alt Hacker NewsChanging how we develop Ladybird
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"A substantial patch used to imply substantial effort, and that effort was a reasonable proxy for good faith. That assumption no longer holds."
On the one hand, if you grew up in the baazzar, moving to the cathedral might feel like the "death of open source" even if it is really just a return to an earlier way of working.
On the other hand, while not accepting external code contributions will certainly improve their security posture it will also make it more difficult to identify who to invite to join the priesthood.
Stuff like this makes me wish AI had never happened.
An open-source projects losing the ability to find and mentor new maintainers is so disappointing.
> There will not be a [..] process for submitting patches by [any] means
> Outside involvement still matters: clear bug reports
So I can find a bug, I can fix it, but I am not allowed to tell them how exactly I did it.
Instead they have to re-figure it out. The team must be thrilled to re-do work they know was already put in by others, repeatedly.
As a user-and-eveloper, why would I sink time into a project with such rules that put a barrier to improving my life with the software? It seems much easier to use Firefox or Chromium, where my fixes actually meet open ears.
It was very useful for me in the past when a new Chromium version crashed on my product, that I could go and suggest a fix to V8, and it was rolled out in the next Chromium release so my product worked again (https://github.com/v8/v8/commit/4f8a70adca01c). Without this, maybe Chromium developers would have never bothered to fix it because of lack of time to figure it out.
> a pull request no longer tells us as much as it used to about the person submitting it
Nobody should need to know anything about any person submitting a pull request. Hopefully whether code that makes it into Firefox or Chromium was never based on the "effort" or "faith" of the submitter, but based on the correctness of the code in review.
Reviewing code fixes is strictly easier than coming up with them yourself.
This holds true automatically: In any situation where it isn't, you can just write the code yourself and done.
As a project you can always ignore or close a PR you want to write yourself instead. But it seems unwise to bar yourself from the _option_ of reviewing an outside contribution, or using it as input for your own re-write.
I can understand where they come from. If most of the pull-requests were AI-coded, well, the maintainers are equally capable of prompting Claude Code themselves.
I think the whole game of software engineering, open source or not, has completely changed. A lump of code doesn't mean or imply the same thing as it did 2 years ago.
Fascinating to see that Chromium/Gecko/WebKit are now more "open" browser engines than Ladybird, at least in one important respect.
(Servo is arguably in the middle, accepting outside contributions as long as you don't use AI.)
It's understandable that a team without much funding would have to close off contributions to spare on labor costs. But, it makes me feel that people don't give Google/Mozilla/Apple enough credit for the economic resources they put into enabling openness.
(Personal bias/experience alert: I'm currently retired, but formerly worked at Google on Chrome. I saw many of my coworkers nurture outside contributors, and did some of that myself, both informally and through programs like internships.)
When AI first happened, I was afraid I was going to eventually lose my job. And while I've been lucky since, many did, and that hurt a lot. When people are losing something to automation, regardless of the economics of the situation, you cheer for the humans, or at least hope that society keeps being fair to those who are most affected.
Now I see communities being affected. When you kill PRs, you not only kill the code contributions, but also massively impact the other, non-tangible contributions like ideas, eyes on code, etc. That feels way worse.
I'm conflicted, confused and afraid, HN. Look at what I just wrote, yet I use claude and deepseek and all the skills and complex harnesses and MCPs and whatnot... But all now seems like a transition phase. Transition to f-ing what though?
A lot of questions cannot be answered unless we dedicate a meaning to our lives. Human touch? Too late? Also: I liked a song and it was sonos. I unliked it after discovering. I feel so stupid, so often.
Sorry for the unhinged digression.
I love Ladybird (have a sticker on my laptop to prove!), I hope they thrive.
Reading this leaves a weird taste in my mouth, since the author tends to regularly make nontrivial >1k LOC PRs (sometimes several per day) and merge them on the same day with no reviews at all. This is even ignoring the LLM aspect; I don't know what % of them are assisted, but even if it was 0%, this isn't the pace of development I'd be comfortable with.
LLMs might be part of why Ladybird is making this decision, but they aren’t the only possible one: SQLite, for example, has been developed this way pretty much forever. To each their own, I guess.
I am old enough to remember what happened to GCC. It was also developed by a closed group of maintainers, because "it couldn't work" as a bazaar-style development. Then EGCS fork happened and became more successful.
I think closing contributions (due) to AI will be looked at in a similar way. Forks open to AI will appear, and take over. And people will return to the open model. I think it needs more proliferation of AI coding and reviewing tools, so that AI contributions can be automatically independently reviewed for quality.
It saddens me to see the communities surrounding free software projects going dark because of the threat posed by AI tools, but I don't know what other solutions there are that would mitigate the threat, particularly when browsers are such a compelling target. Perhaps some kind of trust system a la arxiv.org, where existing users have to vouch for new submissions before a user is themselves trusted? Definitely still vulnerable to abuse, but perhaps less so.
