Ladybird web browser now funded by GitHub co-founder, promises ‘no code’ from rivals

Who cares? It’s run by reactionary incels, transphobes, and racists.

Wait until you find out who runs Lemmy development.

Good news, most folks at beehaw know and the admins have decided to move to a new platform
- Correct. We're moving to Sublinks very soon. Buckle up.
  
  oh boy I can't wait for all of the integrations to break
  also is it just me or is deciding what software you use and do not pay for based on the political views of the people who create it (who again in no way benefit from its use by people who don't donate) incredibly fucking stupid
  
  Don't call people "incredibly fucking stupid". Be(e) nice.
  
  i'm not calling people stupid, i'm calling an idea stupid. is that also not kosher?
  
  It is absolutely a reasonable interpretation to assume you were referring to the people making the decision you didn't like. And even if it wasn't, calling an idea a group of people have "incredibly fucking stupid" isn't much different, as it carries an implication of how you see those people.
  If you feel other people are getting offended too easily at what you say, I recommend spending extra time on your posts to ensure you avoid saying derogatory things you don't intend for. Something that looks good to you can be incredibly insulting to others who read differently from you, and since conversation is a two-way street, that's the kind of thing we all need to be aware of.
  
  so you're saying i should have anticipated that people might have willingly misinterpreted "that is a stupid position to take and here is why" as "you as a person are stupid" and, instead of telling me why they thought I was wrong, try to get me banned from beehaw as a result?
  i would've been okay if you'd just said yes and left it at that. but the "actually, you are calling me stupid" really rubs my fur backwards
  
  I’m saying that if you think you said “that is a stupid position to take and here is why,” you missed the mark severely, and you should be more careful with your phrasing if you don’t want people to get upset at you in future. It’s not about people “willingly” misinterpreting anything — whether you realized it or not, what you said wasn’t the level-headed response you may have intended it to be.
  
  based on the political views of the people who create it
  That is not the reason for Beehaw switching to another platform, but here's a few of the true reasons why.
  
  @AVincentInSpace @remington The Lemmy devs are infamously difficult to work with. They've repeatedly shown an unwillingness to even acknowledge the existence of the many problems that instance admins face. That has been a big driver in Beehaw's decision to move platforms, not just because of a difference in political views, and they've been pretty open about discussing it. You're way off-base.
  
  Do you know what topic brought you here?
  "Hey guys, let's not use this free software, because of their views."
  "Maybe we shouldn't use this other free software because of their views."
  "Why are you guys worried about which free software you use based on their views?"
  "We can all tell you aren't new, why are you complaining about our unofficial pastime?"
  
  It's almost like the philosophy behind a software matters to its long-term stability. Like, as if devs might find reasons to, I don't know, reject PRs, ignore bugs, and trash their users when they come to them for help.
  Weird that the content of someone's mind might affect their actions or be an indicator of what level of trust they should be extended!
  
  Programming is a form of communication. When you develop a piece of software, it will intrinsically be biased to boost the kinds of messages you believe in. This is both because you as a person think about problems a certain way, and because the code you write is meant to convey to others how you were thinking about the problem you were trying to solve. Who heads projects and how they communicate with their community matters to what the product produced will become, not just because of how the leads will think about the problem, but also because people who don't get along with them won't wind up contributing. Beehaw requested moderation tools that the lead lemmy Devs didn't view as valuable. The result is beehaw, reasonably, gave up on getting PRs merged and issues tracked in the issue tracker, instead choosing to look at Sublinks which was explicitly started in response to Lemmy's devs not behaving well with their own development community.
  And for anyone saying Sublinks is splintering the Lemmy Dev community, no, lemmy's devs did that themselves
  
  I wasn't making any judgement on this, although if I were, I would point out that one of the benefits of open source is the ability to fork projects and move away from the elements you have a philosophical issue with, such as what the OpenOffice developers did when Oracle purchased Sun and started imposing their unplayable rules. What I was half-jokingly pointing out was some guy coming in deep into the conversation of highly opinionated people and acting like the conversation wasn't about their various opinions.
  
