We're excited to announce our support of two independent, open source projects: Ladybird, an ambitious project to build a completely independent browser from the ground up, and Omarchy, an opinionated Arch Linux setup for developers.
Remember, technology is political and our major technology-related problems are political, not technological. We wouldn’t be building alternative browsing engines if Chromium was a community-built project, unaffiliated with an ad company.
E: FWIW, this comment suggest the initial political Ladybird snafu may have been remediated.
I think that kinda weird and bad statement from the ladybird lead makes way more sense when you realize that his first language is german.
German, like other gendered languages, uses the male gender for an unknown person, using a genderless pronoun like “they” in german is a deliberate political stance that would prompt debate and is unusual and, frankly, weird, since the male pronoun is used as a neutral one.
Given that he apologized and changed it to they later, and no other incident of the sort happened since, I personally am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
The ladybird contributing guidelines currently read:
Use gender-neutral pronouns, except when referring to a specific person.
Could’ve sworn he was german, I don’t know where I got that from. Guess I was wrong.
Otherwise when you learn english as a second language, until very recently you’re taught to use he or he/she, and that they is incorrect, but that’s maybe a bit of a stretch
i take less issue with him using gendered pronouns by default than i do with him being overly dismissive of someone trying to adjust the language to be more inclusive.
Just remember that from his perspective, you are arguing against grammatical rules that are at the core of his communication experience due to his first language being German.‘so perhaps his initial reaction was confusion because he didn’t understand the angle - he thought he was being inclusive? Maybe?
I dunno I’m probably playin devil’s advocate without all the information here; I’ve just been resisting making jokes connecting grammatical pedantry to Germany the whole time.
It’s actually a very contentious grammatical issue in Germany from what I have been told by a German friend. That there is definitely a contingency of people pushing for more gender neutral language and a large amount of pushback from those who think the entire idea is absurd because of how gendered the language is.
I can see a bit of both sides of the argument. It’s important to make people feel welcomed and not like being a male is the default for everything. On the other hand, language evolves often very slowly and you can’t just force people to change the language entirely overnight. It does sound like much of the pushback is less political in nature and more grammatical as adding neutral phrases to a gendered language becomes quickly a complex task with complex new words. However, some of the pushback is also political in nature, so it’s hard to gauge whether the Ladybird situation was truly political or more grammatical at it’s core.
As a Russian language speaker, I can tell you any gender-neutral language is absolutely impossible with Russian. The old kind of egalitarian (just normal really) language was to use the same form and gender of the word denoting profession or position as with male person, when it’s a woman. Because the old feminitives usually meant “wife of someone of that profession”, with a good deal of confusion whether they mean that or actually a woman of that role, and also they have sort of a flavor of vulgarity.
There’s a modern (very limited to leftist fashion) tendency of inventing feminitives not common before.
Like for “author” there’s “автор” (male form usually used for women too), “авторша” (traditional feminitive with a flavor of rudeness), “авторка” (new fashionable feminitive nobody really uses).
Or for “psychologist” there’s “психолог” (normal male form), “психологичка” (not traditional, kinda rude feminitive), “психологиня” (new feminitive really used often enough, but that’s when it means someone your age with that being like below 35).
Yep. I’m a native Spanish speaker and I’m also old. Spanish is similar to German in that the male version of words is already gender neutral. But there’s a huge effort to make it truly gender neutral, and I understand the reason and support the idea. Having lived many years in an English speaking country and in corporate environments, I use “they” in English without even thinking. It comes naturally to me, especially as a manager talking about people I manage, to protect their identity.
But there’s no way in hell I’m using gender neutral Spanish because it sounds extremely stupid to me. It’s a complete distortion of the language, and I have to make a huge effort not to think less of people who use it. None of my friends or family uses it.
You might be right. I’m looking at that as a more general issue of what “no politics” implies. E.g. can we use that to predict how the people working on it would handle the project affiliation in the future. That is, for example are they willing to let it be taken over by a large tech corporation? They’re already using the weakest of licences - BSD. The whole point of us supporting another browsing engine by contributing to it, developing for it, or using it is so that we escape the browser-under-ad-company problem. If make Ladybird the next Chromium competitor and the team gets jobs at say Microsoft, then we’d end up back to square one.
It was pointed out and could have been corrected easily, nobody was accusing them of doing it intentionally. Instead they doubled down, which then did show their views and caused the controversy.
He may rejected the pr initially, but he later apologized and changed it. Again, I don’t see the issue, my original comment explains why that doesn’t seem that bad in my view.
It’s all resolved now and I do support the project, we need another browser engine. But to not see the issue at all…? An issue resolved doesn’t mean the issue didn’t exist.
And I explained that I disagree that it “wasnt that bad”. It absolutely was an issue and it was handled poorly. Without the backlash, I highly doubt they would have changed their mind.
What about servo?
Perhaps Servo isn’t apolitical enough. 🥹
Remember, technology is political and our major technology-related problems are political, not technological. We wouldn’t be building alternative browsing engines if Chromium was a community-built project, unaffiliated with an ad company.
