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.

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."

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?

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

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.

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;

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.

This change to xsnow is obviously an unalloyed negative, and the simplest test to confirm this to yourself is to imagine the political statement being something you disagree with, e.g. if the locale were set to an EU country, only the US flag would show.

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.

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.

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.

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

Shit like this erodes trust.

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.

Isn't there discrepancy between that and The Debian Linux team removing “offensive” quotes for the “fortune” application[1]?

[1] https://x.com/LundukeJournal/status/1952340426892984580

> don't, like, invade their country

I did not invade any country

At least this app just displays the flags and not prints such accusations

Not everyone who speaks Russian is a Russian or lives in Russia. It's like show a Palestine flag specifically to users with a Jewish calendar.

Looking at your comment history, it's odd how you feel this way about certain countries but not certain others.

That may be, but if I do in fact live in a place where my "government are the baddies," why does it follow that open software should punish me—for nothing more than happening to be alive within that jurisdiction—by provoking my "baddie" government to visit its badness upon me personally? For speech I wasn't even trying to make—for speech that you kind of put in my mouth without asking me?

It would be fine if you gave me a beautiful and whimsical way to choose to express my feelings, and I took it. But when you're disguising the flag in code as an "EXTRATREE," that signals to me that you're trying to slip through a surprise without my noticing:

    #ifdef USE_EXTRATREE
          if (global.Language && !strcmp(global.Language,"ru") && drand48() < 0.3)
      tt = MAXTREETYPE;
          if (drand48() < 0.02)
      tt = MAXTREETYPE;
    #endif

I think it's great that you live somewhere—and enjoy a relationship to your working environment—where you don't have to worry about that kind of thing! I wish more people got to enjoy those kinds of freedoms. I don't think the way to make that happen is to rub individual people's faces in the crappiness of their predicament.

I'm reminded of a situation I encountered some years ago where a person opened a web browser in front of a classroom—no porn in their history, nothing untoward, just going to a high-profile mainstream news site or something in service of a classroom discussion—and all the targeted ads were for things like HIV medicines and mainstream campaigns choosing ad variants that depicted gay couples.

Not the time or the place, that person didn't ask for it, and it led to deep consequences for them—from "outing" on one side, to accusations of "grooming that classroom full of students" and "probably being riddled with AIDS" on the other—that this good, responsible, kind, wise person did nothing to invite.

The targeters probably thought they were doing something righteous or even "accepting" by "making sexual minorities feel seen" or something—but by putting words in the person's mouth without their consent or agency, they caused great unnecessary harm to somebody who didn't deserve it.

    # This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    # but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    # MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
    # GNU General Public License for more details.

Don’t you mean Iran, not Iraq? Or are you hoping Dick Cheney’s ghost will see the flag?

the problem isn't protesting someone's actions - it's supporting the other side

do you really want to support country that kidnaps its citizens off the streets and honorary reburied Nazi criminals?

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.

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]

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

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...

It's not even an anti-Russian statement!

I wouldn't get bent out of shape if Xsnow showed me a Canadian/Greenlandic flag in response to me using en-us.

How can anyone complain about Ukrainian flags, unless these people have a problem that the Ukraine exists.

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