linuxmemes

I'll give my take on it. Something many fail to grasp is that it's not about a singular thing, you need to look at the context. Let's go through some of it:

• Andreas Kling, lead developer of (now-)Ladybird, rejects PR that changes "he" to "they" in documentation.
  • This is the most frequently mentioned example of Andreas' issues.
  • The "he" in question referred to any user, where "they" is already commonly used instead by everything from companies, to news, to the Linux Kernel docs (an arguably much more important software project).
  • Andreas' exact words: "This project is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics."
  • This code was eventually merged 3 years laters in a different PR, this time described as "Grammar fixes" (it changes more pronouns to gender neutral than the original PR).
    • This PR was merged two hours after its creation and, coincidentally, around one month after Andreas announced his stepping down from SerenityOS.
  • Later, someone publicly tried to explain to him why that's not cool; he doubled down.
• Andreas Kling really likes interacting with far-right, homophobic, or otherwise controversial persons.
  • Here's him calling Brendan Eich, known homophobe, kicked out of Mozilla for... being a homophobe, now CEO of the foremost crypto browser, infamous for its bravery and attracting like-minded fans, "Senpai."
  • Here's him cheering for Brendan Eich, so you don't think it's an isolated instance. The only reason I won't cite others is that I'm frankly tired of scrolling through his tweets, I should've saved these last time I went dumpster diving.
  • Here's him welcoming Vaxry, infamous for the toxic community of his Hyprland project to the point of being kicked out of the freedesktop.org project. He's also on record saying "I do believe there could be arguments to sway my opinion towards genocide". There is a print of this, somewhere. I will find it and put it here.
  • Here him doing a talk with Bryan Lunduke, tech's premier transphobe conspiracy theorist with a classic far-right victim-complex.
    • Here's relatively prominent KDE developer Nicco's hour long video detailing how Bryan is a horrible, lying "journalist."
  • He also often interacts with other far-right users on Twitter, a platform he describes something along the lines of "full of positive energy." I'll try to find this again and add it here, too.
• There's more. I realize I'll need to edit this comment anyway to add sources, so I'll add to it as I go.

Would I look at that PR and say I'm never touching him with a ten-foot pole? Maybe that's excessive. Would I ignore all the rest and say he's just misunderstood? Hell no. For all its issues, I do hope Ladybird succeeds as a new browser engine because the internet needs more of those. I'm just not touching or otherwise supporting it unless they get their shit sorted.