As the text makes clear, 'protestware' as a concept is fine, destroying random people's data is not.
> When deployed, this ‘protestware’ expresses the maintainer’s opposition to the Russian government’s invasion of Ukraine. Most protestware simply displays anti-war or pro-Ukrainian messages when run. This is a non-violent, creative form of protest that can be effective.
I wonder is protestware as a concept is fine. It's a form of ads, just people pushing their opinion in front of everybody just because they can.
Sure, everybody's against the war, but what if the message was a more controversial anti-this or pro-that topic - do we really want to have these messages popup during installation and even after?
If a large project had "unpopular" opinions in the commit messages, it would be top of HN instantly and companies everywhere would be pressured into not using the project in the future. Software should do what you want, only what you want, and do that thing well. Political messages are horrible additions that accomplish nothing but isolate people and make free software look bad.
As the text makes clear, 'protestware' as a concept is fine, destroying random people's data is not.
> When deployed, this ‘protestware’ expresses the maintainer’s opposition to the Russian government’s invasion of Ukraine. Most protestware simply displays anti-war or pro-Ukrainian messages when run. This is a non-violent, creative form of protest that can be effective.