I thought we all agreed that flags-as-political-statement in software were Certified Cringe after the one-click “add a French flag overlay to your Facebook profile photo” thing, eleven years ago?
Xsnow "protestware" in Debian
11–20 of 132 posts
Re: Xsnow "protestware" in Debian
#12How 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.
Given the number of colonized people that speak Russian, including residents of Ukraine, Georgia, Uzbekistan, etc. etc. etc. I think this sort of Easter Egg based on language rather than geographical location is quite appropriate.
My family speaks both Ukrainian and Russian, and in Russian speaking spaces here in California we find many many many eager supporters of Ukraine's sovereignty, because when they hear Ukrainian spoken they tell us! And also tell us they wish they had been able to keep their non-Russian family language alive too. Most of these supporters are not from the Moscow or St. Petersburg areas though...
Re: Xsnow "protestware" in Debian
#13How 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.
This point in the comments made me think twice:
> People in Western countries don't realize how bad the situation on the ground actually is; random Ukrainian flags showing up on your work monitor can result in severe problems for you (like losing you job, or worse), especially if you work in the government sector. If they show up on your laptop in a random cafe or an airport, you might very well get a beating from one of many "war heroes" that walk around the cities these days.
[EDIT: I see @krunck reposted this at the top level — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48736518]
Re: Xsnow "protestware" in Debian
#14One comment really nails the problem with this sort of thing:
" People in Western countries don't realize how bad the situation on the ground actually is¹; random Ukrainian flags showing up on your work monitor can result in severe problems for you (like losing you job, or worse), especially if you work in the government sector. If they show up on your laptop in a random cafe or an airport, you might very well get a beating from one of many "war heroes" that walk around the cities these days.
No, the government sector doesn't just make missiles and bombs, it also covers schools, hospitals, many other things."
Re: Xsnow "protestware" in Debian
#15How 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.
How can anyone complain about Ukrainian flags, unless these people have a problem that the Ukraine exists.
Re: Xsnow "protestware" in Debian
#16One of the comments that struck me on the lwn.net site is the (albeit small) possibility that someone in Russia could be running the software and unintentionally land themselves in hot water if someone discovers these images on their computer. I'm sure that's not the intended consequence, but I could be problematic.
Re: Xsnow "protestware" in Debian
#17I'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,…
The simple solution that should make everyone happy is to simply document it. That way it is no longer a hidden behavior, and the Debian maintainer could even do that as a patch without the help of upstream.
Re: Xsnow "protestware" in Debian
#18I 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()
it is in upstream. but the debian package maintainer is also the upstream maintainer.
Re: Xsnow "protestware" in Debian
#19One comment really nails the problem with this sort of thing: " People in Western countries don't realize how bad the situation on the ground actually is¹; random Ukrainian flags showing up on your work monitor can result in severe problems for you (like losing you job, or worse), especially if you work in the government sector. If they show up on your laptop in a random cafe or an airport, you might very well get a…
And that's not even so bad compared to what would happen to somebody in occupied Ukraine: they would be sent to "the basement." That's the euphemism for the local torture chamber, outside of which they deposit the dead bodies of the tortured to let everybody in the area know what happens if they do something like speak Ukrainian.
Re: Xsnow "protestware" in Debian
#20How 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.
This point in the comments made me think twice: > People in Western countries don't realize how bad the situation on the ground actually is; random Ukrainian flags showing up on your work monitor can result in severe problems for you (like losing you job, or worse), especially if you work in the government sector. If they show up on your laptop in a random cafe or an airport, you might very well get a beating from on…
Oh no! Imagine the horror of losing your job. It compares nothing to literal genocide their army perpetrating.
And yes, it is their, not their government, not some mysterious leaders. Russians reelected same government for 35 years with it invading neighbours pretty much every 5 years.