I cannot see who made that comment. Pretty sure it is not the dev who is getting crucified. I am not sure it is even anybody that contributed to SerenityOS or Ladybird.
I certainly do not see anybody from the project endorsing that language.
I mean, I read the comment on Lemmy. Should I now go around saying not to use Lemmy and using that quote as evidence for why?
What are we reacting to here? The single comment from the actual dev saying that the project wanted to avoid politics? Or the actual hateful comment from some bystander?
Ladybird has split from SerenityOS and from that community. Hopefully the bystander has been left behind.
As for the actual project founder, if all he has ever said is that one statement, I am impressed with his level of restraint given how some have vilified him for it.
Constantly? Or once?
And was the “hateful shit” a single request to keep politics out of the project and stay technical?
And was the request to be more gender neutral granted?
I mean, I have not drilled into it. But I keep reading these complaints on Lemmy and the only link I have seen features a single response from him. It feels like a lot of manufactured controversy.
using the Linux / BSD situation as a benchmark ignores a lot of history. I would argue that the BSD lawsuit was the deciding factor.
the Linux project is not representative of a typical GPL code base. It rejected GPL3 and features a rather significant exception clause that deviates from GPL2.
Clang vs GCC is probably a better metric for the role of the license in viability and popularity. Or maybe Postgres vs MySQL.
Why has nothing GPL replaced Xorg or Mesa or now Wayland?
Why hasn’t the MIT or Apache license held Rust back from being so popular? Why would Ubuntu be moving away from GNU Coreutils (GPL) to uutils (MIT)? How did Pipewire (MiT) replace PulseAiudio (LGPL)? How did Docker or Kubernetes win (both Apache)? Actually, what non-Red Hat GPL software has dominated a category in the past 10 years?
If the GPL is the obvious reason for the popularity of Linux, why would RedoxOS choose MIT?
This is not an anti-GPL rant.
My point is that choosing the GPL (or not) does not correlate as obviously with project success as you make it sound. It is an opinion that would require a lot more evidence.
I won’t give you that. Ladybird is already quite a bit more capable than that. The JavaScript engine is not nearly fast enough but more and more real websites just work.
It is a debatable point which would be easier:
1 - get Ladybird to the point it is competitive
2 - establish a viable and popular alternative dev and governance infrastructure capable of stewarding and evolving Firefox
The fact that people want to try option one is far from crazy.
See the other comment about Las Vegas
It is not difficult. Not everybody agrees that it a desirable thing to do.