People have a tendency to tolerate things from developers that they don’t tolerate from other people. This should change 
Anyway, I’m not sure what the drama is this week, if I remember correctly there was a change to use gender neutral writing that was initially rejected, but that was a long time ago, and Ladybird has since changed its policy to clarify it and resolved the problem.
Can we accept that they made a mistake and then fixed it? Or is there some newer reason for drama that I missed?
Why those “activists” did not create their own projects, with their own rules, instead of trying to impose it on other ones? Oh, I that means hard work and nobody want that… 
Where are the “activists” here? Someone found that in a readme, the user of the program was referred as “he”. They suggested to change the readme to use “they”. This is not activism, this is basic english writing rules that have been in use for decades if not centuries (and even prior to that, it was also possible to use “she”, but now this is an outdated practice).
Similar things happened in Haiku and… we fixed the affected document (it was the Haiku interface guidelines). End of story, the person who reported the problem was happy and we are happy.
Instead Ladybird (well, more precisely one of Ladybird developers) at the time decided to reject the change because it was “politically motivated”.
I let you decide who was the activist in that scenario.
Here are the pull requests attempting (repeatedly) to change pronouns:
“It’s a minor nitpick, but I think it’s important; assuming the user and/or developer of the operating system is male isn’t exactly the best.”
“he → they (more universal)”
“The pronouns “they”/“them” are a better choice, as Serenity does not cater to only men.”
I don’t see what is “quite aggressively worded” here. (these are from Serenity OS, before Ladybird was forked from it). But when you keep rejecting these changes for a while, of course people start to get annoyed that you insist on it.
On the other hand here is the handling of the situation by Ladybird. They eventually decided to require gender neutral pronouns (you can decide if this is “just the right thing to do” or “giving up on the pressure of the woke mob” or somewhere in between):
This is the paragraph they used before to justify rejecting these changes:
This is a purely technical project. As such, it is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics or religious beliefs. Any changes that appear ideologically motivated will be rejected.
This is what they replaced it with:
We reserve the right to reject issues and pull requests that appear to be motivated by bad faith. Additionally, anyone found participating in social media brigading of Ladybird will be permanently banned from the project.
As far as I understand, the Haiku community should not engage in political debates… But also, Haiku should avoid radical and irrational leftist extremist ideas. For sanity’s sake.
Same here. I was registered once during Eugenia’s days, but after a while they changed something and I should register again. Skipped that, the people and the comments are strange, mostly being always in favour of Thom’s arguments and views, even if he is completely off the scale (mostly on Apple related stuff…).
I only use OSNews from time to time as a news summary, only reading the headlines…
Is it radical to properly address someone? If that’s the case I’d argue that maybe we should be open to such “radical” steps. (Btw. Extremist is not strictly defined in politics and often used to just dismiss progressive ideas by equalizing them to those of hatred)
I personally understand the backslash of the “mob” for labeling the use of inclusive language (in this case something as simple as replacing a he pronoun with a they one) as political. I at least would not see a reason why not to do this as it is just proper English and does not exclude anyone at all. On the other side, by labeling the use of they as political and thus dismissing that is exclusive, not everyone that contributes to software development/uses software is a man and is addressed by he. And looking at the political discourse and seeing how some political forces, including a former president that’s running again now spread hatred against queer people (and disabled, non-white, the list goes on) and use a “they is political and not proper english” as a kind of ship of theseus to discriminate and exclude people from their in-group, I really get that people are concerned when a project they like does such a move and implicitly leaves the existence of a person up for debate. I personally will neither debate the existence of me nor my friends and am quite thankful that that was, as I see this, a misunderstanding on everyone’s side and not mallicious.
Then define when a political debate starts. Everything can be political and most things are. Even things like licenses for software, Architecture and microarchitecture requirements (or the importance of hardware 3D acceleration if you will, not everyone needs it) can be argued to be political. In general nothing really is apolitcal and the term nonpolitical really just means something that most if not all people of a community agree on or are at least fine with it.
Of course there are many topics which do not directly affect Haiku as a project and thus of course need no debating on this forum. And also I do see the point that many people tend to jump to conclusions way to quickly in cases of honest misunderstanding (seeing something as malicious which is not meant to be malicious) and miss nuance which hurts everyone.
OK for avoiding political debate because comment like yours are the prime example why we can’t have those.
Simply changing a pronoun cannot seriously be qualified a “radical and irrational leftist extremist ideas”, or this comment could be qualified as a “radical and irrationnal rightist extremist idea” with equal merit (i.e. : no merit).
Let’s not get “over the top” comments in the first place if we want discussions to remain constructive.
