[cjwatson44]

I'm the author. Wow, this is suggesting a lot more drama than actually happened. I just decided that the joke (which after all was not exactly the height of sophisticated comedy) had had its day. I'm sure I could have dug my heels in and made a big thing of it, maybe freewheeling open source developer versus humourless corporate internet, and I imagine I'd have had people lining up as defenders and detractors and whatever, but the thing is ... if I'd done that, it wouldn't have been funny any more anyway, so why bother?

For me, the point of an Easter egg in software is to make people who discover it smile without getting in their way: make a few people's days a little brighter. The nature of this one was that it wasn't all that likely that people would notice it - you had to run man without non-option arguments at the right time and you also had to know enough about ABBA for the output to remind you of the lyrics. For six years I heard barely a peep about it, and I'd pretty much forgotten about it myself, then suddenly it turns up on Stack Exchange and is all over the internet. Somebody on HN suggested that maybe this was the fewest bits needed to encode a widely-distributed earworm. The Register later had a comment thread on it full of ABBA puns. I'd only ruin it if I decided to be an arse about it; for a formerly-obscure silly bit of code, it isn't going to get any better than this anyway.

Four years later, it still occasionally crops up and I get an ABBA earworm for the next day. I'm not sad about that!