cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions
BSD tells me the team probably wants Ladybird to become not just a standalone browser but also a new competing base for others to build a browser on top of
with mandatory male pronouns for users in the documentation.
(and no politics allowed!)
this issue was resolved eventually by another dev; afaik the lead dev stopped commenting on it after he closed a PR and said people who wanted to remove the docs’ implied assumption of users’ maleness were “advertising personal politics”.
edit: ok, i went and checked, here are the details:
https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814 is the first PR he closed in 2021 saying “This project is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics.”
https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/24648 is the PR where it was eventually fixed, after it was publicized in july 2024
here https://xcancel.com/awesomekling/status/1808294414101467564 the day after the fix was merged, he sort-of almost apologized, while also doubling-down on his defense of his decision to reject the first PR 🤡
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladybird_(web_browser) was later spun out of SerenityOS in to its own project
The three currently-maintained engines which (at their feature intersection) effectively define what “the web” is today are Mozilla’s Gecko, Apple’s WebKit, and Google’s Blink.
The latter two are both descended from KHTML, which came from the Konquerer browser which was first released as part of KDE 2.0 in 2000, and thus both are LGPL licensed.
After having their own proprietary engine for over two decades, Microsoft stopped developing it and switched to Google’s fork of Apple’s fork of KDE’s free software web engine.
Probably Windows will replace its kernel with Linux eventually too, for better or worse :)
They’re allowed to because the LGPL (unlike the normal GPL) is a weak copyleft license.