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."
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.
> if they do something like speak Ukrainian.
Sheesh, how different are the languages? Would it be an honest mistake to say a word in Ukrainian and not realize?
No it won't.
When I've looked at academic language comparisons, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian are all about the same distance from each other. Somewhere in the range of distances of Portuguese/Spanish/Italian, which have lots of very similar words. A single word isn't going to get somebody in trouble, but a sentence? Going to raise eyebrows, and likely capture unless you've got people to vouch for you being a patriotic newly Russian citizen, just trying to catch up to the new reality. The areas that are currently occupied, as well as Russian lands that border Ukraine, have a mixed vernacular called Surzhyk, which uses Ukrainian sounds and grammar but lots of Russian vocabulary and idioms.
Early on in the occupation, one form of resistance was simply graffiti with a letter that's in the Ukrainian alphabet that's not in the Russian alphabet, like ї. That sort of symbolic resistance has been replaced entirely by far more strategic resistance these days, according to recent reporting.
Honestly, this is like saying that someone who speaks Italian would mistake your for speaking Spanish. That's how it sounds. If you disagree - you clearly don't speak both languages. Just because some words are similar doesn't make them sound same.
I speak Spanish so this makes sense. Thank you. I am unfamiliar with both languages and was unsure how they deviated.
Note that xsnow already displayed such flags randomly, and this just changes the probability.
So, if you're in a location where displaying the Ukraine flag will get you shot, 1) it was already not safe to run xsnow, and 2) much more importantly, I genuinely hope you can successfully escape your situation.
When the war started, Europeans were forcing famous Russians living in Europe to denounce their government's evils. For example an opera house demanded a Russian opera singer to say something against the regime or be "blacklisted".
As if it's so fucking easy to denounce a dictator who has murderous tendencies and who rules your homeland, as if it's so easy to insult him, and then what, not be able to return home and see your friends and family until that dictator is defeated?
I found those demands so unthinkingly heartless, it's responding to tyranny with your own tyranny...
I mean, it's easy to be apolitical and stay in russia. They can always do that and not break the russian social contract.
Молчание - знак согласия
> not be able to return home and see your friends and family until that dictator is defeated?
Assuming they're still alive.
Oh, russians re-elected same govenment for past 35 years cheering invading neighbors every couple years since inception of russain federation.
Problem is not in dictator. Problem is imperialistic russia and every russian citizen who does nothing about it. They should be denied every service from civilized world until they stop their fascism.
And before you ask, yes, I did protest and depose dictator.
Well the voting is heavily manipulated since more than 10-15 years already, and many candidates are banned from running too (not to forget many opposition and critical figures were killed).
Of course they should change the government but I don't think it's possible to achieve that through elections.
Slackware-current upgraded xsnow to the latest version in June 20th but applied a patch from ALT Linux that removed the protestware bits just because of this reason. I support this.
They don’t have to use the software. It’s such a non issue. Xsnow is closer to art than critical software, you can easily ditch it
The naïveté of that position is that the users are not informed ahead of time that there's a random chance of a political protest popping up on their screen, so do not get to make an informed choice before it is perhaps too late. It's not mentioned in the doco. It's obfuscated in the source code as an 'extra tree' in an array of xpmtrees. The commit that added this had the commit message 'willem'.
Please, tell me, who is ever using xsnow in a place where that would be problematic? It’s such a niche software. Again, complete non-issue.
> who is ever using xsnow
We don't know? Debian doesn't spy on users.
popcon shows 302 users as of now: https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=xsnow
302 installs, could be one person with 302 virtual machines, and could be 1 million with popcon disabled (which is the default).
It could also be 302. You cannot just invent a massive user base because you have no information. Given how niche the software is there is no reasons to believe it is widely used in places where that would cause issues. I suspect not a single person has been impacted by seeing Ukrainian flags.
The push back in this is obviously coming from an anti Ukraine sentiment
I do agree that the user base is possibly minuscule. But as I said in other comments, even if it only happened to one single person, I wouldn't consider it an acceptable risk.
