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The xsnow application, which generates an animated snowfall effect (and other pleasant diversions) for X11 desktops, does not seem like an obvious channel for political statements. Nevertheless, xsnow's maintainer seems to have included a political protest in the program: an Easter egg that is triggered when the program's language is set to Russia ("ru"). One user has complained that this functionality should be removed from the Debian xsnow package, but Debian does not seem to have any rules that forbid such a feature outright.
The complaint
On June 14, Alexander Ivanov sent a message to Debian's development list to complain that if a user's language settings were set to Russian, it would trigger " a disguised visual element (Ukrainian flags labeled as 'EXTRATREE') with a significantly higher probability ". The code is found in the src/scenery.c file beginning on line 326 in xsnow 3.8.3, the version packaged for Debian 13 ("trixie") and in 3.8.6, which is in unstable:
#ifdef USE_EXTRATREE if (global.Language && !strcmp(global.Language,"ru") && drand48() < 0.3) tt = MAXTREETYPE; if (drand48() < 0.02) tt = MAXTREETYPE; #endif
Xsnow is more likely to display Ukrainian flags ( src/Pixmaps/extratree.xpm ) if the language is set to Russian. Xsnow allows users to pick from one of several languages; when the application was set to English, I did not see any Ukrainian flags but they should pop up about 2% of the time. I did see the expected decorations such as a moon, snow, trees, polar bears, birds, and Santa with his sleigh. After I changed the language setting to Russian, xsnow immediately placed several flags on the desktop along with the other decorations. The screenshot below shows what this looks like on Debian 13.
DFSG violation
Ivanov claimed that the behavior violated the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) that are part of the project's Social Contract. Specifically, he said that the " targeted behavior " violated the principles of no discrimination against persons or groups (DFSG #5) and no discrimination against fields of endeavor (DFSG #6).
Ivanov had not filed a bug, but was, instead reporting the problem to " the wider Debian development community ". He said he took that route because the maintainer of the Debian package, Willem Vermin, is also the maintainer of the xsnow project and had been the one to introduce the change in the first place.
Chris Hofstaedtler replied that Ivanov was mistaken; the DFSG does not require that the software is non-discriminatory, but that the license for the software is. " The licenses in use do not appear to violate the DFSG's points 5 or 6. Please read the DFSG carefully next time. " Xsnow is primarily licensed under the GPLv3, though some files carry other Debian-approved licenses.
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