E: FWIW, this comment suggest the initial political Ladybird snafu may have been remediated.
I think that kinda weird and bad statement from the ladybird lead makes way more sense when you realize that his first language is german.
German, like other gendered languages, uses the male gender for an unknown person, using a genderless pronoun like “they” in german is a deliberate political stance that would prompt debate and is unusual and, frankly, weird, since the male pronoun is used as a neutral one.
Given that he apologized and changed it to they later, and no other incident of the sort happened since, I personally am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
The ladybird contributing guidelines currently read:
He is actually swedish, so your attempt to excuse his behaviour is simply wrong
Could’ve sworn he was german, I don’t know where I got that from. Guess I was wrong.
Otherwise when you learn english as a second language, until very recently you’re taught to use he or he/she, and that they is incorrect, but that’s maybe a bit of a stretch
i take less issue with him using gendered pronouns by default than i do with him being overly dismissive of someone trying to adjust the language to be more inclusive.
Just remember that from his perspective, you are arguing against grammatical rules that are at the core of his communication experience due to his first language being German.‘so perhaps his initial reaction was confusion because he didn’t understand the angle - he thought he was being inclusive? Maybe?
I dunno I’m probably playin devil’s advocate without all the information here; I’ve just been resisting making jokes connecting grammatical pedantry to Germany the whole time.
Pretty much yeah, he thought he was already being inclusive, and I don’t blame him for doubling down initially given how awful that github thread was
It’s actually a very contentious grammatical issue in Germany from what I have been told by a German friend. That there is definitely a contingency of people pushing for more gender neutral language and a large amount of pushback from those who think the entire idea is absurd because of how gendered the language is.
I can see a bit of both sides of the argument. It’s important to make people feel welcomed and not like being a male is the default for everything. On the other hand, language evolves often very slowly and you can’t just force people to change the language entirely overnight. It does sound like much of the pushback is less political in nature and more grammatical as adding neutral phrases to a gendered language becomes quickly a complex task with complex new words. However, some of the pushback is also political in nature, so it’s hard to gauge whether the Ladybird situation was truly political or more grammatical at it’s core.
As a Russian language speaker, I can tell you any gender-neutral language is absolutely impossible with Russian. The old kind of egalitarian (just normal really) language was to use the same form and gender of the word denoting profession or position as with male person, when it’s a woman. Because the old feminitives usually meant “wife of someone of that profession”, with a good deal of confusion whether they mean that or actually a woman of that role, and also they have sort of a flavor of vulgarity.
There’s a modern (very limited to leftist fashion) tendency of inventing feminitives not common before.
Like for “author” there’s “автор” (male form usually used for women too), “авторша” (traditional feminitive with a flavor of rudeness), “авторка” (new fashionable feminitive nobody really uses).
Or for “psychologist” there’s “психолог” (normal male form), “психологичка” (not traditional, kinda rude feminitive), “психологиня” (new feminitive really used often enough, but that’s when it means someone your age with that being like below 35).
Yep. I’m a native Spanish speaker and I’m also old. Spanish is similar to German in that the male version of words is already gender neutral. But there’s a huge effort to make it truly gender neutral, and I understand the reason and support the idea. Having lived many years in an English speaking country and in corporate environments, I use “they” in English without even thinking. It comes naturally to me, especially as a manager talking about people I manage, to protect their identity.
But there’s no way in hell I’m using gender neutral Spanish because it sounds extremely stupid to me. It’s a complete distortion of the language, and I have to make a huge effort not to think less of people who use it. None of my friends or family uses it.
If it’s written in German, I’d agree. In English, no he is just wrong. But perhaps is English just sucks, I don’t know and I don’t care to find out.
Removed by mod
You might be right. I’m looking at that as a more general issue of what “no politics” implies. E.g. can we use that to predict how the people working on it would handle the project affiliation in the future. That is, for example are they willing to let it be taken over by a large tech corporation? They’re already using the weakest of licences - BSD. The whole point of us supporting another browsing engine by contributing to it, developing for it, or using it is so that we escape the browser-under-ad-company problem. If make Ladybird the next Chromium competitor and the team gets jobs at say Microsoft, then we’d end up back to square one.
Gendered language is stupid and antiquated and I say this as a native speaker of a gendered language. It’s just such a poor communication design.
It was pointed out and could have been corrected easily, nobody was accusing them of doing it intentionally. Instead they doubled down, which then did show their views and caused the controversy.
He may rejected the pr initially, but he later apologized and changed it. Again, I don’t see the issue, my original comment explains why that doesn’t seem that bad in my view.
After a large backlash, yes.
It’s all resolved now and I do support the project, we need another browser engine. But to not see the issue at all…? An issue resolved doesn’t mean the issue didn’t exist.
Did you read my original comment or just skim it? Because it that one I explain why I think it’s not an issue.
And I explained that I disagree that it “wasnt that bad”. It absolutely was an issue and it was handled poorly. Without the backlash, I highly doubt they would have changed their mind.
Is it surprising to anyone?
They doubled down and showed their true colors. AFAIK they never tried to improve the situation after that.
They don’t appear to be sponsoring that one