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this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2024
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No, I'm actually with them on that one. The he / they issue in of itself is tiny, I agree, and if they'd just changed it from gendered to gender neutral language then nobody would've even cared. Most of us tend to write in a gendered way out of habit or because we think about our own gender, and in a casual conversation that isn't that important. But this is about a piece of software that, surely, is not just meant for male audiences. It's just unprofessional to address someone as male by default. Most importantly though, being this stubborn on having the user specifically male is just a weird hill to die on, but even weirder if that particular action is the one that is actually causing the drama - which they allegedly claim wanting to prevent by dismissing "politics". And I'm sorry, but changing a "he" to "they" is not politics, it's just including non male users. Nothing more, nothing less. So why is it such an issue to not just address specifically male users? It really only would be because those people hold some very questionable views, which, in my opinion, clash heavily with the whole concept of free and open source software, which is supposedly for everyone. So if your actions and views are this flawed, how can you be trusted on such an important project?
Also, in regards to this news... "no code from rivals" also is just a stupid thing to say and do. There's plenty of good open source code that they could and probably even SHOULD use. But whatever. I'm not gonna support this project and predict it will fail anyway.
The thing is, as some other people have pointed out, the guy is not a native english speaker, and many latin based languages simply don't have any gender neutral pronoun and make use of the neutral masculine instead. Many of these languages have seen some people propose new ways to handle pronouns to change that recently, most of which are somewhat controversial. It's easy for a native speaker of those languages to assume the same is true in english (especially since the use of "he" as a generic neutral is, as far as I can tell, still valid, although clearly out of fashion). Once you take all of that into account, the proposed change can easily be viewed as someone trying to simply push one of those controversial ideas instead of a widely accepted generic masculine, which would clearly fall into politics in the sense of "real world beliefs and social issues irrelevant to the topic at hand". The rest seems to simply be a pretty childish ego war between him and some mastodon users which could have been solved by either side taking 5 minutes to explain their point of view on this matter.
Now, even without this context, from what I can tell, the issue at hand was a single instance of " he" used to describe a generic anonymous user in the dev VM... Seeing that as unprofessional because it addresses someone as male by default surely is a bit of a stretch.
About that "no code for rivals", I don't think is as stupid as many mention. Right now when it comes to web browsers (at least ones with wide compatiblility and features), there's only 2 choices : chromium-based and firefox. So someone trying to bring some fresh blood is welcome, and in order to avoid having the same issues as the chromium-based ones, you need to make sure you are not overly dependent of your competitor's code. Granted, this is a pretty strict approach, but it doesn't prevent them from using the same libraries and techs, it just means that any code written specifically for a different browser shouldn't be copy/pasted.
Nothing about being a non-native English speaker requires you to stubbornly continue to use specific language. I have many non-native English speaking friends. Generally they actually want to know how their words are being taken, and will make corrections to be sure they're not saying the wrong thing.
You know, like, as one does when learning another language. I'm not going to insist on using English grammar rules while speaking Spanish and then just tell all the Spanish speakers to stop being so political at me when they correct me. That's nonsense.