Comment by leoc
9 months ago
I have to say, a single announcement that Cloudflare is sponsoring specifically these two projects does start to look a bit like an attempt to curry favour with the grassroots part of the tech right: give “their guys” some money and praise and maybe they’ll stay off Cloudflare’s back for a bit. And to be clear, that’s not to say that it’s bad to sponsor Ladybird, or maybe even Omarchy.
Is Ladybird a tech right thing?
It kind of is, though not explicitly. If you follow Andreas on X you will see a lot of his comments and replies are either a) posting about being aggrieved about users who are mean and rude on BlueSky or b) Amplifying traditional family values, right wing beliefs, etc, in a somewhat indirect way. He seems to be too cautious to outright say anything, but it’s obvious by the company he keeps.
Somewhat - Kling is explicitly 'apolitical' and this always attracts a certain ilk of people.
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And - maybe this is a stretch, but you also have to consider that the competing product (Servo) is written in Rust, while Ladybird is C++.
From what you read on hn, I think Rusts community being very liberal sort of resulted in memory safety being perceived as a culture war thing by some; ("authoritarian big compiler is forcing you to not free this memory" vs "the handmade c programmer with his artisanal allocations"). So Ladybird not being written in a safe language might be part of the appeal.
And I know that Ladybird is supposed to adopt Swift, but I don't think any single LOC has been written yet?
I'm not sure how true that is when half the Rust job postings are cryptocurrency related.
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I wouldn't describe it as such, but that's not what matters here. Andreas Kling has been out championing the anti-anti-Charlie-Kirk cause on Twitter, so it's a safe bet that the Lundukish grassroots anti-wokes see him as one of theirs. Whether he has any juice with the right-wing VC set I don't know.
Kling's politics aside, he's also had a history of abandoning projects after hyping them up on social media and attracting contributors. Here is what happened to SerenityOS and jakt, for example:
https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/graphs/commit-activit... https://github.com/SerenityOS/jakt/graphs/commit-activity
If Cloudflare wants to defend the future of the web, maybe they could also throw a few dollars towards projects with better governance and aren't helmed by a BFDL with a spotty record and are written in a more future-proof language than C++ [0]. (For example, Servo.)
[0]: In Kling's own words! https://web.archive.org/web/20250819053816/https://awesomekl...
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Someone should do some digging into GamerGate…
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I don't see LadyBird's dev endorsing white replacement theory in your links. Rather, I see innuendo and hearsay from extremely online people, with a rather exclusionary sense of politics.
> The lead Ladybird dev endorses white replacement theory
Lying used to be something that people are ashamed of
I don't see any endorsement of such things in the linked tweet, did you put the wrong link?
This is some absolutely insane character assassination, you should be ashamed of yourself for spreading lies and FUD like this. No sane reasonable person would make the jump from “certain statements made me uncomfortable” to “I support a racist conspiracy theory”