I have no problem with that, as long as “Haiku” also avoids radical and irrational rightist ideas.
In other words, let’s keep this forum/community just as it is, unpolitical.
Can we move on?
Not really. Politics is about the role and composition of government, about the impact of economic systems, about the duties and privileges of the citizenry. What we have seen the last few decades is the co-option of irrelevancies into the political debate. This trick is common to both left and right, BTW. If you can trick people into fulminating about things that do not really affect them personally, they have no time or energy left to notice that their actual living conditions are deteriorating steadily.
Take the “singular they”, since it has come up. It has existed in English since 1375 and was therefore already over two centuries old when Shakespeare used it in Hamlet. Has its role in the language changed since then? Of course. Does it actually make a difference to me, personally? Hell, no. If replacing “he” with “they” makes 50% of the human race feel included, and it does not exclude me, there is no reason not to do it. None at all. This is not politics, it is just courtesy.
Well, it is marked “off-topic” …
Don’t forget about radical centrist ideas 
I’m more worried about the “irrational” than the “radical” parts!
I personally don’t care if someone calls me he or they or even she if that’s without bad faith,only as a little unimportant word in some text.
I also don’t explicitly think which word I use for my texts,mostly it’s he because in German we have the generic masculine and I refuse to use nonsensical difficult to read he/she constructs but sometimes it’s they or whatnot.
What drives me crazy is that sort of “word police” that invests a lot of time,and costs a lot of time and nerves for project maintainers,only to change a single unimportant word.
I understand that SerenityOS rejected the change,and I would have done the same in my project.
Not to discriminate against someone,but simply because I find it unimportant and not worth creating a commit.
And I’m happy for those who find it important that they don’t have actual important issues in their life…
Making people feel included with language use is generally a good idea and simply polite and mentioned earlier. There are many ways to do it. For example in gendered languages like German, French, Spanish, I like to alternate between genders, if they don’t play a role towards meaning. For example when writing user stories for software.
I disagree with the above statement that politics is only relevant with regards to the state. Politics is about the of use power also everywhere else. Groups need a way to make decisions for example. This can be organized via consensus, a hierarchy, taking turns, voting deferring to an assigned decision maker, and other ways.
I agree though that disagreements about style, manners, morals, values, and ethics aren’t the same as politics, but are related. What’s acceptable in a group is decided through a political process in the end.
People use signaling to display their morals and political convictions. Because of today’s polarization and culture war this can get heated quickly.
Not being political for a project like Haiku means that it doesn’t want to be activist or be a place to discuss politics beyond the scope of the project. Political moralism and activism can distract, cause conflict, and even destroy projects. Groups being hijacked by activists for their own ends can be troublesome.
We should not be afraid to agree on a set of Principles despite accusations of engaging in politics. I find such accusations usually made by those who have an objectively unsavoury position - which benefits from being considered as merely another political choice rather than something to be rightly condemned.
That’s really quite characteristic of politics. I mean, of course we could just condemn whatever it is and move on in the hope that no one is so fragile that it really makes a difference, but no, the crusade is really the point.
Philosophical difference between technology and politics
Any practical and working technology (engineering) is built on the philosophy of rationalism.
In the world of politics, practicality and workability are not essential.
Thus, not only rationalism but also irrationalism lives in the world of politics.
Irrationalism is the philosophical basis of any extreme political force.
From dictionary:
Rationalism — the belief that all behaviour, opinions, etc. should be based on reason rather than on emotions or religious beliefs.
Irrationalism — belief in feeling, instinct, or other nonrational forces rather than reason.
Speaking purely from a grammatical perspective, they and them in English is a bit weird. One could previously have used them to refer to a single person, but mostly to avoid gender when talking about someone the speaker know only scant details about. “I saw someone walking past my window at night. If I seem them again, they probably walk past my window regularly”. It is not previously common to use this language when talking about a person the speaker knows well. Because of this, they/them does work, but it starts to become confusing as they/them is generally plural. Especially in more complex conversations where multiple people are being spoken about. I think this is what a lot of people find jarring and uncomfortable about using they/them for a single person in regular speech. It unfortunately does feel very unnatural if one is not used to speaking like that. And the there is a tendency for it to start sounding weird, especially when a he or she is accidentally dropped in.
English really needs a new set of pronouns. We either need to take a leaf out of the Finnish book and have one pronoun for all 3rd person Finnish has hän for all genders, (and I guess therefore no issue with this at all) and Swedish has retrofitted a third one (Han is he, hon is she and hen is gender non specific, though I gather it is not necessarily universal, it doesn’t overload an existing pronoun.)