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It's actually a genius idea. If you are someone who the professional presentation of not having an anime girl on the loading page is required, then you can afford to fork over the cash to fund development.
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Per personal communication, this is precisely why the developer did that.
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I guess the disconnect here is a bunch of HN'ers believing professional companies and websites want to attach their branding to a sexualized anime character and that they are willing to pay to remove it.

Which one then wonders why they would install it in the first place.

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Sexualized? It’s just a cartoon/anime character holding a magnifying glass
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In any case, if you run a professional website, this immediately comes off as juvenile and/or amateurish. And am y people just assume it's part of your website.
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Money can be used to purchase goods or services, such as an unbranded version.
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not when you are pushing a sexualized depiction of a child in the format of a cartoon as your product

that is a no-no square in judeo christian societies

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> ... sexualized ...

Perhaps you should check if anybody else sees what you see. After browsing through every image I could find in the history of this project, I, at least, am convinced: any "sexualization" _you_ see is entirely in your head.

> ... in judeo christian societies

I really hope you're not trying to whitewash your own bias by alluding to those religions. From everything I've read of their texts, and interacted with practioners of those religions, I'm unaware of any bias that classifies _cartoon depictions of children_ as "sexual".

Perhaps you should try whitelabeling instead. Don't like the packaging? Package it yourself!

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There is absolutely nothing sexualized about the Anubis mascot.
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What specific aspects of the image do you feel are sexualized?
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> is a turnoff for anyone with a brand or personal image that doesn't mesh with those subcultures.

Most people either don’t know or don’t care about “those subcultures”. I bet a lot of older people think it’s a cartoon figure of Betty Boop (nurse) and miss the furry bit since it appears and disappears quickly. Most people also don’t have a brand.

So it seems like you’re describing a concern that only affects a tiny fraction of people:

- Not interested in paying for custom branding, so obviously not a corporation or influencer

- Dislikes cartoons

- Aware of, and hostile towards, “furry” subculture

That has to be an exceedingly small fraction of potential users of Anubis, and given how much businesses and branders will pay to custom-brand something, I’d counsel them to stay the course. Sure, a few never-payers will never pay, but they wouldn’t have anyways, so they can cope with Nurse Betty or look elsewhere for a competing free product.

If you think about this in physical market square terms — in other words, a bazaar — it seems horrendously rude to complain about a shop logo sticker on a free product handed out to anyone that walks up and asks for it. If you want it white-labeled so you can write your own name/logo on it, you pay for the privilege of displacing their name with yours. But you don’t stand there and loudly complain that their shop mascot has dog ears while holding a freebie bag of product, without losing the respect of everyone who hears you doing so.

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If you have a brand or personal image that you are investing in, you can surely afford to invest in paying for a branded version of Anubis.
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I'd argue its rather functioning exactly as intended with regards to obtaining paid users.

Also this view seems a bit elderly. For most towards the end of the millennial curve and younger, anime is no longer subculture, its just general culture at this point. Although I would agree it isnt necessarily what you'd want for every platform and web presence.

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How hard is it to maintain a fork that changes nothing except the logo?

If you can't be bothered to maintain a trivial fork, then why should the author of anubis be bothered to serve your branding needs? It's not like you have a service contract or anything do you?

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I think that's partly why they do it? If you care about that, you should pay?
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Or just have an LLM write the same thing for next to nothing...
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Pay to change logo??? Just fork Anubis and remove one div... It's not SaaS first software, you're expected to deploy it on your web server.
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They're not stopping you. They're asking you politely not to.
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I wish my rent would stop going up year over year.
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You just discovered their business model congrats.
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It's MIT licensed, you are free to do whatever you want to it, including removing the logo. They're basically just saying "we'd prefer you didn't do this, but we're not preventing you from doing it."
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haproxy-protection is an alternative.
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you really revved the weebs with this one
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Nah, I don't especially like the logo myself when I come across those sites, but I do like that "brand" people who want to make money off it and not pay dislike it even more.
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It seems to come up every time this complaint arises. "I want to use an open source project without being associated with furries" isn't that unreasonable of a request.
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My understanding is that it's nigh-impossible to run a website without having a dependency on furry-maintained infra (even just basic stuff like BGP)
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> open source project

So, one can put in the minimal effort of removing one div.

> being associated

There's no requirement of association of any kind. See above and below.

> request

Cool. Pay for your own branding. Request fulfilled. No? Then it's a demand, not a request.

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that's really smart of them. Just pay to use the service you need.
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It's open source, just ask your AI agent to change the logo.
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Just keep in mind that changing the logo is a great way to move yourself down the priority list for bug reports and support.
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Someone willing to take the 2 minutes to ask Claude to change the logo can probably also ask it to fix any bugs they find, or add any new features they might want.
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You wish they'd give your preferable imagery for free and not make you feel bad for using their free software for personal gain. Your subculture is irrelevant and not special.
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If you 'don't mesh' with that then you are not worth protecting anyway :)
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I hope I’m missing the sarcasm here…
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