  People talk about forking open source projects as if you just push a button and it happens on its own. I mean, okay, that's the first step, but maintaining an repo is a whole thing. Saying 'well just fork it then' is only a viable solution if you have the the means, the time, and the inclination. It isn't really an exclusive alternative to criticism, but another, much narrower, potential additional path.
  It would certainly be good if people would fork all the useful projects made by devs who are interested in promoting social conservatism masquerading as 'apolitical actions' that attempt to reinforce the existing status quo of power. I'm not sure how likely it is, though. Certainly less so than bringing criticism to the table.
  
  If this is provably the case, then I agree, we should stop using Lemmy. If not -- and I say this as a proud supporter of the vast majority of seemingly-pointless ideological bullcrap -- it is nothing but pointless ideological bullcrap.
  
  Yeah. We probably should.
  Changing our behaviors isn't a binary, though. It takes effort. Sometimes it takes changing the world around us first to accommodate new behaviors, or waiting for the right opportunity. And given all the other things we should also be changing, prioritizing matters.
  Finding a Lemmy alternative is somewhere on that list. Is it anywhere remotely near the top? No. There are a great many other things to do. It's probably closer to the top of alyzaya or Chris's lists than mine; close enough, it seems, to be carried out even.
  But it isn't about trying to figure out who's a shit and point fingers at them while loudly demonstrating non-shit behaviors. If we actually want to make the world better, we need to figure out how to work together rather than just glue everything in place.
  People are so defensive about being wrong. And why wouldn't they be? Whether you look at how things are set up in school or the cruelty and corruption of the prison system, or the poverty-reinforcing measures set about in our banking and credit rating systems, the elements that we need to grow past push this tendency to categorize people and sort of socially compartmentalize their various experiences.
  End up in the right categories and you don't really have to worry. Companies will throw free cellphones at you just for breathing. End up in the wrong categories, and you're going to have to struggle against a system that's built to keep you from getting back up.
  We can spend eternity playing with the categories, moving around between them or building or diminishing their relative social power. We can change the criteria that we categorize people by, or try to keep them the same. But in the end we're not really going to make much forward progress until we let go of thinking we know the potential of every human being at a glance. We don't.
  What we can do though is be patient, speak our minds honestly, set boundaries, allow others their own autonomy, and try to help ourselves and other humans open up and grow rather than close off and shrink.
  In any case, the world is complex. It's silly to try to boil it down into absolutist binaries. It's also probably really bad for your cortisol levels.
  
  I don't understand at all where you're going with this. Either Beehaw uses Lemmy on the backend or it doesn't. Either you're using Ladybird or you're using a different browser. These are pretty binary choices.
  
  Will it federate with Lemmy? I would miss you folks.
  
  It's my understanding that it will...I believe that's, also, what it means when they (Sublinks developers) said it would be "Lemmy compatible".
  
  That could also mean client API-compatible, so Lemmy apps would work with it, which doesn't address federation.
  
  Maybe so. We should, probably, ask @Penguincoder@beehaw.org about this.
  
  Pong. @mox@lemmy.sdf.org , in sublinks, the federation services are entirely separate from the API of the instance. So much separate, the federation services are written in a programming language called Golang. The API service is written in a programming language called Java.
  One aspect does not require or preclude the other with Sublinks.
  
  Indeed, protocol is independent from implementation language, but that isn't the question at hand.
  Do you know whether Beehaw will still federate with the lemmyverse (and therefore the rest of us) after moving to Sublinks?
  
  The current aim of Sublinks is Lemmy parity for V1 release. So yes, I do see Beehaw still federating with Lemmy instances at the on-set.
  
  Thanks for clearing that up!
  
  then what's the point if you're still not getting away from the same people?
  
  Y'all just don't even bother moving your eyes over the text before you post, do you?
  
  That's like saying what is the point of misskey (and its forks) when it can be seen by people on mastodon. Isn't that the whole point of the fediverse?
  