We've removed stuff from debian for way less than this.
> The push back in this is obviously coming from an anti Ukraine sentiment
You can read minds?
So 3% of the pop uses Linux. I shouldn't be surprised that 3% of those use Debian. I WOULD be surprised to find that more than 1 in 10k has EVER used xsnow 1 in 1M running it continually. Note this is actually wildly overstated. I have not even touched on the settings which would show flags.
Then we have to imagine they run xsnow all the time and somehow don't notice the dangerous political stuff OR run it for the first time.
If we start with 140M Russians this has certainly never happened and will almost certainly NEVER happen.
It is actually far more likely that someone should actually get caught using it trying to see the flags and have to explain that to their boss.
How many victims should something generate before considering removing it from Debian?
Funny thing how here we are talking about keeping it despite it can apparently cause people to die, while Debian was so quick to decide that the offensive fortunes that nobody had complained about for the past 23 years were incredibly harmful and had to be removed right away :D
What is the acceptable number of, say, tortured people, before this becomes an issue for you? What if your math is a little off and exactly one person dies? Are you okay with that?
We have to draw the line somewhere.
I'd understand it if the flag is added by someone from Ukraine or another country invaded by Russia. But it looks like it was added by someone with a Dutch name.
Westerner putting random people's lives at risk just so he can give himself a justice boner doing some cheap virtue signaling. Classic.
That's also a good argument for completely removing rainbow flags from everything, in more countries than one. Will we see that happening?
Yeah, but is open source so if some of the extra rare "good Russians" do not like this super small chance of getting hurt then they diserve their regime, they will finally protest when the regime will affect their own lives but stay silent while other people get genocided.
I do not own any popular software to put anti Zed/Putin shit in it so sorry I can inconvinience those super rare good Russians.
Are you currently located in DC protesting about the war in Iran? If not, rules for thee but not for me?
This sounds like a you problem. Suppose you have software that shows famous faces and quotes as a screensaver would you make it by default not show anyone of color so it would be acceptable in rural Oklahoma or make it show no women so it would be acceptable in Iran?
In rural Oklahoma, it is entirely acceptable to have “anyone of colour” portrayed in something like a screensaver.
I don’t know much about Iran, but depictions of women seem common in advertising there.
Most women whom one would display inspirational quotes wouldn't be displayed in a head scarf as they would come from a range of cultures most of which don't have the same restrictions. I think that the point is that political moral and cultural norms aren't neutral and many are just morally deficient and free software shouldn't be in the business of pretending that Nazis and Jews are 2 different groups with equally valid rights not to be offended.
This is a corporate mindset we adopt because we want everyone's business not a useful or correct attitude for individuals who aren't the beneficiaries of the publics money in the first place.
The Russian aggression is evil, the Russian culture as a whole is abhorrent. We shouldn't be afraid to call it out and fight back. I would be ok if every Debian terminal printed a message raising donations for the defense of Ukraine.
Its free software so Russians worried about political correctness herein meaning defense of mass murder torture and genocide can run a fork which boots up to Russian military propaganda if they like.
I would hesitate to say “Russian culture is evil”. I don’t dehumanise people or denounce entire ethnic groups.
Russia is a political entity Russian culture inside Russia like MAGA culture glorifies and justifies violence against others.
This doesn't mean everyone of Russian ethnicity shares the same flaws.
Wouldn't that be.. acceptable, if not entirely the point? Raising awareness? Some rando getting arrested for a screensaver they didn't know contained a flag is pretty efficient propaganda and would likely turn at least the involved people and their inner circles? It might not be the point but I doubt they'd be disappointed
I really really really hope the point of stuff of like this is NOT to make martyrs of randomly selected people in a foreign country. That would be an absolutely demented thing to try for. Not to mention the arrogance of thinking you need to show foreign people what their country is like. They know that better than you.
How is this an issue? Xsnow is a novelty. You have to make two decisions: the first to still be using Xorg at all, the second to install the application itself which is essentially a gag screensaver.
The idea that some govt employee would get fired for this is extremely far fetched.