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Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder

lunduke.locals.com

391–400 of 777 posts

Re: Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder

#391

> No "default search deals", crypto tokens, or other forms of user monetization, ever. Sounds good, but how would you make sure the sponsors won’t influence you in the future once it’s popular enough? After all, they are still corporations and are after profits, as opposed to crowdfunding.

I'm not an expert in this stuff, but I did notice that the Ladybird website mentions only accepting unrestricted donations. That doesn't prevent power dynamics from evolving between sponsors and the project, of course, but it at least means that no sponsors get to explicitly demand specific things.

Re: Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder

#392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the Mozilla originated Fluent project for localization is another example of a stand out approach. It would be interesting to see how localization fits with the Ladybird browser project as a whole. Making use of a custom implementation of Fluent might actually be a good way of moving forward.

Do people actually use Fluent? When I showed it to some professional translators, the reaction was along the lines of: “Hmm, interesting, but does it fit into my existing [roughly speaking XLIFF] tooling? No? Then no.” More generally, a technical translator’s flow is turning a table of strings into a table of strings with minimal distractions and the occasonal look at the reference; I’m not sure Fluent—however nice i…

Mostly not, but the formats and limited available tooling is designed to dovetail with existing offerings. Adoption is extremely low despite fairly easy implementation of most features.

Re: Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder

#393
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, I am as annoyed as you are with the constant barrage of "rewritten in Rust" projects, but if Mozilla did not try various other projects that are not browser, there would be no Rust.

Rust wasn't a Mozilla project per se, it was something a person who happened to be working for Mozilla was messing around with and it got internal traction. But I'm actually ok with a lot of the non-firefox projects that they have like the VPN. What I do have an issue with is the foundation, throwing money away at various projects that have very little to do with making firefox better. From "trusworthy AI" research g…

Huh I didn't know that Mozilla Ventures exist.

Well, okay

Re: Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder

#394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak for Servo, but my understanding is that they have very different goals than we do. Servo wants to build an embeddable engine for controlled sets of HTML/CSS/JS content, with a focus on modularity and parallelism. Ladybird wants to build a usable browser for the open web, warts and all, with a focus on compatibility and correctness. I'm a big fan of Servo and I hope they become a huge success! Competitio…

The talk about correctness gets me thinking. If there is a difference between how specs define something, and how browsers behave (and website expect them to behave), will you choose technical correctness or websites actually functioning? Technically this has been the big problem of HTML5 vs XHTML, and "technical correctness" lost to actual usability.

Nowadays the spec mostly is "whatever Chrome does".

Firefox has often been forced to just conform to Chrome behaviour, despite differing specs, or because the spec was rejected/not agreed upon.

Re: Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder

#395

Nitpick (or is it?) but the website is soulless and just bad. The website design communicates that this is just another immature project, desperately looking for a VC funding, just following modern design trends where "design == aesthetics". Yuck. I am happy to see the project thrive.

This is a textbook definition of bikeshedding though

Re: Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder

#396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> seeing your code being used by some guys you don’t like? This is not even in the list of my concerns. I just don't like to see efforts of hundreds if not thousands of volunteers are rolled into a closed source application and distributed for the profit of a couple of people who pat themselves on the back because they got their next car/house/whatever for free. This is why I prefer GPL over BSD/MIT.

That sounds no different from "code being used by some guys you don't like" to me, to be honest. If some company took my permissively licensed work and turned it into a commercial product, why would I take issue? I put my work out there for the betterment of all, and it is still bettering the world even in its new form. I have no complaints with that.

In fact, it's very different. You, as a single person might not care about a patch you contributed, or a small utility you have written. However, not everyone thinks like you (e.g.: Me, as Fig. 1a).

When you put all this spectrum of views under a project, it becomes another thing to manage these expectations and what people want from the project in the end. When big shifts start to occur, people will react differently.

When it's a project people love and contribute with the expectation of keeping things the way it's, and the things change, people won't be happy. See: Go's opt-out by default telemetry proposal, HashiCorp's and Docker's license changes, Google's persistent push to block ad-blockers, Microsoft's breaking of VSCodium in subtle ways, etc.

So it's much more than you and your code, esp. in projects like these. I think licensing them with licenses allowing rug-pulls (esp. under community itself), is a red-flag in many cases.

I also put the code I develop myself out there for the betterment of all, but it's licensed with GPL, because I don't want someone take and run away with it for "betterment of themselves rather than everyone". Now, you might not agree with me, and I respect that, but that's the terms I put on my code. As I always say. If you like it that much, reimplement it. I don't care.

Conversely, I contribute to a project which allows no GPL code, because it's designed to be both open, and be customized and closed at the same time. We put it out very openly in the beginning, because that license is a requirement for the use case we (as in ~10 countries) have, and MIT is the best one for our use case.

...but, Ladybird is not that. The project tries to build an important, foundational commodity item. Allowing it to be taken private is a mistake, IMO.

Re: Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder

#397
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we are aware of how permissive licenses work. If someone forks our code and does a better job with it than we do, fair game. :)

Just so you know, chromium exists now as an open source project because KDE developers used GPL.

Would you mind elaborating? How did KDE's use of GPL prevent Chromium from being closed-source? What about Google Chrome?

Re: Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder

#398
post #357

Hello friends, Ladybird founder here! Here's a short video from Chris Wanstrath announcing our non-profit yesterday, and kicking things off with a $1M donation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9edTqPMX_k Happy to answer questions :)

Hi Andreas, First, thanks for this project and making your self accessible! Will "plug-in" or "add-on" support be a first-party concept in Ladybird? I ask that because in years past a few other browsers (Konqueror, Falkon, Dillo, etc) made it pretty far but lacking add-ons, useful capability such as 'NoScript' or 'uBlock' or even a tab manager made them non-starters.

NoScript for Dillo makes no sense as it doesn't support JS anyway. uBlock... yeah, a little, but most annoyances will be blocked by the lack of JS support anyway.

Plus there are plugins for dillo... https://dillo-browser.github.io/#plugins

Re: Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder

#399
post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seeing someone ignore the naysayers and attempt the so-called impossible task of developing a new independent browser is awesome to see Well the impossibility isn't so much in making a browser but making a browser that manages to get a chunk of web audience. That means presence on mobile, feature and performance parity with Chrome, surprasing Chrome on some level (e.g. Safari having better vendor lock-in).

Safari is better than Chrome in many ways, arguably most.

A fact that appears to be lost on the majority of users that have a say in what browser they use: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...

Re: Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder

#400
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn't count OSX as someone running with BSD?

I run Mac OS. I am aware that it builds on BSD. Yet BSD is very alive and nobody who wants BSD is lost to Mac. At least I personally have never heard anyone deliberating over a free BSD vs Mac. Edit: and of course upvote. Apple ran with it. But they didn't run away with it. We still have it. Actually we have some patches thanks to them. As I mentioned in my other reply: Open source is not a zero sum game.

> Actually we have some patches thanks to them.

In a relative sense, I would argue that Apple has pilfered an order of magnitude higher value from the community than they have given back. The only example of Apple's net-positive contributions seem to be CUPS and LLVM, both of which were cross-platform before Apple took control. Compared with how much networking and userland code they've taken it feels like a trillion-dollar pittance. Even Microsoft chips in more.

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