  Yes I don't understand the point of misskey either. It just seems to be a Japanese clone of mastodon with a small, differing interpretation of some parts of ActivityPub.
  
  Sublinks exists because the developers of Lemmy have repeatedly ignored feature requests from instance admins and acted in a hostile manner towards them. They're unpleasant to work with, so a bunch of people decided to no longer work with them and create their own project.
  It feels like you're only capable of seeing the "logical" point for something to exist friend. Misskey is to Tumblr as Mastodon is to Twitter.
  
  I am overjoyed to hear that we'll be staying in the fediverse and I can stay with beehaw.
  
  It will be "Lemmy compatible", so hopefully all of Lemmy apps should work fine.
  
  That's splendid, though I'll continue to use the web interface of beehaw honestly.
  
  The demo on that link is literally Lemmy lol
  
  Is it maybe that they're using the Lemmy frontend, but Sublinks for the backend? But yeah, still a bit weird...
  
  Probably because the project is just taking rust and making it Java....
  Because they hate/don't want to learn rust and think Java is a superior language
  
  Because they hate/don’t want to learn rust and think Java is a superior language
  You know, that's not what I've read. It's worth mentioning that it doesn't just use Java.
  
  It was their announcement reasoning. And notice none of it is rust
  https://discuss.online/comment/5276375
  
  announcement reasoning
  ...no it wasn't?
  
  Oh sorry they'd rather not contribute to lemmy and not use rust
  https://discuss.online/comment/7560301
  Java isn’t my preferred language. I did learn Rust to try to contribute but found the code base in less than ideal state and the process of contributing to risky. They don’t always accept all PRs. I also have low faith in the success of Lemmy due to it’s poor QA process and it’s major lack of features.
  I believe Java is the best option for this type of application, I almost did it in PHP. My goal was to attract as many people as possible to want to contribute. It’s worked, I have a ton of people contributing in some way, Sublinks roadmap is clear and organized, and we have a super-motivated and driven team.
  
  why do something original when we can just copy because we say we don't like the devs?
  
  Its better to fork than recreate the wheel.
  Well, PRs are better, but when the devs ban their contributors or don't accept PRs, then at some point its best to fork. Lots of people have come to this decision
  I'm looking forward to switching to Sublinks but it isnt ready
  
  Oh nice. Hadn't heard a platform had been decided upon.
  
  Is it anywhere near ready yet?
  
  I can't give you a date. However, I can say it will be very soon.
  
  It's a lot of work, give them time
  
  I'm not the one saying they're gonna switch to it very soon
  
  Great! Must have missed the announcement as usual but no matter, looking forward to it!
Lemmy devs are awesome. 1 more reason to use the platform.
Confused which of those you think applies to the lemmy devs?
What did they do?

Sometimes terrible people can do good things.
Those good things should be supported.
Judge a project on it own merits.

People still use the Autobahn.

"What about the good things Hitler did?" Is not the flex you think it is. Also, using the Autobahn does not send support to Nazis
- Using Lemmy without donating to the developers does not send support to them. Same goes for Ladybird, does it not?
  
  Adding to popularity does support them.
  
  you're kidding, right?
  
  If you see two pieces of identical software, one with 1000 downloads and one with 100,000, which would you choose?
  
  That would depend on the feature set
  
  Read it again...
  
  I refuse to believe there exist two pieces of software that are truly for all intents and purposes identical, unless one is a very recent fork of the other.
  Both Lemmy and Ladybird are very pointedly not forks of anything.
  
  Which is unrelated to their point, which is that visible popularity of a piece of software (e.g. having many downloads in an app store) has a large impact on likelihood of people to trust it.
  You feigning ignorance at this just discredits your own position. Their question was essentially rhetorical, and you chose to answer it incorrectly rather than concede their correct point:
  If you encountered 2 identical pieces of software, you would trust the one that is more popular, thus proving that popularity is a meaningful benefit to a piece of software.
  
  I mean, you can deny the premise all day long, but it will never win you an argument.
  
