823
Firefox is fine. The people running it are not (www.theregister.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[+] -8 points 1 year ago (20 children)

the ladybird devs have a history of major transphobia though

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

    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 lime!@feddit.nu 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.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (11 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 32 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year 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.

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  • [–] -1 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    That's totally false.

    One can write using the generic masculine form without making a political statement.

    This is not even close to not acknowledge there is non-men in this world.

    What you are putting forward is absurd. No one is saying that only men exist anywhere in here.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    It isn’t totally false; the claim that the use of the generic masculine is the result of or may have been informed by sexism is based on the fact that it hasn’t always been that way.

    Here is a more nuanced and better take:

    The generic masculine in modern English is a recent development, as you noted: English used the non-gendered "they" for groups of people and hypothetical/non-specific individuals until prescriptive efforts arose to make it more like Latin. (You can find lots of traces of these prescriptive efforts in modern English: "don't split infinitives" and "don't strand prepositions" are similar rules imposed to make English more like Latin, which are still taught in schools but most people don't really follow.)

    Source

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  • [–] -1 points 1 year 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.

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