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Changing how we develop Ladybird

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Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#181

Post by smartmic »

cpcallen wrote: post #42

On the one hand, if you grew up in the baazzar, moving to the cathedral might feel like the "death of open source" even if it is really just a return to an earlier way of working. On the other hand, while not accepting external code contributions will certainly improve their security posture it will also make it more difficult to identify who to invite to join the priesthood.

There are great Open Source projects doing fine with the cathedral style, just look at Sqlite and its siblings (Fossil, …).

So I do not see a problem with Ladybirds decision, in contrary, IMHO it strengthens the human aspect of software development and puts the brakes on AI free riders

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#182

Post by hypfer »

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…

> Now I see communities being affected. When you kill PRs, you not only kill the code contributions, but also massively impact the other, non-tangible contributions like ideas, eyes on code, etc. That feels way worse.

These "contributions", while they did exist in small quantities, mostly were not actually what you've described there.

Instead, those boiled down to unsolicited opinions, hostile takeover attempts, value extraction, general drama and just overall overhead over simply building code.

This was not always the case, but the GitHub model of building FOSS (and removal of all friction) certainly made it the new default.

Said model was always unsustainable, but the burn rate made it sustainable enough so that we could just throw more humans at the problem to replace the burnt-out ones.

AI pushed the burn rate over the replacement rate.

=> We will likely see more projects adapt this or a similar stance I think.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#183

Post by signa11 »

troupo wrote: post #5

"Gain trust through plausible contributions" is a new angle on AI-produced PRs I haven't seen yet. Though in retrospect we should have seen it. It's been an angle of attack since forever, it only took a lot of effort.

isn't linux-kernel-development operating on exactly the same model since forever ?

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#184

Post by drcongo »

I paid for Kagi's Orion (even though it's actually a little crappy) because I want options in the browser landscape. I'm really rooting for Ladybird, and just in case they don't offer a paid version in the future, here's a link to how you can sponsor its development: https://opencollective.com/ladybird

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#185

Post by LeFantome »

lukaslalinsky wrote: post #122
bayindirh wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not source available. It's OpenSource(TM) because of the BSD-2 license. This is not unheard of. The most famous models are emacs & SQLite. SQLite doesn't accept outside patches, emacs is developed opaquely and only releases are put forward. You can do this with GPL, too. You put out tarballs of the releases only. There's a great misconception between Free Software, Open Source, and Open Development (bazaar model…

It's actually common, many companies develop their products this way. The source is available, you can see the VCS, but you can't participate in the development. That's why I see this as signal that it's going to turn into a company.

Well, technically it is a "company" already as it is registered formally as a non-profit. They have income (sponsors) and paid employees.

To my eye, this change does not appear to be driven by a change in corporate governance or profit motive.

They explain that the change and the timing is driven by two things.

1 - The burden and of processing public contributions has increased with the rise of AI

2 - They need to focus and stabliize the code base in preparation to introduce a public alpha

Those reasons ring true enough for me that I do not need to go looking for other motivations. I do not like this change but I can see why they would.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#186

Post by sinpif »

Oh well, AI bros ruined it. I'm actually glad in some twisted way, because if more projects follow suit and close their development, it will again become an actual badge of honor to get on those teams. Having contributed to such projects will mean something.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#187

Post by cromka »

"A substantial patch used to imply substantial effort, and that effort was a reasonable proxy for good faith. That assumption no longer holds."

This is probably the best, most succinct explanation of what we're seeing happening in the OS world right now.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#188

Post by cliche »

nathell wrote: post #21

LLMs might be part of why Ladybird is making this decision, but they aren’t the only possible one: SQLite, for example, has been developed this way pretty much forever. To each their own, I guess.

Yeah I don't see the big deal here. Some of the best software is made and maintained by a very small group of dedicated folks. It's a perfectly reasonable move to protect their time and project.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#189

Post by vasco »

embedding-shape wrote: post #145
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 L…

We can also take some refuge in things like steam engines or electricity or the internet and how if you're just on the cusp of those you'd have similar feelings, but many years later here we are, still with jobs and meaning. A lot of people say this time is different but I guess when electricy showed up people would've said the same? I certainly remember people predicting that Manhattan would stop existing during the dotcom bubble because the internet would kill all street level businesses and people would work from wherever so big cities were over. And here we are.

I'm also conflicted but take a glass half full approach basing myself on the fact that when I'm feeling like "this time is different" it's probably my ego wanting my lifetime to happen at an interesting time in history, so my brain wants the current events to be the most transformative.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#190

Post by dwaite »

jeroenhd wrote: post #29
nnevatie wrote: post #19

This is one way to rephrase "we don't want your AI slop, thanks.".

> Whether code was typed by hand is beside the point. What matters is who is responsible for it once it enters the browser. Ladybird is becoming a browser for real users. The people introducing changes to it must be the people who decide those changes belong in the project, and who will answer for the consequences. It probably accelerated the decision, but I don't think that's all of it. I think they're moving in the…

> I think they're moving in the WebKit/Safari direction: open for you to look at, but not really an open source project.

Webkit absolutely takes third party submissions. https://webkit.org/contributing-code/ .

I believe this is an external PR merged a few hours ago at the time of this writing. https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/pull/66507

Safari does not accept third party submissions, but the chrome has never been open (even before Google Chrome recycled the term).

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