Wasn't the entire goal of Ladybird to have an open and independent browser engine? Making it effectively closed to contributions makes it.. Not independent anymore. It's now dependent, on few people who work on it, just like any other closed-source or corporate-controlled browser.
This rather feels like it's completely stepping away from the thing that made the community around Serenity and Ladybird so good.
Very confusing statement. It is definitely true that OSS is on the verge of a crisis because of AI agents, but they clearly said AI is not the reason to reject external contributors: "Whether code was typed by hand is beside the point."
If AI is the problem, the solution would be introducing an AI policy, community trust management system or something like that. Definitely not a closed development process.
This seems quite misguided and is sad to see. They have every right to do this, but I was looking forward to continuing testing Ladybird as it improves and contributing in the future. I hope servo stays open to contributions, as it seems like it's all we have left.
I manage multiple open source Github enterprises for the Linux Foundation. Something like this is under discussion in all of them - the amount of terrible PRs and issues being filed is overwhelming.
Having read the blog post and then the comments here, I'm rather astonished. Do we understand our craft so little that our only realistic option is to ban LLMs (so-called AI)? Has everyone forgotten we've been in a software crisis for almost sixty years?[0] Have we so internalized the sweat-of-the-brow we've accumulated for decades that it's now part of the identity of being a programmer, and the only reliable signal of whether a contribution is beneficial?
As far as I can tell, architecture, i.e. sound, precise definitions of exactly what a software artifact must do, is now critical. And with LLMs, it's now feasible to begin implementing such things, though many brownfield projects may be intrinsically unsound in ways that their creators are unaware of. In such a world, contributions simply require a modified proof that the software does what it must do, with perhaps additional claims that the maintainers provide.
It's inevitable that more projects follow this path.
The elephant in the room is so many projects already operate like this without formally announcing it.
If you look at Blender, one of the biggest and most successful OSS projects out there, it's effectively run as source available. Some PRs make it through, but for the most part there have been heavy barriers to entry to get your work into the product. In this example, it's been key to such a large and complex project with millions of users staying afloat. It's an inconvenient truth.
It's one of those unspoken things in open source - the bigger the project the less you can accept or vet contributions. The less able you are to respond to users because there are too many. The amount of code you need to own balloons. The signal to noise to too much. LLMs have massively exacerbated this issue.
Crappy timing for me. Ladybird has never built on musl based systems. I got that working just a couple of days ago (on Chimera Linux) and was hoping to push the changes to the project. I guess I am maintaining that myself now.
Why don’t they take the Linux approach? A browser is like an OS. Linux continues to accept public contributions, through an esoteric process that discourages lazy contributors: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/submitting-pa...
> Ladybird remains open source. The source code will continue to be publicly available under an open source license.
We usually call open source software without open collaboration source available software.
This is terrible news, defeating core beliefs people had in Ladybird. Not an open browser I wished for.
This feels like a new phase for open source. I think screening people to join development efforts will become the norm, at least for resource-constrained projects. Trust will have to be earned.
They could make two kinds of pull requests and add much more strict criteria for public contributions. For example, they could say that the PR has to be smaller in size and well-documented for human review, otherwise it's closed by an automation.
And then if someone wants to do a larger contribution, they could have a process like making an issue, discussing the approach and then collaborating with a maintainer to get it in.
Blocking public contributions means that they want to have complete control of the project and AI is likely a good excuse to do that.
It says something about the fragility of contemporary software that a fragment of bad code could result in doom. I think we need to move to much more restrictive computation architectures, inherently partitioned, functionally pure, and resistant to type confusion, pointer manipulation, memory issues etc.
The core problem is that we don't have a PR respect system. 10kLOC from an unfamiliar person with empty GitHub is much different from a pal regularly contributing that you personally know.
Integrating some kind of proof-of-stake system might be a way forward for open source. Nobody wants to shuffle through a pile of low-quality PRs written by LLM.
I don’t understand how you’re supposed to cultivate new maintainers if you shut down contribution.
Is this a sponsored project where maintainers are just hired?
Goodhart's law, again.
I feel like 1/10 comment I make on HN are about this.
So merged PR were until LLMs a good proxy for the ability to code and contribute to a software project. Consequently they were used to estimate if a candidate was potentially good for a position. Merged PR on popular project were thus precious credentials one could "trade" for potential work. Since then the desire to provide PR changed from contributing to a project for its own sake, to make the actual project progress, to signalling.
A new proxy must be found to establish the ability to contribute to a project.
I don't like this, but I understand it. I've contributed to the LB project several times, and I have made friends IRL with people who have also contributed to the project. ( we are now friends at uni ) It feels like a stepback because instead of 30-45 contributors every month, you have 15...
i feel like there should be a way to trust a PR ID verification or in-person verification at FOSDEM/DEFCON/Chaos Communication Congress,UNI's, for example.
