Standards [LWN.net]

Standards

Posted Jul 1, 2026 12:30 UTC (Wed) by alx.manpages (subscriber, #145117)
In reply to: No discrimination by political opinion is not practically possible. by farnz
Parent article: Xsnow "protestware" in Debian

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.

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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?