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Xsnow "protestware" in Debian

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Re: Xsnow "protestware" in Debian

#2

Post by Svoka »

How is seeing more Ukrainian flags a discrimination?

Discrimination implies something harmful. Like invading neighbor country and perpetrating genocide. This complaint says more about Ivanov than anything else.

Re: Xsnow "protestware" in Debian

#3

Post by jszymborski »

Svoka wrote: post #2

How is seeing more Ukrainian flags a discrimination? Discrimination implies something harmful. Like invading neighbor country and perpetrating genocide. This complaint says more about Ivanov than anything else.

Yah that's where I stand on it. The message isn't harmful or hateful, it dares only make a political statement.

Re: Xsnow "protestware" in Debian

#4

Post by galdauts »

Svoka wrote: post #2

How is seeing more Ukrainian flags a discrimination? Discrimination implies something harmful. Like invading neighbor country and perpetrating genocide. This complaint says more about Ivanov than anything else.

Very much agreed. It‘s a statement by the authors of that software, and that is well within their rights.

Re: Xsnow "protestware" in Debian

#5

Post by neilv »

I'm very sympathetic to Ukraine and the desire to demonstrate or speak out, but I don't see how this instance is very effective, and doing it has a significant cost to the integrity of Debian, as this argument says:

> Russ Allbery agreed that the DFSG was not relevant; he also warned that citing the Social Contract and DFSG ""turns the conversation into rules lawyering without addressing the actual issue"". However, even though xsnow is DFSG-compliant, he did say that the flag display may be something Debian does not want in its archives:

> > I would, in general, say that software that behaves in deceptive ways, which includes hidden behavior changes based on usernames, locales, or other local settings or information that no user would reasonably expect to change behavior in this way is probably not something that we want to have in Debian. It's a very slippery slope and also likely to create a lot of drama to very little benefit.

Re: Xsnow "protestware" in Debian

#6

Post by Svoka »

jszymborski wrote: post #3
Svoka wrote: post #2

How is seeing more Ukrainian flags a discrimination? Discrimination implies something harmful. Like invading neighbor country and perpetrating genocide. This complaint says more about Ivanov than anything else.

Yah that's where I stand on it. The message isn't harmful or hateful, it dares only make a political statement.

[flagged]

Re: Xsnow "protestware" in Debian

#7

Post by 4bpp »

Svoka wrote: post #2

How is seeing more Ukrainian flags a discrimination? Discrimination implies something harmful. Like invading neighbor country and perpetrating genocide. This complaint says more about Ivanov than anything else.

The imputed discriminatory part is that the software only shows the additional flags to users with Russian locale, not that it shows the flags at all.

Re: Xsnow "protestware" in Debian

#8

Post by asveikau »

I was not totally clear on this. The article makes it sound like the behavior is in the debian patches, and not upstream?

I believe upstream is here, and has the same code as quoted:

    https://sourceforge.net/p/xsnow/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/xsnow/src/scenery.c#l332

  if (global.Language && !strcmp(global.Language,"ru") && drand48()
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