I donate to Ladybird and Servo, and I hope they succeed. We need serious competition and a check on Mozilla (not to mention Chrome and Safari).

That said, I’m sad that neither Ladybird or Servo are licensed under strong copyleft licenses. We need user-oriented browsers now more than ever, and strong copyleft enables that. I worry that, even if these engines are successful, they will be co-opted by proprietary browsers and eventually superseded by them.

This happened before - both Chrome and Safari ultimately derive from KHTML, Konqueror’s browser engine. If KHTML had been licnesed under the GPL instead of the LGPL, Chrome and Safari (and not just their engines) may have been free software today. Or, at the very least, it would have been much more difficult for Apple and Google to get started.

That said, I wish Ladybird the best. There donation = no influence policy is excellent, and I really, really hope they can stick to it in the long term.

I made a comment about this on another thread, see this comment.

You can do this using JMP Chat, which bridges phone numbers to XMPP. Unfortunately, it’s USA and Canada only, for now.

Alternatively, you can use a “SIP Trunk Provider”. For instance, in the UK, Andrews and Arnold offers this service. You can then connect any compatible SIP client (e.g. Gnome Calls).

I’d prefer having both analogue and digital options for things, but I’m fine with requiring technology, as long as open standards are used throughout. That is the only way to ensure equal and non-discriminatory access.

You should never have to use any particular piece of software, or be forced to sign a terms of service, to go about your daily life. Requiring an app for everything only entrenches iOS and Android, and most apps really don’t cater well for people with disabilities or other requirements.

Meanwhile, open standards allow a variety of software to be built that can cater for everyone’s needs.