As much as I wanted to see another browser alternative succeed, Ladybird has lost my trust. Using LLMs to rewrite the entire codebase was already extreme. But eliminating external contributors is a precursor to a rug pull. And rewriting the entire codebase can now be seen as another step in a rug pull.
"A substantial patch used to imply substantial effort, and that effort was a reasonable proxy for good faith. That assumption no longer holds."
This is probably the best, most succinct explanation of what we're seeing happening in the OS world right now.
I do wish they had left a window open for criteria to whitelist developers who can create PRs. By closing off their developer circle, they are losing the best parts of open-source - new software developers eager to solve large problems with novel approaches.
So basically it will become more or less similar to the structure for SQlite and Fossil by Dr.Richar Hipp et al , basically seems most projects that have the requisite manpower/maturity will end up at that kind of structure. In the long run may be interesting from a chain of trust (human as well as code) and interop as any dev from these projects (guilds?) would already have some trust build in.
For every person wanting to do good in the world there are ten windup merchants of which at least one has darker motives
Perhaps we should start to describe projects as Open Contributions from now on. With maybe a few Open Contributions Standards to distinguish how this works.
Interesting how this post coincides with the Leyden declaration in mathematics: both documents are abot how human-human trust ("in good faith") is eroded by large language models, because a substantially-sized artifact does not necessarily attest to substantial human effort and skills.
this is a move in wrong direction, its sad and a bad solution. Ladybird implements specs that must be compliant, making compliance harder is the way to go, proving the code changes does what they are intended for should be made better instead of gate keeping from malicious and "honest" contributors
Surely you can just autoclose any PRs from 1. People you don't know and 2. That are over 100 or even 50 lines?
That way new contributors are forced to start small.
This project gets a lot of publicity for the product it has to show (which, as far as I know, is effectively still inexistent).
This is a very sad day.
Yes, Ladybird is facing a wall of slop... no... A tsunami of slop overwhelms core maintainers. Probably safe to generalize to other popular open source projects.
The project is important and the code is beautiful! I spent many happy hours trying to understand the code, browser-specs and tried to adapt to their coding style. After 18 months I ended up with a few merged PRs. Some were pure joy to write. I got to work directly with most of their core maintainers in the review cycle. They're great!! From the outside, it seems like their responsiveness to submissions slowed down in the last few months... slop.
Of course, it would be great if there was another way, but here we are.
Love <3 to Andreas and the core maintainer group! Keep up the good fight! Maybe we'll meet again.
> For decades, code contributions have been how open source projects learned who to trust. People would show up, do the work, take responsibility for their changes, and stick around. Over time, trust emerged from the work itself.
Trust is key.
So the new way to contribute is to fork
Make a better Ladybird successfully to the point the original contributors take notice. If the barriers to doing that are truly lower, then it should be easier.
That sucks, I would have hoped that they at least allow previous contributors to somehow make PRs still.
For an open source project, is there any reason to still accept code contributions?
Feature requests are valuable because they tell you what users want.
Error reports are valuable because they tell you under which circumstances the code fails.
But the code that implements those features and fixes those errors can now be written by AI. AI follows all the rules for how code is supposed to be written in your project. Is already producing very high quality code. And soon it will produce a quality that no human can match.
The GenAI mess has delivered a new form of Eternal September[0] but for the software development communities.
I wonder what it will be referred to as, after the dust settles?
Ladybird going source-available is quite unfortunate, seems like Gecko is the only production-ready independent browser engine we're left with.
They may, at this point, go ahead and remove "get involved" block from their website https://ladybird.org/, since it's not possible to contribute anymore.
I once submitted a PR to Ladybird, but even in early AI days there were so many open PRs that mine got lost in the noise. I don't really blame the maintainers here. Once the open PRs get to a certain point, it becomes unmanageable.
Opensource doesn't mean open to contributions. The source code is available, you can fork it and apply your patches there.
This is the way to go to reduce supply chain vulnerabilities and to reduce time of mainters reviewing LLM slop.
I wonder, if they are really only concerned about trust, will accepting external PRs but never giving commit access to external contributors work for them?
Of course, if they are also concerned about the quality of external PRs then that does not help.
I've been looking a lot at Godot (another big open source project) PRs lately, and there's been kind of a surge of wholy ai-generated PRs (both code and description). This is agains project-policy, so people creating these PRs usually get mildly told off. What's surprising is that while many submitters take that fairly well, some people get really indignant, essentially calling the maintainers ungrateful.
It's kinda surprising to me that even the people who are all in on ai haven't internalized that there's no inherent value in producing a big lump of code. They've massively decreased the work they put in but still expect the same pre-ai reaction/gratitude when submitting a big PR.