  I guess that's true when you're a company trying to sell a product. For an open source project more popularity might just mean more hassle. Sure, it may increase your employment opportunities somewhat, but seeing how entitled and demanding users of os-software can be, I'm sure some devs wish their projects were less popular.
  
  Yeah, it EMOTIONALLY supports them. Dude. It's okay. It also supports the users who get value out of it in actual material ways.
  
  A. Not a "dude"
  B. I'll pose the same rhetorical as I did to the other person that didn't think popularity was support:
  If you see two pieces of identical software, one with 1000 downloads and one with 100,000, which would you choose?
- I'm sure a few bad people make a living maintaining it, and all the roads you depend on everyday.
  Bad people are everywhere, doing all sorts of jobs you appreciate.
  
  Sure, there is no ethical consumerism under capitalism. But I can do harm reduction. When someone says or does something shitty, I can avoid or stop using their product. In your example, if a road worker came out publically with some transphobic nonsense, I could raise that to my local road authority and they would likely lose their job. Are there more people that have shitty views in this theoretical? Maybe, but they will be less likely to spew them if they know there are consequences.
  
  Is it harm reduction if all the bad people couldn't make an honest living? Would it be better or worse if they were living on the street? Do you think they might resort to criminality also?
  
  Wow, what a slippery slope you've made.
  
  It's your idea.
  All I did is assume all good people agree with you.
  
  What? It was your hypothetical
  
  Given that what these people are being criticized for are not intrinsic traits, those people have the option to change their behavior in order to not be ostracized. I am certainty not under any obligation to give anyone my business.
  "What if all the bad people lost their jobs?"
  Well, that certainly might encourage them to rethink whether being bad is working out for them.
  And yes, I'd say that route sounds to me like it will reduce harm in several ways.
  
  there is no ethical consumerism under capitalism
  What is the source for this quote? I most often hear it used to argue in a fatalistic way in favour of continuing to do whatever harmful thing it is a person wants to continue doing. I don't think it is true, certainly not for those who are struggling for survival. Ethical doesn't necessarily mean that there is no harm. It means that the harms have been considered and a meaningful attempt at balancing those harms according to some ethical framework has been made.
  
  I'm not sure of the origin, but that is a fair point. I typically us it in the context of there is no way to find a harm free source of anything in a capitalist society, so you have to find the path with the least amount of harm in it. That is basically what you are saying, but just tweaking the stated definition of ethical.
  
  "Ethical" does not mean "good", "moral", or "right", it means something more like, "consistent with an explicit set of ethical axioms." It's meaningless to say something is unethical without stating or at least implying a specific ethical philosophy.
  Carnism says that it is sometimes acceptable or even good to be cruel and violent to animals. Veganism says that it only is in cases of absolute necessity. A researcher or scientist for a cosmetics company might follow all the ethical requirements of their profession, and yet by any other standard, do unforgivable harm both to animals they experiment on and to the humans they mean to exploit with their research.
  
  something is unethical without stating or at least implying a specific ethical philosophy.
  Which is why I followed it up by saying the best we can do is harm reduction by choosing the less harmful paths when we find them. Nothing you are saying is different to what I said, just a different wording
- I think you meant that using the Autobahn does not send support to Nazis. Slight typo there :P
  
  Ope, yes indeed
Great analogy and perspective.
- It's not that great an analogy because the autobahn isn't still maintained by Nazis.
  
  That's your opinion on what is and isn't a great analogy.
  Hopefully the maintainers of the project will be more considerate in the future.
  
  It's not my opinion, it's an objective flaw with the analogy where the comparison doesn't entirely work. It's not a big deal, by their nature analogies tend to be imperfect.
- I don't understand the analogy, can you tell me what the deal with the Autobahn is? We don't have an Autobahn where I'm from.
  
  The Autobahn is a very well engineered German highway system. It is well known but was also was constructed during Nazi Germany.
  While it was built by evil people, it still is a fantastic highway system that is used today.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobahn
  
  !fuckcars@lemmy.world
  
  Time and place, phneutral. Time and place.
  
