Don't do it.

People will hate you for it... and never, ever let you live it down. :-/

Other than the Caddy debacle, there was a short-lived attempt to run ads in the output of npm install, which also backfired spectacularly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20786981.

I think if there was a magic button to remove any and all advertising from the internet, most people would press it, consequences be damned. You really need to think hard before hitching your cart to that horse.

He's speaking from experience. But, if your circumstances aren't exactly the same, the outcome may be different.

Credits pages in software, accessible from the main UI, used to be very common, and having names there -- or embedded in source code -- doesn't violate a user expectation.

Server software sending 'Server:' headers also doesn't violate user expectation, though some people prefer to turn these off.

Custom headers that cannot be turned off have a higher likelihood of violating user expectation.

To the OP: in open source projects, some users will attempt to remove undesired behavior, within the rights afforded by the license, but these exercises of copyright can interact adversely with trademarks and other brand protections, and with the surrounding (human) infrastructure and information-space around a project (e.g. names, URLs, references to services, secrets).

Your attempts to reconcile such a situation are nontrivial, and both inaction and action have a high likelihood of resulting in bad press (e.g. user confusion about fork, or heavy-handed enforcement). The harm will persist long after the original situation has been resolved or mitigated.

> some users will attempt to remove undesired behavior,

Surely. But a link in a comment to a supporter who helped finance the project is not really "behavior" is it? It is not part of the program that executes.

So it is not "undesired behavior" since it is not behavior at all.

But is it "undesired" in other ways?

If you put in a copyright notice into the source code, that is a kind of advertising for whoever's name is in it. Often comments contain links to the website of whoever maintains the source-code. Is that undesired? If not then what would be so undesirable about putting in a link to the website of whoever supported the project financially.

And if they paid for that, they would be supporting the project financially. And in the end isn't that what we want, financial support for Open Source projects?

Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, BSD License literally had an "advertising clause".

The only question would be whether it should be used only for non-transferable "moral" authorship or transferable as the author chooses.

> only hackers read source-code

maybe I'm behind the times, but is 'hacker' now colloquial to mean 'anyone who codes'? Plenty of normal software engineers / devs, who are by no means 'hackers' (myself included) read the source code.

Inside the community, a hacker (as opposed to "cracker" or "security hacker") is someone who uses technology in a creative way.

My understanding of hacker is specifically someone who exploits vulnerabilities in code. Regular programmers are like building architects, hackers are like people holding up a mask so that the facial recognition powered NEST lock will let them inside the building.

so what do we call undesirables like anonymous and so on?

"crackers" or "security hackers". I'm sure most people on this site would consider themselves to be some form of "hacker", after all, this is "Hacker News".

"cracker" or "security hacker"

Every programmer of course reads some source-code because they must read their own source-code. But such a programmer might use an Open Source library without reading its course. Whereas if you are truly hacker you are interested in how things work and you would more likely be reading such source.

I agree that definition of "hacker" is somewhat vague but mostly people understand it the same way depending on context.

I assume that reason dedicated programmers are called hackers is that earlier the the word "hack" referred to writers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_writer

What the hack, there's even a pub called "Old Hack"

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g188644-d10512...

You're actually too far ahead of the times.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/

It has been tried And The Results Will Surprise You: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15237923