US politics has been pretty fascist lately. The state is filling up concentration camps, engaging in mass state violence against people on the basis of racialized traits, deporting them to random countries without any respect for habeas corpus, exerting state pressure on the free press to censor speech critical of the current administration, and Trump is openly floating the idea of an unconstitutional third term.
Fascism is clearly on the rise, and they’re winning more and more power. None of this is far removed from us in the FOSS community – there are a number of fascists working in FOSS, same as the rest of society. I don’t call them fascists baselessly – someone who speaks out in support of and expresses solidarity with fascists, or who uses fascists dog-whistles or promotes fascist ideology and talking points, or boosts fascist conspiracy theories – well, they’re a fascist.
If one consistently speaks in support of a certain political position and against the opponents of that position then it is correct to identify them with this political position. Facts, as it were, don’t care about feelings, namely the feelings that get hurt when someone is called a fascist. Fascists naturally do not want to be identified as such and will reject the label, but we shouldn’t take their word for it. People should be much more afraid of being called out as fascist than they are afraid of calling someone a fascist. If someone doesn’t want to be called a fascist, they shouldn’t act like one.
It’s in this disturbing political context that I saw an odd post from the Cloudflare blog pop up in my circles this week: Supporting the future of the open web: Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy. Based on Ladybird’s sponsorship terms we can assume that these projects received on the order of $100,000 USD from Cloudflare. I find this odd for a few reasons, in particular because one thing that I know these two projects have in common is that they are both run by fascists.
Even at face value this is an unusual pair of projects to fund. I’m all for FOSS projects getting funded, of course, and I won’t complain about a project’s funding on the solitary basis that it’s an odd choice. I will point out that these are odd choices, though, especially Omarchy…
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Shit. I read the DHH’s (
RubyRails founder) post. And oh, oof.To be clear, he’s not the founder of Ruby, he’s the founder of Rails.
Fixed. Thanks!
Instead of 3 full paragraphs of stuff everybody already knows, why not start by explaining why you think Ladybird and Omarchy are”run by fascists”?
That’s explained in the blog post just below where OP stopped quoting
it’s in the blog post
Only thing I know about Ladybird is the lead dev didn’t want to include gender neutral wording in the documentation, because he “didn’t want it to be political”
That’s kinda old news now and not sure if anything came of it.
Of course.
He now also celebrates Charlie Kirk hoping that others will pick up his great work, and whines about white men being discriminated against in tech.
Let’s just say he’s certainly not anti fascist.
Oh lovely…
i will continue to say that kling is just a pretty offline guy, and also very much unaware/uninterested in america. most people around me are saying the same things about the kirk shooting and i would not consider them even close to what americans would probably call “centrists”, but here is called “right-wingers”. people here had just never heard of him or any of his opinions before last week.
kilng strikes me as a man who has never had politics happen to him before he started working in open source, and he is being treated like he shares american values and american cultural knowledge just because he speaks english online.
i don’t agree with his stances at all, but it’s the norm where he and i live. “åsiktskorridoren” was a political punching bag for a reason.
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Interpreting a PR which changes “he” to “they” as pushing political ideology is not an apolitical stance. I don’t know a ton about him and I’m not convinced this makes him a “fascist” by association, but the fact that he seems to be ideologically aligned with the ones in power on America is troubling at the very least.
so i’ve talked about that event at length before and i don’t have the time to dig up my old comments right now but the short version is
- sweden has a weird history with gendered pronouns in that our english language higher education recommended using male pronouns up until very recently, and the language itself just recently got a gender-neutral one which still isn’t in general use.
- the documentation was rewritten to use second-person pronouns (and a much friendlier tone) shortly after, sidestepping the entire discussion.
He commented directly on the Charlie Kirk situation. If he jumps in, he will have to deal with people’s reactions
right, by saying “nobody deserves to die for their opinions”, which is what most tv pundits are saying.
RIP Charlie Kirk
I hope many more debate nerds carry on his quest to engage young people with words, not fists.
This implies Kirk was a debate nerd. He wasn’t. He was a prolific propagandist with a vast, well-funded operation. He pretended to debate here or there in-between monologues of fascist propaganda. TV pundits aren’t the people who you want to look up to as bearers of objectivity on the matter, given they’re threatened with being taken off the air. It’s no accident they talk about the person but don’t talk about what he said or wrote. Maybe Kling is mislead by them. Maybe not.
My god, the dev really seems to be a bigot, to say the least.
i’m not talking about american pundits.
the media here has never shown any kirk debate, and has only talked about him as a “american right-wing debater/influencer”. personally i was aware of him only as that too, and only saw how heinous his opinions actually were when i googled him after the event. and i, along with most other swedes, have a fairly high regard for our public broadcasting institutions, and since most american internal squabbles don’t influence us until they become external, we don’t really care to dig deeper. i did because i’m active here, but kling probably didn’t.
Wow. Some people really think we’re in the 80s and rely on “media here” to deflect from being mislabeled.
He’s somehow so far away from US politics he’s funded almost exclusively by US companies like Cloudflare, FUTO, and 37signals.
