Reprinted with permission from the Free Software Fellowship

There has been a lot of discussion this week about the ethics of revealing and discussing Amandine Jambert's real identity and connection between her CNIL and FSFE roles. Just as with the Mollamby scandal in Debian, it has been necessary to consider both privacy and public interest in the same equation.

Some of the public interest factors in the Jambert case:

• Jambert had used her pseudonym, cryptie, to sign multiple emails intimidating the Fellowship representative, a volunteer elected by the community.
• Jambert is in a leadership role in FSFE, encouraging other volunteers to do work for her. Those volunteers don't have the ability to vote for a representative any more.
• Multiple people chose to resign from FSFE after abuses of volunteers' privacy. Jambert ignored these resignations and decided to stay in the organization.

Matthias Kirschner famously made this comment at the end of 2018:

One general wish -- which I agreed with -- from Debian was to better share information about people

When he wrote that, did he anticipate sharing information about Jambert?

This photo of the FSFE e.V. members was taken outside LinuxHotel, Essen, when they decided to impose more conflict on the free software community. Two of the resignations occurred immediately after this photo. Do these people owe Jambert and the rest of the community an apology? ⬆