[mjthompson]

man is not a safety nor mission critical system. It was trivial to work around functional anomalies. There was nothing wrong with this, and it was hilarious.

I'm glad the VLC developers never backed down from the Santa hat popping up near Christmas, despite ridiculous criticism from a tiny minority of users.

If you don't like it, fork it.

[BrandoElFollito]

The (or one of the) threads that feature how people are offended by a hat on a cone: https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=96539

[rgoulter]

Similarly, VSCode faced the same issue: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87268 which they then apologised for: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87440

I wonder if the difference in response due to 8 years of shift in culture, or just different size of the maintainer?

[Bayart]

It's not just time span. VSCode is a Microsoft project, and there's probably quite a bit of US corporate culture around it.

[johan_felisaz]

I am surprised that they are serious when saying "even a single person being offended is one too many". Not want to start yet another flamewar on CoCs, but how is such a rule even practically enforced ? Given it's impossible to respect for a project of this scale with this many users, it just feels like a fake statement for good PR I feel like this makes the whole move even less respectful that if they'd have done nothing about the Santa hat complains

[IshKebab]

Yeah that makes no sense. Can I just say I'm offended about anything and they'll change it? Obviously not.

[cesarb]

It might be because Microsoft dislikes easter eggs in general, see https://web.archive.org/web/20171123041231/https://blogs.msd... (followup to https://web.archive.org/web/20171122154012/https://blogs.msd...).

[TchoBeer]

That first one is incredible. Getting offended on behalf of Jews for the millions of lives caused by... What, Christmas?

[globular-toast]

The amount of effort exerted for that is insane.

[BrandoElFollito]

The maintainer of VLC is French. We have a culture of parody and making fun of everything.

This costs lives - people in France are killed because they made fun of the imaginary friend of some people. This is horrible and, unfortunately, we as a society start to give up. Teachers are told to be sensitive and not show pictures of gods, tomorrow this will be creationism and homeopathy and we will end up as another US.

I get offended all the time, but people are free to express their minds without fear. Even if they are obviously wrong because they do not agree with me (whom in contrast is always right and they do not get it).

Blackmail, master git branch, blacklists - all these changes are simply idiotic and the people who are proud of having changed that (and removing a hat on an IDE) probably do not realize that everyone officially tells them that we are proud of not offending them anymore, and when the micros are off they are called negros, twags and whatever word is painful to them. This is really sad.

They are the first ones to lose here, by having invisible walls built around.

I have a very good friend (a woman) who left a great company because she joined when the "diversity" program was live. She was told by her male colleagues that it used to be who you know, who you sleep with and now if you are a good match for diversity. She was brilliant but could not stand that and left for a smaller and more normal company.

All these forced ratio and PC is really against the ones it tries to help or make comfortable or not offend. And to be clear - having been on the receiver side of such campaigns (a minority), it took some time to build trust wit the ones who were not part of the minority. I also felt how it is to be a mnority as a kid - and it was horrible.

But PC is not the way to fix that.

I used somewhere else the analogy of catholics in France. They are being made fun of, they react (or not) but it ends here. This is the reason why they are integrated to French culture, and protected by this culture. The village I live in has a yearly mass outside of the church. As a complete atheist I find this great because this is a tradition and I like to see the folklore (whihc is faith for the ones who attend the mass). OTOH catholics do not try anymore to actively get in your bed to check what you do there, or try to push some god into our school books. And we like them.

[captainmuon]

I am offended that people didn't recognize that post as a joke. Or - alternatively - a ridiculous position that is tantamount to a joke.

Seriously, while on the one hand I welcome that we have become more culturally sensitive, on the other hand in some situations we should just get a thicker skin and learn again to say 'nope'.

[effingwewt]

Yea I remember when it went down, being a lifelong user of VLC I was pretty active there. It seemed obvious to me it was a joke, but so many were sure it was not.

Happened here the other day in a Perl thread. Someone made a pretty funny (to me) joke. Having used Perl too much I appreciated the joke but some read it differently.

Like the tabs v spaces, Vim or Emacs, to me it seems funny and nothing to get riled over but some just become so invested in taking offense/personal.

[mjthompson]

You're right, one might invoke Poe's law in relation to complaints about a hat on a cone.

[ryandrake]

At what point does a software become mission critical? Would we be so accepting of this easter egg if it was in 'cat' or 'grep' rather than 'man'? I mean, yes, it's open source, so all downstream users can patch it out, but shouldn't unexpected output be considered a bug by the main upstream maintainer? How about an official branch, man-with-easter-eggs for users who want to debug this kind of fun at 00:30 in the morning.

[GrinningFool]

Conversely why does your determination that an open source project is 'mission critical' to your use case obligate the author to make any changes at all for you?

[ryandrake]

I don't think the maintainer should be obligated to do anything. It would be courteous to treat it as a bug and maybe even provide a patch so that downstream users can easily fix it, but not an obligation. It looks like this one is already fixed so the point is moot.

If the primary maintainer of 'cat' decided it would be funny to have it output "meow" when run at 00:30 in the morning, it's totally their right to do it. I'd expect a lot of downstream users wouldn't find it that funny and would want to patch it out pretty quickly.

[Delk]

I don't think 'man' is that commonly used in scripts or as part of other automated processes that could go wrong. Most other unix utilities are fairly commonly used that way and a small behavioural change could be expected to break something somewhere just due to the sheer volume of use.

I'm not actually that surprised the easter egg broke something for someone even in 'man', for the exact same reason, but it's probably less expected than with grep and lots of other unix utilities.

[thrwyoilarticle]

>If you don't like it, fork it.

Go ahead.

The question wasn't asking for it to be removed, this is wholly the author's decision. Can we not overreact?

[63]

I think it's mildly offensive to some because they view utility software as a tool that's meant to be invisible. You don't want your hammer singing Christmas carols even if it's harmless. It just feels out of place for this item that's supposed to have a single purpose which otherwise would do one thing and only that one thing. I understand the argument that it's fun, but I think the "it's fun" people are a little too quick to react when others say they don't want it. No one's trying to ruin your good time, it just feels weird. Sometimes I'd rather my tools be impressionless and predictable.

[agumonkey]

Lets have mandatory forks before whine and enjoy the silence :)

[IshKebab]

> If you don't like it, fork it.

The original request was ridiculous but in fairness the "if you don't like it, fork it" attitude is really bad too. Forking something isn't zero cost. You'd have to maintain it, and then try to get developers to come to your fork, teach users about your fork, and then you end up with the annoying ffmpeg/libav situation where you have two similar but different projects.

It's kind of like saying "if you don't like Trump why don't you just leave?".

A better and more honest response would have been "I have considered your idea and I unfortunately disagree and won't implement it."