Fortune Program -Moving->RE: Wanda is broken

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 4/23/05, Patrick Barnes <nman64 at n-man.com> wrote:
> We must be careful not to offend users. Quotes that could be seen by
> anyone as offensive, or which may be protected by trademarks must be
> avoided. Clever puns related to Linux are the best candidates. Quotes
> like "There's no place like ~", while they may not be as interesting to
> many people, are unlikely to offend anyone.

Once you've begun down the road to nonoffensiveness it's pretty hard
to stop, until you're left with nothing.

A handful of years ago a bug was announced in some of the HP laser
printers that allowed you to overwrite the status screen with 16 bytes
of text via a carefully crafted packet. At the time I ran the network
for an org with an IT department of about 35 people and we had such a
printer dedicated to our department.

I wrote a script to take the entire fortune database distributed with
RH (probably around rh6 or so), and after passing each fortune through
a set of regexes that flatted whitespace and abbreviated some long
words, I threw out all that had a a final length of more than 16
characters.

I went through the list by hand and bulled out all the ones I thought
were potentially offensive, which left me with something around 70
fortunes. I then set a cron job to give us a new printer fortune every
weekday.

This was a smash hit, it made good conversation.. One person started
coming in a bit earlier so he could scoop everyone on the fortune of
the day. All was well.

About half way through the list of fortunes, I received a memo from HR
telling me that I had to turn it off: Someone had been gravely
offended by "Are we not men"

There is already a mountain of text in Fedora that someone could find
offensive if they choose to be offendable (just consider the
documentation alone!), and the same is true for any large software
problem.