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Changing how we develop Ladybird

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Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#141

Post by TeriyakiBomb »

It's inevitable that more projects follow this path.

The elephant in the room is so many projects already operate like this without formally announcing it.

If you look at Blender, one of the biggest and most successful OSS projects out there, it's effectively run as source available. Some PRs make it through, but for the most part there have been heavy barriers to entry to get your work into the product. In this example, it's been key to such a large and complex project with millions of users staying afloat. It's an inconvenient truth.

It's one of those unspoken things in open source - the bigger the project the less you can accept or vet contributions. The less able you are to respond to users because there are too many. The amount of code you need to own balloons. The signal to noise to too much. LLMs have massively exacerbated this issue.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#142

Post by MarsIronPI »

JimBlackwood wrote: post #33
jsmailes wrote: post #3

It saddens me to see the communities surrounding free software projects going dark because of the threat posed by AI tools, but I don't know what other solutions there are that would mitigate the threat, particularly when browsers are such a compelling target. Perhaps some kind of trust system a la arxiv.org, where existing users have to vouch for new submissions before a user is themselves trusted? Definitely still…

I think a trust system is the only way. Ladybird will need new/different maintainers at some point in the future. How are you going to find them now? I don’t disagree with their choice, but it’s not sustainable in the long term.

Maybe it is, if they can somehow vet potential new contributors in-person at e.g. conferences.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#143

Post by afdbcreid »

VortexLain wrote: post #114

Ladybird going source-available is quite unfortunate, seems like Gecko is the only production-ready independent browser engine we're left with. They may, at this point, go ahead and remove "get involved" block from their website https://ladybird.org/ , since it's not possible to contribute anymore.

That's not source-available, that's still open-source. Quoting Wikipedia:

> Source-available software is software released through a source code distribution model that includes arrangements where the source can be viewed, and in some cases modified, but without necessarily meeting the criteria to be called open-source.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software

> Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open-source software may be developed in a collaborative, public manner.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software

And as said here, SQLite was operating like this forever.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#144

Post by LeFantome »

Crappy timing for me. Ladybird has never built on musl based systems. I got that working just a couple of days ago (on Chimera Linux) and was hoping to push the changes to the project. I guess I am maintaining that myself now.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#145

Post by embedding-shape »

patates wrote: post #131

When AI first happened, I was afraid I was going to eventually lose my job. And while I've been lucky since, many did, and that hurt a lot. When people are losing something to automation, regardless of the economics of the situation, you cheer for the humans, or at least hope that society keeps being fair to those who are most affected. Now I see communities being affected. When you kill PRs, you not only kill the co…

First off, to have conflicting feelings about something is really normal and doesn't immediately point to a problem, it's extremely human, and I feel similar to you to. I'm a creative + programmer, I hate to see what's happening in some communities yet I too use agents for development, it'd be like avoiding Google + SO when they first appeared, feels like there is a clear "before/after" moments with those, and with LLMs as well.

I don't really have anything useful to add here, I think, just that you aren't alone in feeling conflicting feelings here. New things usually are like that, comes with incredible benefits in some areas yet seem to strip humanity away from others, some people use it to produce fluff and crap, others essentially gain new abilities and use those to build even better stuff. I don't think there is any universal truths here, sadly.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#146

Post by multjoy »

pelagicAustral wrote: post #100
cassianoleal wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your analogy, is the junkyard the development model of vibe coding? I look forward to the book: The Cathedral, The Bazaar and The Junkyard.

fwiw I asked Claude to look at GP's post and write me a story titled "The Cathedral, the bazaar and the junkyard" and I have a pretty good time reading his riff.

“Its riff”

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#147

Post by MarsIronPI »

bigupthewhole wrote: post #70
habinero wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that help? People gladly post slop PRs under their real names.

It's not the only solution but it might reduce PRs by a decent amount I would think. If you see a PR and the guy is verified, you can check his name, his linkedin and where he works, at least there is some accountability if he introduces malicious code. If the goal is to reduce slop, define slop. As a maintainer of a project you should be able to tell if something is slop. If you don't have time to read PRs (which is…

I suspect that rather than some kind of digital proof-of-competence, communities will shift to in-person meetups at conferences and such. Which is unfortunate for people who can't attend for whatever reason, but I think some solution to that can be worked out.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#148

Post by mehs »

splittydev wrote: post #24

Wasn't the entire goal of Ladybird to have an open and independent browser engine? Making it effectively closed to contributions makes it.. Not independent anymore. It's now dependent, on few people who work on it, just like any other closed-source or corporate-controlled browser.

It is still independent in sense that it doesn't depend on Google Search money and Chrome/Firefox code as most of the alternative browsers. Depending on your definition of dependency, it will always going to be dependent on something.

Also they are not changing the licence or preventing forks.

It is a pragmatic solution to a real problem that can really clog down progress on the project. I hope they (and other open source projects) will figure out how to filter in good, responsible contributors but I guess it will take time.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#149

Post by progbits »

torben-friis wrote: post #118
Fraterkes wrote: post #66

I've been looking a lot at Godot (another big open source project) PRs lately, and there's been kind of a surge of wholy ai-generated PRs (both code and description). This is agains project-policy, so people creating these PRs usually get mildly told off. What's surprising is that while many submitters take that fairly well, some people get really indignant, essentially calling the maintainers ungrateful. It's kinda…

There is certainly a certain... entitlement? (It's not the perfect word, but I fail to find a proper term) from some of the vibe crowd. Like an attachment to the output and refusal to accept that most of the work was not theirs. It is seen in the way they approach contributions but also in regular language. I created X, insistence that their 'curation' was very influencial to the output, difficulty to mention LLM con…

I've experienced the following sequence more than once at work, and I remain baffled by it each time:

- Receive a huge vibecoded PR for complicated new feature.

- Complain that this needs some design doc to figure out the right approach first.

- Author says no need for design doc, easier to have vibed implementation and discuss the concrete code instead of abstract document.

- I disagree (obviously), but review the PR with feedback along the lines: this entire approach is flawed, throw this out and start over.

- Author gets defensive, says "but this is already working and ready, let's just merge".

- I tell them there is no chance in hell this is getting merged. They go sulk to their manager that I'm not interested in helping them launch.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#150

Post by sdevonoes »

patates wrote: post #131

When AI first happened, I was afraid I was going to eventually lose my job. And while I've been lucky since, many did, and that hurt a lot. When people are losing something to automation, regardless of the economics of the situation, you cheer for the humans, or at least hope that society keeps being fair to those who are most affected. Now I see communities being affected. When you kill PRs, you not only kill the co…

It doesn’t help to know that using and supporting private LLMs is only making openai/anthropic/google/etc even richer. I myself cannot justify its usage.
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