| I have used Plant UML a lot and I love it. Anything that can help me draw less figures is a bonus and the markup language they use is pretty flexible and ergonomic. However, I have one major gripe with Plant UML. About 3-4 years ago, my local install started showing memorial plaques for people who died in a terrorist attack in Paris [1]. While this attack was undoubtedly a horrible event, I still feel it is deeply unprofessional to include stuff like that in a program, and it makes me lose all trust in the developers. If they had just added a memorial section in the program, it would have been fine. However, for every error generating a diagram, Plant UML would show a popup window with a picture and a text in memory of that person. This is similar to what the Notepad++ developer(s) did back in 2013-ish where they had a memorial build into a new release of the program. On startup, Notepad++ would write (literally type it out) some message into the default empty document [2]. It might be a bit harsh. But in my mind, if the developers of these programs can be so influenced as to push this onto their unsuspecting users, I feel they have misused my trust. It makes me think: "What are they going to put into it next? Malware? Perhaps watermark the output with a statement?" Since these events, I have avoided Notepad++ entirely and been reluctant to use Plant UML, but used it out of necessity. [1] https://github.com/plantuml/plantuml/issues/25
[2] https://notepad-plus-plus.org/downloads/v6.7.4/ |
It's a really big jump to say people who honor the dead with their software are going to insert malware in it next.
Use or don't use whatever you like, it's free and open source, but this seems like a pretty terrible reason to avoid otherwise great software.