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Comment by leoc | Hacker News Reader

I have to say, a single announcement that Cloudflare is sponsoring specifically these two projects does start to look a bit like an attempt to curry favour with the grassroots part of the tech right: give “their guys” some money and praise and maybe they’ll stay off Cloudflare’s back for a bit. And to be clear, that’s not to say that it’s bad to sponsor Ladybird, or maybe even Omarchy.

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Is Ladybird a tech right thing?

I wouldn't describe it as such, but that's not what matters here. Andreas Kling has been out championing the anti-anti-Charlie-Kirk cause on Twitter, so it's a safe bet that the Lundukish grassroots anti-wokes see him as one of theirs. Whether he has any juice with the right-wing VC set I don't know.

Kling's politics aside, he's also had a history of abandoning projects after hyping them up on social media and attracting contributors. Here is what happened to SerenityOS and jakt, for example:

https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/graphs/commit-activit... https://github.com/SerenityOS/jakt/graphs/commit-activity

If Cloudflare wants to defend the future of the web, maybe they could also throw a few dollars towards projects with better governance and aren't helmed by a BFDL with a spotty record and are written in a more future-proof language than C++ [0]. (For example, Servo.)

[0]: In Kling's own words! https://web.archive.org/web/20250819053816/https://awesomekl...

Isn't Ladybird (now) supposed to be moving to Swift, though?

(I think that investment in Servo is also likely to be an excellent idea. Sponsoring Igalia's Servo work is an obvious starting place for any European institutions which are actually serious about "tech sovereignty", just to start with.)

>Kling's politics aside, he's also had a history of abandoning projects after hyping them up on social media and attracting contributors. Here is what happened to SerenityOS and jakt, for example:

He published free, open-source software. He's not obligated to work on a particular project forever. This is a particularly strange critique given that he shifted focus away from those projects to focus on other open-source work.

If anyone else wants to take over the work Andreas was doing on old projects, all his code is there for them to use.

It would be a bad look if he took the money and quit.

This is a very strange take. SerenityOS is a hobby project, from which both Jakt and Ladybird were born. Jakt never took off even within the Serenity community. Ladybird is where most of us were spending our time, and its departure from Serenity was a pretty natural evolution.

Ladybird is now a legally established nonprofit, with a board of directors and several full-time employees. Not a hobby.

Someone should do some digging into GamerGate…

It kind of is, though not explicitly. If you follow Andreas on X you will see a lot of his comments and replies are either a) posting about being aggrieved about users who are mean and rude on BlueSky or b) Amplifying traditional family values, right wing beliefs, etc, in a somewhat indirect way. He seems to be too cautious to outright say anything, but it’s obvious by the company he keeps.

Somewhat - Kling is explicitly 'apolitical' and this always attracts a certain ilk of people.

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And - maybe this is a stretch, but you also have to consider that the competing product (Servo) is written in Rust, while Ladybird is C++.

From what you read on hn, I think Rusts community being very liberal sort of resulted in memory safety being perceived as a culture war thing by some; ("authoritarian big compiler is forcing you to not free this memory" vs "the handmade c programmer with his artisanal allocations"). So Ladybird not being written in a safe language might be part of the appeal.

And I know that Ladybird is supposed to adopt Swift, but I don't think any single LOC has been written yet?

I'm not sure how true that is when half the Rust job postings are cryptocurrency related.

In Rust communities, like the official Discord server, there tend to be more left type people. Furthermore, if you go to left leaning communities that aren't related to programming the few programmers who are there are almost always Rust enjoyers. The cryptocurrency use also exists, of course. I suspect that the common thread in both cases is idealism -- leftists want what they see as an ideal economic system while crypto bros, when they aren't scamming, want an ideal financial system. Rust in many ways is closer to an ideal language in a way that feels to me to be similar to those other idealist arguments

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