Xsnow "protestware" in Debian

One 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."

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.

So, if someone were to modify a Debian package to show Palestinian flag for Hebrew speakers or Iranian flag for ...Enligsh speakers, the change won't be instantly reverted and the user won't be restricted, right?

I could not be less sympathetic on this. If you don't want people protesting your actions, don't, like, invade their country.

"But what if it was the US doing the invading?" Yes, even then. If some Iraqi author made an Xsnow that waved little Iraq flags, that's their right. Even if I disagree, it doesn't harm me, and it might inspire me to consider our actions.

"But what if it makes someone's boss get mad at them?" If my boss saw an Iraq flag on my screensaver, I'd say "huh, look at that! I guess that was added in the new version. I'll change it to another screensaver." And if you live in a country there the likely reaction is that your boss might execute you, your government are the baddies.

A lot of people talking about how displaying the flag at all could get somebody in Russia in trouble. You could see the increasing of the likelihood as helpful then, because the flag could always appear. By making it come up more often it communicates to the user that it can appear it gives a chance to the user to notice it in a "safe" situation and not use xsnow if they are in a situation where it could cause trouble for them. The existence of the flag is not quite mentioned at https://www.ratrabbit.nl/ratrabbit/xsnow/, and the site is loading too slow to see if it is shown in https://www.ratrabbit.nl/ratrabbit/xsnow/visuals/index.html.

I haven't heard of this package personally and it's not on my desktops so it must not be pulled in by any of the task- desktop environment metapackages I use. So you probably have to go looking for it.

I really don't care about this package or protest but what might be more interesting to consider is what if this were in a default package and what if the affected locales were different?

If I make a list of all the countries who have recently been at war or are currently engaged in hostilities or have ethnic animus towards each other and just choose to taunt them all, that would really be a dick move and it's probably OK for Debian to drop the package. FWIW I'd rather see them adopt a kindhearted fork than override an author/ maintainer when possible.

If there's no special pleading for the ru/ua conflict then it's not too concerning.

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() < 0.3)
     tt = MAXTREETYPE;

Most do not acknowledge the slippery slope exists until they are sliding down it about to hit bottom...

One 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.

So next time something like this slips through and it runs rm -rf /* ? Then what?

Shit like this erodes trust.

Has anyone confirmed who this 'Alexander Ivanov' person is or even if this is a real person and not some AI bot? I searched for the email address used and it only appears recently in these handful of posts about xsnow.

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.

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?

Protestware as a whole has never worked to solve anything. Awareness of a particular issue is the only positive thing "protest" software has successfully tried, with the second order effect being better supply chain management.

I don't use Linux or Xsnow but it baffles me how distributions would allow something like this. Sure, it's just flags now, but if you look at faker and colors.js, you'll see the other side of the coin of what happens when you allow software like this.