[zenexer]

Is it known whether this was a deliberate political statement in response to recent events in China, or just a festive holiday joke intended to be harmless?

Given the current state of affairs in China, I’m inclined to believe this was political. If that’s true, many of the other comments here debating the need for professionalism in FOSS may be missing the point. It could be argued that this fits into the same category as the malicious hijacking of libraries on NPM, although I agree with the political statement being made here.

A more appropriate debate may be whether it’s acceptable for FOSS libraries to protest human and civil rights violations.

[Ahmed90]

Protest all you want, but use your own productions, not others, can you tell me what would be your feeling getting a call on holidays from an angry client or a manager who might not even be celebrating Christmas?

Chinese politics? alright fair enough... but what if some of these companies got punished because of it? or lost business?

I'm Arabic, can you imagine the shit a dev will get because of this if he/she used Ant for a political figure or party website? imagine a non-christian religious organization finds their site publically celebrating Christmas?

at the end of the day, politics or not the only person that will get all the shit dumped on their head is the poor developer who trusted your product and took you as a responsible person with all the 39k GitHub stars and 692 contributors... if I can't trust that to be mature then eh... good luck reshaping the world with FOSS.

Good luck explaining dependencies to the client/manager and how "someone from outside the company can modify our precious little website" and how can you prevent that in the future lol...

[karmasimida]

> I'm Arabic, can you imagine the shit a dev will get because of this if he/she used Ant for a political figure or party website?

Can you illustrate this specifically? Had this happened, will the dev himself/herself get punished?

[Ahmed90]

Personally, I'm from Iraq, regular people won't care, but politics, religious figure, government thingy with a stupid manager etc... they will give that dev a hard time, some yelling, and might just fire him

[karmasimida]

> just a festive holiday joke intended to be harmless

Christmas in China is just a shopping holiday for the most. And no reason to make things this complicated, the author has already stated that all this is intended to be an easter egg.

[Stratoscope]

> all this is intended to be an easter egg.

An easter egg that they put on other people's sites without their knowledge or consent.

The correct word for this is malware.