Bug#771126: Bug#771191: Bug#771126: Bug#771191: Bug#771126: libav/tests/lena.pnm: also not mentioned in debian/copyright

[Russ Allbery]

Fabian Greffrath <fabian at greffrath.com> writes:
> Am Dienstag, den 02.12.2014, 23:29 +0100 schrieb Bastien ROUCARIES:

>> And offencive (sexist) for 50% of the population the women... 

> Now it's getting really ridiculous. Gosh, it's a picture of a woman!

Er, no, it's not just a picture of a woman.  It's a cropped Playboy
centerfold.  In other words, it's a porn shot (if one from the fairly
artistic side of that spectrum) that's been cropped to remove the explicit
sexual content.  The image itself is one thing; the surrounding context of
the image makes it a bit worse.

Obviously, in terms of great problems facing the world, this isn't the
worst.  But having the standard test picture for image software be a porn
image does send certain messages, and they're probably not messages that
we (by which I mean the general software and tech industry as a whole)
actually want to be sending.  This is not a problem of Debian's creation,
and we can't fix the world, but insofar as we can contribute to not
sending those messages, I think that makes the world, and Debian, a better
place.

Thank you very much to Reinhard for doing the irritating and tedious work
of starting to replace it.  It feels like a distraction from other work
and a thankless task, I know, but small things like this really do make
people happier and help people in tiny ways.  Software became a bit less
off-putting, a bit less locked into a particular model of how genders are
"supposed" to interact, and a tiny bit more welcoming.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>