Yet another reason I have a hard time trusting software that is the product of integrating many disparate pieces with different engineering processes into something used in any life-safety or mission-critical application.
If you want free-as-in-beer software, you'll take what I give you, easter eggs and all.
Anything else is just entitlement.
Your pipeline will error with an unexpected result from man, you can grep the man code for “gimme” and remove it in 2 minutes, far quicker than reading a man page.
I miss the Linux world of the 90s before all the money grabbers came. I accept I’m in a tiny minority, and that would be fine. Sadly corporate interests overwhelm the ecosystem now.
- the free version does something goofy at 11:11, but works fine otherwise
- the paid version is identical to the free version, but it doesn't do anything goofy at 11:11
Of course it would be trivial to just do this:
if time.now() == time(hours=11, minutes=11):
sleep(60)
freeversion()
Even though the e.egg broke s.o.'s pipeline, it should yet be celebrated. Why? Cause otherwise you get libfuse's author rage quitting over endless pressure on himself and his codebase for little fun and no profit.
Easter eggs are much less invasive and nasty compared to mid-video yt ads, which the world gladly takes alongside free content, including people who hate having their pipes tweaked with. Besides, there is enough evidence internet and the whole computing business works on workarounds and now with LLMs - on pure chance.
This easter egg was entirely deterministic, though.