Technology

That ladybird gender thing is such a load of crap. I find it hard to even believe that people are genuinely passionate about it. Every time ladybird is mentioned, someone brings up the 'extreme views' based on this. But it is the biggest load of nothing you are ever likely to see.

For anyone who doesn't know, here's what happened:

• The build documentation for this unreleased pre-beta software used the pronoun 'he'.
• Someone suggested that they change it to be more inclusive.
• The author didn't think it was important enough to change, so left it.
• More requests and pressure came to change the pronoun.
• The pronoun was then changed, and the author apologised.

To me, that's a minor error of judgement, with no lasting harm caused to anyone at all. But yet somehow this is constantly used as a reason to avoid ladybird.

How can I take this seriously? Is this some kind of organised anti-competition propaganda campaign? We're talking about a free and open source project of a highly technical nature, and somehow people are upset that the word 'he' existed temporarily in a work-in-progress document with a target audience of essentially zero people. The people making this project are not political leaders or public figures with media training. They are focused on the technical side of things. Yeah, the pronoun was a mistake, but it pretty much the smallest mistake you could possibly make in this context. It not like they are donating to right-wing orgs, or publicly denouncing anyone, or promoting hate. I see far worse than what they did on a daily basis from all sorts of people - including right here in lemmy. And in terms of ladybird, I have not heard of any kind of misstep ever since this instant - which was a very long time ago now. It is honestly bizarre that people have clung onto this incident. I'm honestly not sure I believe that the backlash is entirely organic. It's just too disproportionate.

[edit] Let me just follow this by saying that I do think there are other good reasons to be upset with this same ladybird dev. I just don't think the 'he' in the docs thing is anything at all.

Or we could ask the question in the opposite direction - why would you use language which excluded anybody who doesn’t identify as male from the documentation for an open-source project, to the point where when someone offers to update the language for you your response is to rant about “personal politics” and write a contribution policy which forbids the use of gender-neutral language?

Whether or not the inclusion controversy is "overblown" (it's not; single word change would have made more people feel welcome, but Kling decided to put his for down) Kling has down himself to be Nazi adjacent.

https://hyperborea.org/reviews/software/ladybird-inclusivity/