  Perhaps I should have posted this link first.
  Hitler building the (first) Autobahn is a myth constructed by nazi propaganda. Repeating it is just falling for their lies.
  That being said of course it is a very important piece of infrastructure today, but that is due to decades of car industry lobbying and the lack of funding for other transportation and transit infrastructure projects. Especially trains would be able to transport more people and goods faster if build properly.
Sometimes terrible people can do good things. Those good things should be supported. Judge a project on it own merits.
The thing here is that Ladybird and SerenityOS are both the community and the code. One cannot live without the other because the code will always need its community to develop it. And in this case, it is not possible to support them without supporting the people who, y'know receive the money. I think nobody is arguing against an independent browser engine - the argument is against the implementation of it.
- It sounds like you're arguing that bad people shouldn't be paid to anything good.
  
  I don't support bad people. Those bad people can change and become good people. Until then, why would I support and pay those that hurt my friends?
  
  Do you think they'd stop being bad people if they couldn't make an honest living? Would it be better or worse if they were on the street? Do you think they might resort to criminality also?
  Do you feel better knowing they aren't getting your money? Even at the cost of them ever doing anything good for anyone?
  
  This is known as a "false dichotomy" and is very lame.
  
  Is it?
  Are you saying you would support bad people under the right circumstances?
  
  Enjoy this excellent web page:
  https://www.logical-fallacy.com/articles/false-dilemma/
  
  I'm fully aware, and disagree.
  Someone else called it a Slippery Slope. That's closer, but still not quite right.
  It's actually Reductio ad Absurdum.
  Which is a useful thought exorcise when analyzing many ideas.
  
  Do you think they’d stop being bad people if they couldn’t make an honest living? Would it be better or worse if they were on the street? Do you think they might resort to criminality also?
  I don't think anyone deserves living in the street. I don't think they will stop being bad people whether or not I support them. It seems you're trying to move the goal post.
  Do you feel better knowing they aren’t getting your money? Even at the cost of them ever doing anything good for anyone?
  I feel better that they aren't getting my money because they cannot be empowered to hurt the people I care about. I think they can do good things without my support. This seems like a weird thing to say.
  Also, this is clearly sealioning. It's really not a good way to make conversation.

Boring hit piece that way overblows some issues on the topic.

The piece was definitely slanted.
Was what the devs did great? No. Does the whole project need to be outcast/abandoned due to what language they use? No. There needs to be nuance with these issues. Open source does not owe individuals anything and that is why it is provided without warranty. On the flip side, individuals can choose not to use it.
We should be promoting open source software and not have infighting when open source software doesn't have much mass market appeal to begin with.
- We should be promoting open source software and not have infighting when open source software doesn’t have much mass market appeal to begin with.
  Just as a side note, I want open source software / free software to have appeal because it is good for people. If the way the promote it to the masses is enabling awful people, I'm really not interested anymore.
- Letting fascists loose on github doesn't make open source software more appealing. Look at how much worse twitter is to be on after relaxing the moderation standards. Now imagine that for open source. We need to make sure open source is approachable to everyone and that means being careful with our language and not being dismissive when someone opens a PR to make the language more approachable to all
  
  Absolutely this. Twitter-level toxicity coming out in this thread from outside instances is already a bad indicator of the kind of communities that are peripheral to open source.
- Non-technical discussion should just be banned.
  
  That is literally the comment that started all of this. Prepare to be convicted and sentenced in the court of public opinion.
  I am serious, the only comment by the dev in question was “This project is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics.”
  
  Non-technical is not the same as political, not even close. I explicitly chose that term because it's not considered subjective by anyone, but especially not by the people who think gender-neutrality is somehow NOT political. If you claim that it is, they just quip back with "a person's right to exist is not a political issue but a human rights one", which of course was never even the debate, they just twist things around to fit their narrative.
  