Does your media or public broadcasting talk about FUTO and 37signals a lot that they got in contact to setup sponsorship? Doesn’t he also stream in “English” on "YouTube"catering to the English speaking world but somehow he shielded himself with all the crap from these platforms. He must not be a human.
Even a cursory skimming of kirks name would be enough to reveal what his quest was.
But this defense is fucking weak. Try harder.
just because you are active in some internet circle, does not mean you are active in every internet circle. I’d say the Right to Repair movement or Cloudflare are more “worldwide” than Kirk.
they’ve never talked about him at all except in the aftermath of the shooting.
That does make sense.
I didn’t know who Kirk was until the assassination I have better things to do with my limited time than go on a deep dive into their history before posting any comment on the news. I kinda got the vibe when I realised that was who Cartman was based on in the recent South Park.
I’ve barely heard of him before he was shot. And all I knew of him was he had debates with people. Not everyone is tied into American politics.
Kirk wanted ppl to die for their race, gender, and other things that weren’t even opinions. While Kling’s statement is technically fair, he didn’t speak out for anyone else. Why weigh in on a white supremacist, transphobe who made many ppls’ lives worse?
Speak out for who else? Who else has been killed that makes international news. And no your daily school shootings do not make international news.
At the risk of being callous and blunt, the international news has been covering the killing of tens of thousands of Gazans for over a year now (soon to be 2). They have also covered the Ukrainian civilians getting drone struck (striked?) for close to 3 years now. The flash floods in Pakistan a few years ago that literally turned half of the country blue as seen from satellite images because of how much water there was were also all over the news. The Hamas higher ranks getting killed by exploding pagers in civilian areas (with heavy collateral damage) was also all over the news in western countries, at the very least.
To be clear, I don’t know if the ladybird dev has said anything on any of these issues. I just want to assert that plenty of killings make international news. Charlie Kirk was not the first nor the exception, what was new with him was that he was named, a far-right agitator, and had an existing (para-)social following. All of which cast a poor light, for me, on this being what someone chooses to speak up on.
mass killings do not bring sympathy because no individual’s life is brought attention to and there is no emotional investment in them.
This is a silly argument. There are killings that make international news. There are killings that make Swedish news. He doesn’t comment on any of them, only when a far right agitator dies in America is it suddenly important to him.
there’s no way for me to answer that
An “offline guy” who develops a web browser.
Is this comedy, funny coincidence or purely bad faith?
the guy is an ex-drug abuser. he started doing serenityos as therapy, and serenityos needed a browser. until you get to the modern stuff, it’s basically just a paint-by-numbers api implementation on top of his existing code base.
You missed that he was a WebKit developer for god damn Apple.
https://2025.stateofthebrowser.com/speaker/andreas-kling/
What’s with all this apparent obliviousness to paint him as a rags to fame personality?
i never said he was destitute or self-taught. you need skills to be an os dev. the first few paragraphs there is what i based my post on.
If we want to use the Nazi bar analogy, Cloudflare is like a company that bought up so many bars in town that some end up not vetting for Nazism well enough, letting it slip through, not necessarily playing favours towards or against fascism but they would technically be a ‘Nazi bar’ under the analogy’s definition. Cloudflare is so big that they probably don’t have controlling interest about the pet projects they kick some pennies towards.
If you want to boycot Cloudflare itself, that’s fine and noble and all, but also staying away from anything they’ve ever donated to, you’ll put yourself in a bind. Like if Cloudflare donated to animal welfare, should one be against animal welfare simply due to second-order links to fascism?
Also there is a lot of reading into the comments used to link the two projects to the fascist regime. Very much a stretch.
Check this. Bit more than a comment. Wouldn’t call it nazi. But sus nontheless. We’ve seen plenty people write or say similar stuff over the years that graduated to fash later on.
But yeah agreed about CF. I take this kinda info more as a mental note on the individuals. CF is a corpo which is gonna corpo.
A new online crusade. Once again heavy accusations with very weak supportive evidence. It became a pattern already.
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Some politicians or activists unfortunately use hyperbole too frequently and sometimes even maliciously. It gets them attention but at the cost of deepening the trenches in the political discourse. Drew thought he’s doing the right thing by calling a fascist out, but realistically this will be remembered as “The woke activists are calling us fascists for saying that nobody should be killed for their opinion.” in the right wing circles. Where the term “woke” is basically the right wing equivalent term to the left’s “fascist”.
I don’t know if you have been paying attention but nothing you do or say will leave the Republicans with a good memory of you no matter what if you are “woke,” so it almost doesn’t matter what you say.
At the very least, someone celebrating Charlie Kirk and whining about white men being discriminated against is not someone I’m interested in supporting, and if the future of the open web is in their hands I’ll just stick to lynx.
The good news is that ladybird is nowhere even close to implementing the full web. It’s maybe 0.5% there. There’s no danger of it becoming some centralized power at least in the next 5 years. Especially barring any license shenanigans.
As for Lynx, well it’s really hard to take that comment seriously.
More seriously from a technical side, I’m also not a huge fan of the browser and the engine being the same thing. To me they should be kept separate. So personally I’m cheering on Servo.
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