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.
I wonder if the difference in response due to 8 years of shift in culture, or just different size of the maintainer?
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
Go ahead.
The question wasn't asking for it to be removed, this is wholly the author's decision. Can we not overreact?
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."