I think the complaintent is right that an image like that might drive some people away.

Of course I don't really think that repelling hyper-sensitive social justice warriors is a negative thing. Folks like that are going to burn up far more project bandwidth on debates like that than they could ever possibly contribute. The last thing your open source project needs is a 200 comment thread on whether or not all occurrences of master/slave should be replaced with parent/child, doh I mean, primary/secondary.

It's pretty obviously staged, and also much more reminiscent of a Western where the focus is the woman being rescued, not murdered. I wouldn't really call it a violent image. Maybe I'm just insensitive.

Some background: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ChainedToARailway

In case you somehow missed it, it's a picture of Swift on Rails for a project called Swift on Rails.