I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing. Subtle but unusual is a good way to describe it.

However, I would like to point out that if it is their branding, then the character appearing is an advertisement for the service. It’s just not very conventional or effective advertising, but they’re not making money from a vast majority of implementations, so it’s not very egregious anyway.

Yeah, it seems entirely optional. It’s not like manually removing the Anubis character will revoke your access to the code. However, I still do find it a bit weird that they’re asking for that.

I just can’t imagine most companies implementing Anubis and keeping the character or paying for the service, given that it’s open source. It’s just unprofessional for the first impression of a company’s website being the Anubis devs’ manga OC…