feddit.nu 4 weeks 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 4 weeks 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 4 weeks 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. if he had not, i would not be as charitable.
neuracnu@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 weeks 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 4 weeks 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.
LucidNightmare@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks 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!
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
with a project named ladybird you’d think otherwise.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
I suppose, unless you’ve watched King of the Hill.
dzso@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
If that’s true, shame on them. But it doesn’t mean their browser isn’t good.
pupbiru@aussie.zone 4 weeks ago
it’s not at all true… it was misunderstanding that people seemed to have blown way out of proportion without understanding context, and now they have A+ policies in place
0x0@infosec.pub 4 weeks ago
Right, so what does that have to do with ladybird
neuracnu@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 weeks ago
I think this may be the issue to which you are referring:
hyperborea.org/reviews/…/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.
cygnus@lemmy.ca 4 weeks ago
You don’t consider it rather exclusionary to imply that only men use computers?
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
at one point or another we all have a penis in us.