  I explicitly chose that term because it’s not considered subjective by anyone, but especially not by the people who think gender-neutrality is somehow NOT political.
  All words are subjective. "Non-technical" is not really the magic word you think it is. Could you clearly define it? I can't personally.
No, I'm actually with them on that one. The he / they issue in of itself is tiny, I agree, and if they'd just changed it from gendered to gender neutral language then nobody would've even cared. Most of us tend to write in a gendered way out of habit or because we think about our own gender, and in a casual conversation that isn't that important. But this is about a piece of software that, surely, is not just meant for male audiences. It's just unprofessional to address someone as male by default. Most importantly though, being this stubborn on having the user specifically male is just a weird hill to die on, but even weirder if that particular action is the one that is actually causing the drama - which they allegedly claim wanting to prevent by dismissing "politics". And I'm sorry, but changing a "he" to "they" is not politics, it's just including non male users. Nothing more, nothing less. So why is it such an issue to not just address specifically male users? It really only would be because those people hold some very questionable views, which, in my opinion, clash heavily with the whole concept of free and open source software, which is supposedly for everyone. So if your actions and views are this flawed, how can you be trusted on such an important project?
Also, in regards to this news... "no code from rivals" also is just a stupid thing to say and do. There's plenty of good open source code that they could and probably even SHOULD use. But whatever. I'm not gonna support this project and predict it will fail anyway.
- The thing is, as some other people have pointed out, the guy is not a native english speaker, and many latin based languages simply don't have any gender neutral pronoun and make use of the neutral masculine instead. Many of these languages have seen some people propose new ways to handle pronouns to change that recently, most of which are somewhat controversial. It's easy for a native speaker of those languages to assume the same is true in english (especially since the use of "he" as a generic neutral is, as far as I can tell, still valid, although clearly out of fashion). Once you take all of that into account, the proposed change can easily be viewed as someone trying to simply push one of those controversial ideas instead of a widely accepted generic masculine, which would clearly fall into politics in the sense of "real world beliefs and social issues irrelevant to the topic at hand". The rest seems to simply be a pretty childish ego war between him and some mastodon users which could have been solved by either side taking 5 minutes to explain their point of view on this matter.
  Now, even without this context, from what I can tell, the issue at hand was a single instance of " he" used to describe a generic anonymous user in the dev VM... Seeing that as unprofessional because it addresses someone as male by default surely is a bit of a stretch.
  About that "no code for rivals", I don't think is as stupid as many mention. Right now when it comes to web browsers (at least ones with wide compatiblility and features), there's only 2 choices : chromium-based and firefox. So someone trying to bring some fresh blood is welcome, and in order to avoid having the same issues as the chromium-based ones, you need to make sure you are not overly dependent of your competitor's code. Granted, this is a pretty strict approach, but it doesn't prevent them from using the same libraries and techs, it just means that any code written specifically for a different browser shouldn't be copy/pasted.
  
  Nothing about being a non-native English speaker requires you to stubbornly continue to use specific language. I have many non-native English speaking friends. Generally they actually want to know how their words are being taken, and will make corrections to be sure they're not saying the wrong thing.
  You know, like, as one does when learning another language. I'm not going to insist on using English grammar rules while speaking Spanish and then just tell all the Spanish speakers to stop being so political at me when they correct me. That's nonsense.
And then another, where a trans woman is called “spam.”
With comments like this it's clear the author is just overreacting. They were clearly calling the PR spam, not the person. (And this is coming from someone who was definitely angry with them for denying the original PRs and stuff.)

I've no love lost for the developers in question. But between the original two PRs and associated comments being from over three years ago, and the "trans woman [being called] 'spam" comment being said about a PR that seems pretty strongly to me to be meant as a sarcastic insult rather than a genuine contribution, I can't help but find it a little unconvincing.

It's not without merit by far. I feel that Kling's blog post not addressing the drama was in poor taste and may indicate a lack of self-improvement regarding the initial fuckup, and saying you want to "avoid alienating people" when closing a PR that aims to improve inclusivity is more than a little pathetic. I also understand not wanting bigots to be able to just bury their past and pretend they were never bigoted. It's just that the fiery response this has gotten still ends up feeling a bit disproportionate given how old the truly insulting issues were. Am I missing something?

