this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
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Unfortunately, the lead developer of Ladybird, Andreas Kling, has engaged in transphobia and enforced misogynistic language in his previous project's documentation, SerenityOS. This post documents and links to multiple examples: https://toot.cat/@EveHasWords/114081930465217200
Annoying that you're being downvoted, you are absolutely correct. We should not support Ladybird as long as Andreas is involved.
Do what you want, but IMO that's a really lame reason to hate on a software project. Evaluate the software on its merits, not the merits of random people associated with it.
When you donate to a software project, you're not giving money to some inanimate concept. You're giving it to the developers, the "random people associated with it."
Kling's actions are harmful, and contribute to an open source environment less welcoming to ~4 billion people. I don't want to reward that. Unless you do, you would be better off putting your support elsewhere, too.
I reject the premise here. If you're going to subject contributors to a purity test, we'll just get fewer contributors.
I haven't yet seen anything Kling did that made the project less welcoming. The only evidence I've seen provided here is a rejected PR that changed a system user's pronouns (i.e. something nobody would actually use directly) to gender neutral pronouns. The correct solution here isn't to make the pronouns gender-neutral, but to elide them altogether, because a system user cannot have a gender because it's just a technical concept. It's not talking about the human user, but a random system user, like
root
ornobody
. The pronoun doesn't matter, so the only rational motivation here for the change is virtue signaling (system users can be women, trans, etc too!), and that's just political crap nobody wants.I'd agree with you if it was referring to the user of the software. But it's not. No gender makes sense here, so one gender over another is irrelevant. The better change is to remove the pronoun entirely because it literally doesn't make sense as a concept here.