Holly Million, GNOME Foundation departure after Albanian whistleblower revelations
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
Various blog posts have appeared linking the GNOME Foundation to the Albanian Outreachy whistleblowers. Within days, the executive director, Holly Million, has resigned.
Resignations are not always a sign of wrongdoing. She may have simply resigned in disgust.
Given the sensitive nature of a scandal that impacts the careers of colleagues, she may not be able to say anything publicly about it.
Nonetheless, some things are very easy to check.
When Holly Million was hired nine months ago there was a lot of public criticism of the decision to hire an outsider. Being an outsider means that she had no prior knowledge of these scandals.
When I resigned from the FSFE Fellowship in 2018, I resigned in disgust. After my resignation, the Fellowship bloggers have been keeping tabs on Neil McGovern. Fellowship reports provide the most valuable background information into the problems that Holly Million inherited when she started the job.
Holly Million has been on the defensive the whole time. These problems keep popping up in different places.
In April, the rudeness from various people at Debian and their WIPO crusade forced more emails about the Outreachy scandals into the public sphere.
There was a panic to remove references to Albanian from the GNOME Foundation web site.
People noticed there was a cover-up in progress and on 4 July I published a blog showing that there is a cover-up and evidence has vanished or been edited/deleted from various web sites.
Holly Million, as a newcomer to open source, could have taken the moral high ground and offered to try and fix this. Maybe she didn't feel the GNOME Foundation board would support her. Maybe the board and her colleagues have been hiding details from her. Even if she did know everything about the history, maybe she just didn't feel this cleanup job would be worth the effort.
My blog was published at the beginning of the US long weekend for the 4th of July.
The head of internships, Felipe Borges, announced he is stepping down on 10 July, the Wednesday after my blog.
On Thursday, 11 July I posted another blog about how the sexism and gossip from Debian is a big turn-off for women. The blog concluded with the comment:
men spreading gossip like that only scare women away
Million's decision to walk away from GNOME has appeared another one day after that on 12 July.
When the phone hacking scandal came out in the UK, Rupert Murdoch made the decision to mothball his News of the World newspaper.
GNOME Foundation is different. The GNOME software is integrated into many other products and operating systems. Could the GNOME software development be taken in-house by IBM Red Hat or another one of the sponsors?
Please see the chronological history of how the Debian harassment and abuse culture evolved.
Please see the chronological history of how the Debian harassment and abuse culture evolved. █