Dear Maintainer, apparently according to this comment https://lwn.net/Articles/1080157/ people using xsnow in the wrong room could end up getting beaten up, or losing their job. I am opening this bug since the original reporter did not, but I do not think Debian users who happen to live in a country ruled by a government I personally disapprove of should face such severe consequences. Best
Hi, thanks for your comment. I am surprised by the fact that my 'protestware' in the toy program xsnow causes such a fuzz. On one hand, the protestware is noticed, and that is exactly I was aiming for. On the other hand, people are concerned that the items shown by xsnow can cause problems for the users of the program. I understand, but if a user sees items that could cause problems for him/her it is very easy to halt the program, remove it and don't use it any more. I am sure there are a lot of programs and web sites who's behavior could have negative consequences for the user, and xsnow is only one of them. So, what to do? - Debian can decide to remove the program from the repo. That is no problem for me. - I could put a version to Debian, without the protestware. I will do that when something is settled. Again, xsnow is just a toy, nobody needs to use it. Regards, Willem
Hello, just to be clear, I've been using xsnow for a long time and I had noticed the flags months ago. I only decided to join the discussion after I read that comment on LWN. It is something that I hadn't considered at all. This idea didn't even apply for the offensive fortunes package, which contained a clear description; xsnow does't even declare that this exists and while it allows to configure every single element, this one is an exception. Unfortunately when someone notices it might be too late, if someone else notices at the same time? Websites are not part of Debian and out of scope in the discussion. Agreed, and I use it (in winter) but the problem if what happens if someone who doesn't read LWN decides to run it. Best
severity: 1141182 serious thanks Hello Bill, What technical info do you believe is missing exactly? It's quite trivial to reproduce. See attached screenshot. If we remove things that might hurt somebody's feelings, shouldn't we also remove things that might cause people to be beaten up? IMHO getting beaten up sounds much worse than having my feelings hurt for 3 seconds by a bad joke. Best Il giorno mer 1 lug 2026 alle ore 00:02 Bill Allombert <ballombe@debian.org> ha scritto: