No discrimination by political opinion is not practically possible. [LWN.net]

No discrimination by political opinion is not practically possible.

Posted Jun 30, 2026 12:45 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Bug of feature? by alx.manpages
Parent article: Xsnow "protestware" in Debian

You now have a hard problem to solve; some Russian speaking Ukrainians want their system to display the Ukrainian flag to represent the ru_UA locale, and a refusal to include the Ukrainian flag is discriminating against their political opinions, because (while being Russian-speaking), they believe that Ukraine is separate from Russia.

As evgeny's post makes clear a Russian resident may well have good reason to want their system to never display the Ukrainian flag, because there are Russians who, as a matter of political opinion, consider its very existence a problem, and expect you to show the Russian Federation flag instead (since they consider Ukraine to be a Russian Federation province, currently in active rebellion).

At this point, you have a problem to resolve: how do you ensure that a Russian looking for the "right" Russian locale for their needs does not see the Ukrainian flag, while also ensuring that the Ukrainian looking for the "right" Russian locale for their needs does see it?

More generally, this is Popper's paradox of tolerance; there are limits to what you can include if you're trying to be inclusive, and that area of philosophy gets quite complex.

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No discrimination by political opinion is not practically possible.

Posted Jun 30, 2026 14:23 UTC (Tue) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link] (11 responses)

And flag wars create their own problems. Debian at one point lost a very capable developer over arguments over appropriate nomenclature/locales/flags for Chinese locales (and the nature/extent of proper sovereignty and naming/political considerations) concerning Taiwan. It's one reason why Debian doesn't normally link locales with flags.

xsnow is strictly an optional package - anyone who doesn't need it can remove it without compromising the other functionality of their system.

Unfortunately too, protest ware is hard to limit: I remember reading of something that was not to be used by S. African police. This with the intention of creating problems for them under the apartheid regime.
Unfortunately, the ban continued into post-apartheid S. Africa where the software was still useful.

No discrimination by political opinion is not practically possible.

Posted Jun 30, 2026 15:27 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

The added problem here is that whether or not xsnow counts as "protestware" depends on your point of view. The thing that makes it "protestware" is that it displays a certain symbol, and if you're in a specific subset of locales, it displays that symbol much more frequently than if you're not.

It doesn't ban you from using or modifying it (you could, quite legally, replace extratree.xpm with something else, for example), unlike your example of a program not to be used by South African police. As a result, it's not really "protestware" in the same sense as your second example, because a Russian could easily have a package to replace extratree.xpm with (say) a drawing of a larch (or other tree). Further, once we have world peace, and flags stop upsetting people, the xsnow "protest" becomes a non-issue; it's only an issue because of current political views in the Russian Federation.

No discrimination by political opinion is not practically possible.

Posted Jul 1, 2026 8:49 UTC (Wed) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link] (9 responses)

> xsnow is strictly an optional package - anyone who doesn't need it can remove it without compromising the other functionality of their system.

Putting myself in the shoes of the hypothetical victim here: After unexpectedly displaying Ukrainian flags and being punched, I likely would remove xsnow. But I would still have been punched.

This is cheap protest by the developer because they are not at risk of harm, but we are potentially putting some of our users at risk of harm by continuing to include the protest. At a bare minimum we should make it unsurprising behaviour: prominently document that xsnow might show the Ukrainian flag in the package description, manpage, etc. But removing the hack would be less work and a better response, IMHO.

No discrimination by political opinion is not practically possible.

Posted Jul 1, 2026 9:27 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (8 responses)

Similarly, including the English language means that if you display English (instead of Spanish) unexpectedly, you can be punched, and will then likely remove everything that's English, not Spanish.

The standard of "potentially putting some of our users at risk of harm" is a difficult one, because just about anything you can think of as "reasonable" is likely to ban significant chunks of the distribution; for example, anything Internet-connected that doesn't have a permit from the appropriate government authorities can get you into trouble in some places - and it's reasonable to assume that if the OS lets you install it, it has the right permits.

No discrimination by political opinion is not practically possible.

Posted Jul 1, 2026 9:46 UTC (Wed) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link] (6 responses)

(Hello Farnz. long time no see!)

Frankly no, I don't think it's a difficult one. There's a reasonable expectation that you will encounter English when using Debian. There is not a reasonable expectation of encountering the Ukrainian flag when using xsnow.

No discrimination by political opinion is not practically possible.

Posted Jul 1, 2026 10:15 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (5 responses)

Why? If I've set my language to Spanish, why should I expect that it will show English unexpectedly?

That's something that only happens because Debian has deliberately decided that English is the fallback language - just as the xsnow upstream developer has decided that Ukrainian flags would be pretty in his application.

No discrimination by political opinion is not practically possible.

Posted Jul 1, 2026 10:19 UTC (Wed) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link]

No, the xsnow upstream developer has decided that Ukrainian flags would be pretty to *specifically* annoy (I wish to believe he didn't intend them to be punished more seriously) Russian-speaking users.

No discrimination by political opinion is not practically possible.

Posted Jul 1, 2026 11:43 UTC (Wed) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link] (3 responses)

> Why? If I've set my language to Spanish, why should I expect that it will show English unexpectedly?

Because that's the long-term, actual experience any non-english user has of any linux distribution, now and always.

> That's something that only happens because Debian has deliberately decided that English is the fallback language

Yes, Debian and everyone else, and always.

It's a false equivalence to compare this to the xsnow situation.

No discrimination by political opinion is not practically possible.

Posted Jul 1, 2026 11:50 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (2 responses)

Why? In both cases, it's a decision that was made by upstream developers, and that Debian has adopted as-is, and that puts people's lives at risk.

One is an older decision, and the other is newer, but that's about it in terms of difference.

Standards

Posted Jul 1, 2026 12:30 UTC (Wed) by alx.manpages (subscriber, #145117) [Link] (1 responses)

English is the de-facto-standard language when local language is not available. That's not something decided by Debian, nor any upstreams. That's not even exclusive of software. If a random person is traveling and doesn't know the local language, they're going to try English, most likely.

Standards

Posted Jul 1, 2026 13:20 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

But if we're saying that the existence of Russian criminals who will assault you for daring to have a Ukrainian flag on your screen briefly justifies modifying Debian so that this can't happen by mistake, why doesn't the existence of South American criminals who will assault you for daring to have English on your screen briefly justify modifying Debian so that this can't happen by mistake? For example, changing software to say the equivalent of "translation not available - available languages are English, French, …" in whatever your chosen language is if you've chosen to ask for translations

In both cases, the risk is that a criminal will take offence at what you've got on your screen, and assault you for it. In both cases, the decision to put the "wrong" thing on your screen is not being made as a Debian patch - rather, it's something upstream of them.

Oh, and for added fun - why is it OK to upset Ukrainians by removing xsnow's upstream's expression of support for their country, but not OK to upset Russians?

No discrimination by political opinion is not practically possible.

Posted Jul 1, 2026 14:24 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> Similarly, including the English language means that if you display English (instead of Spanish) unexpectedly, you can be punched, and will then likely remove everything that's English, not Spanish.

As an aside, my (English) family name, if pronounced correctly, is a slur in Turkish.