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Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

> Whether code was typed by hand is beside the point. What matters is who is responsible for it once it enters the browser. Ladybird is becoming a browser for real users. The people introducing changes to it must be the people who decide those changes belong in the project, and who will answer for the consequences.

It probably accelerated the decision, but I don't think that's all of it. I think they're moving in the WebKit/Safari direction: open for you to look at, but not really an open source project.

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> I think they're moving in the WebKit/Safari direction: open for you to look at, but not really an open source project.

Webkit absolutely takes third party submissions. https://webkit.org/contributing-code/ .

I believe this is an external PR merged a few hours ago at the time of this writing. https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/pull/66507

Safari does not accept third party submissions, but the chrome has never been open (even before Google Chrome recycled the term).

WebKit does allow outside contributions, though that example is perhaps not the most illustrative as it is from an Igalia employee. Igalia maintains substantial parts of WebKit and at this point has to be the #2 contributor other than Apple themselves.

It's still open source, but not open for public contributions. That's pretty much how it was before the advent of these forges.

I think I didn't put the emphasis right in my comment above. The code is still fully open source, but the project that produces the code isn't. It's not dissimilar to other projects producing open source software.

This is the first time I've seen a project with this much history in community contributions close down, though. I suspect AI will cause more projects to follow in Ladybird's footsteps.

> The code is still fully open source, but the project that produces the code isn't.

I think your thought was cut off. What is the project no longer?

That's not really right, though the license is still Open Source compliant. Linux was practising an open, patches-welcome developement style before the forges existed, on its mailing list. This did indeed contrast with how eg. the FSF was running its projects, though even in those the door wasn't shut as hard on people wanting to contribute as Ladybird's now is, I think. Then Eric Raymond wrote "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" specifically to talk up Linux's patches-welcome development model, and to move the emphasis away from (just) licensing terms and source accessibility, to openness to patches. Netscape then launched the Mozilla Project specifically on the CatB model. In response to the surge of momentum, the "Open Source" label was created basically as a brand name for the CatB perspective. After all this, "doing it as open source" was established as a clear mental category in people's heads, and the forges popped up as low-friction SaaS solutions for something that people already wanted to do, and by then were often already doing. (In the process helping to make Web-based SaaS a well-established concept and business model in people's heads, something with ironic consequences.) So Ladybird's current development model is much more clearly in line with the Free Software philosophy than the Open Source philosophy. To be clear, that's not the only disagreement or difference of emphasis between "Free Software" and "Open Source": most obvioulsy, Ladybird's BSD license is a failing in the FSF's view of things, just not enough of a failing make Ladybird not Free Software. But it is a real one.

"The Cathedral and Bazaar" is orthogonal to open source. Its argument is that open source is most valuable when paired with the bazaar model, not that the cathedral model cannot be considered open.

The open source definition was created in that mind. It does not state or imply open development or a community are requirements.

CatB and Open Source aren't coaxial, but there wasn't a very clean separation between them either: https://www.free-soft.org/literature/papers/esr/cathedral-ba... https://web.archive.org/web/20021001164015/http://www.openso... . "[T]he same pragmatic, business-case grounds that motivated Netscape" was CatB. Even now OSI doesn't emphasise any separation: https://opensource.org/about . You are correct: the Open Source Definition does not mandate an open development model. However that's probably at least in a small part because, well, how would one craft a legal requirement for open development in a software license that wasn't either unenforceable or very burdensome and abusable? It's also quite definitely because the expectation was that forks and/or the threat of forks would in practice enforce a certain level of open development on OSD-compatibly-licensed software: this was in fact what ended up happening to GCC at least once https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Compiler_Collection#EGCS_f... . If software projects all largely go the way Ladybird is going now, and stay that way, then it's a crushing (though not total) defeat for what the Open Source movement promoted and what it hoped to achieve; but sure, to be clear, Ladybird remains OSD-compliant. (Not total because at least the source remains available, without paying or signing anything, for bug-hunting.)

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