You seem to have missed this third PR, that was genuine, three days ago. It seemed to be the cause of the trans woman's sarcastic PR. The author of the article does mention it.
- I saw that one. It's what I was referring to when I said "saying you want to 'avoid alienating people' when closing a PR that aims to improve inclusivity is more than a little pathetic." Criticizing the maintainer response there was one of the good parts of the blog post.
  But the outcome of that doesn't really much change the fact that the sarcastic PR was sarcastic, and thus calling that PR spam is reasonable, whereas claiming they called the trans woman herself spam is not. To be clear, however: I've no issue with the sarcastic PR itself, only the framing of it in the blog post.
  
  Yeah okay that's a very reasonable take, and you're right that it kinda harms rather than helps the authors otherwise well-researched and structured argument.

I do, I feel like we desperately need some more competition/options in the browser engine space.

“reactionary”. Self-aware much?

I do not know either of you.

That said, on the one hand we have a guy that trivial research reveals has been dramatically transparent about his own life, struggles, and frailty in a really humble and disarming way. He shares his talent freely not only with code but mentorship and teaching. He has created a thriving and closer-knit community working together to do interesting and valuable things ( OS and browser ). His somewhat famous tagline is “well, hello friends”. He has also showcased both his wife and other females on his channel. Unless I misunderstand the term “incel”, you are demonstrably and factually wrong on that front at least. The biggest complaint I could find about him elsewhere is that his is “too neutral”. Perhaps that is at play here.

On the other hand, we have somebody directly peddling destruction, slander, and hate ( you ). And why? As far as I can tell, the only contribution the SerenityOS founder has made to this “discussion” is the sentence “This project is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics.”. Is that really it? Overreaction?

That sentence spawned all of this? I must have misunderstood which of you we were labelling as “reactionary”.

Regardless of if the project should have accepted the commit or not ( a valid debate ), I cannot possibly side with this reaction. It is awful.

Downvotes welcome. I would rather be ethical than popular.

You're wasting your breath. These people cannot be defeated with logic. You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't use reason to get into in the first place.
At the very least they will claim "gender neutrality and/or a person's right to exist is not an ethical OR political issue."
his wife and other females
His wife and other women. The word "female" is an adjective and should not be used as a noun unless referring to e.g. animals. Like myself, you are (probably) non-native speaker of English so I don't weigh this all too heavy, but others might since it is considered somewhat disrespectful to women.

Oh didn't you hear? It's fine now because a PR was finally accepted well after being called out and ~~stepping down~~ stepping aside from the project

/s

Imagine that talking with people about issues and not just shouting and brigading them actually works. Who would have known.
- Like the first time it came up, politely with a complete PR, and it was just shut down?
  
  you mean this one https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814 three years ago? yeah that was not the nicest reaction. Bridgading in that old thread and the thread about the accepted and merged PR was not nicest reaction as well.
  Also the merged PR was way more of substance and didn't just replace he with they in that one line whereas there were several occasion where that issue occured in the same file. If the original one would have been merged, the documentation file would be inconsistent.
  
  As someone who hasn't bothered to read any of the detail about this whole mess until just now, the comments from three years ago were all relatively civil, even if the response by the developer was dismissive. That this was corrected within 6 weeks and people are still talking about it is pretty impressive, though. Looks like people are trying to make enemies, not converts.
  
  Looks like people are trying to make enemies, not converts.
  Yeah and it's fecking sad, no even embarrassing.
  
  Yes, that one.
Teaching changing minds, influencing... it needs plenty of repeating and sleeping on things. To be fair, when all else fails applying pressure has its place as well. Nevertheless small victories are still victories.
The ability of Ladybird’s team to face scrutiny of all kinds is important for them to eventually gain traction in the browser market. But I’m still hopeful, and we need more options.

What does that have to do with the code tho

no it's not, and nobody worth listening to cares anyway.

please stop bringing up this absolute nothingburger.