It may well be that GNU gettext also chokes on a BOM, because they aren't used under Linux. But I think as a Python tool it should be more Windows-tolerant. The annoying thing is that you get a syntax error, but everything looks right because the BOM is usually invisible. Such error messages are really frustrating. Either the BOM should be silently ignored (as in the patch) or the users should get a friendly error message asking them to save the file without BOM. If GNU behaves badly to Windows users, that's not an excuse to do the same. They are already suffering enough because of their (or their bosses') bad choice of OS ;-)