The Ladybird browser project

Are you talking about Drew or "those guys", whoever they are?

Let's focus on Drew. I've not seen him mention HN, which by the way doesn't require running non-free software, and he literally runs a free software competitor to GitHub. I've not seen him be rude to people using GitHub. He certainly strongly criticizes them.

I assume he uses GitHub to communicate with projects hosted there. If he does, I don't think he could be blamed for meeting people where they are. He is not arguing about this, he is arguing against hosting non free software on proprietary infrastructure and strengthen it instead of helping strengthen the free software ecosystem. Which he doesn't do. He doesn't host his projects on GitHub.

He could boycott GitHub to make an even stronger point, but I believe that isn't practical at this time when you are part of the open source community. And running a whole GitHub competitor is way more than most people do for this cause. Accepting to reluctantly use GitHub (or Discord, or whatever) and spreading the word against its use is not contradictory.

Hypocrisy would be telling people not to use proprietary infrastructure to manage your free software project, and then hosting on GitHub.

Specifically about podcasts because that's what people seem to take issue with here: podcasts are usually hosted somewhere else, in addition to Spotify. Historically, podcasts are handled with RSS feeds, there's nothing more standard and open than this. It would be wrong to force people to use Spotify to hear his podcast, but that's not the case. He also should accept to be hosted on Spotify. When you are spreading ideas, you should want to reach people who are not yet as aware as you are in your cause. If you stay outside the world you criticize, you don't reach people inside it. And more importantly, he didn't mention Spotify at all; in particular, he didn't say "please host me on Spotify". Podcast ≠ Spotify.

I see hypocrisy nowhere.

Activism is hard, you know. You often need to do compromises for you activism to be efficient. Nobody is perfect. Should you wait to be perfect before making something for your cause?

Besides the actually answer - because they want to - I don't think it would even work, because of the dependencies. (SerenetyOS is also written from scratch.) But since Kling used to work on the webkit team - you can bet that they don't work in a vacuum and reinvent the wheel, but just reimplement in a way they think is best. Also, they are not doing it for you, but for them.

It's very possible to have other goals than having a usable and marketable product, Andreas Kling and SerenityOS developpers have explicitly stated other goals on numerous occasions, and other positive side-effects have emerged from the project. These include having something to stay busy long term to stay away from drug use, having fun, learning, prove that things are possible, identifying and reporting mistakes in specifications that were caught thanks to the blank slate implementation approach.

Maybe Ladybird is not usable right away, so what? It's getting impressively close to this point with barely 5 years of development, from scratch (and it goes much deeper than HTML, CSS and JS engine, they also re-implemented the whole networking stack, image/audio/video codecs, font...) and by a small team of mostly volunteers, but more importantly, it's a positive project not only for the developers, but also for their audience and for greater scale web standardization.

I hardly imagine a project such as the one you're describing getting as much traction as Ladybird / SerenityOS (in fact, there are many such of these, but I don't see nearly as much talk and interest for their development), the whole project isn't about the end product, it's explicitly about the process to get there.

As years have gone by, I've realised that the whole "don't reinvent the wheel" is fundamentally an anti-innovation and anti-intellectualist idiom.

Like yeah, the idea is that the wheel already works pretty well, so you wouldn't need a better one, but really now? First of all, how would we know that we've explored all the possible ways wheels can be? How do we know whether what we have is actually the most optimal way that wheels can exist? You won't know unless you try! You might fail, but I'd say that the learning opportunity is worth it.

Also, when it comes to people who criticise projects like Ladybird here for "reinventing the wheel", I feel that comparing software to wheels is a bit disingenuous. Because while manufacturing wheels does take skillful craftsmanship and such, most software is probably just a tad more complex than just the wheel. Call it a hunch.

So, the ethos that one shouldn't "waste effort in writing this stuff from scratch, but that off-the-shelf components should be used" is the kind of ethos that can be applied to a lot of things. And usually when that kind of ethos is adopted, it tends to lead to stuff like stagnation and lack of innovation. And we know this, because we have examples of entire countries doing this, which has usually lead to either reforming away from this sort of model, or the country just not existing anymore.

We should not let the web for example stagnate due to browser monoculture. We should have alternative implementations of stuff, actually.

I thing I understand what you mean: in theory rewriting a browser in ‘ship of Theseus’ way focusing on one thing at a time should be more manageable. But in practice the integration points between different parts are not standardized and you’ll have to deal with a huge C++ code base that takes hours to compile.