Jérémy Bobbio (Lunar), Magna Carta and Debian Freedoms: RIP
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
Jérémy Bobbio (Lunar) passed away on 8 November 2024. It is uncanny but that is exactly 30 years after Oregon voted to legalize euthanasia and it is exactly ten years after Lunar disclosed his cancer diagnosis on a Debian mailing list, debian-private, the gossip network that is being used to spread rumors about developers. While Lunar advanced computer security in many technical initiatives, the gossip on debian-private enables social engineering attacks, therefore, gossip is like a cancer too.
Here is the message from 26 November 2014, it was sent some days after the diagnosis, hence the observation that he lived with the disease for almost exactly 10 years. He thought it would just be a couple of months. It turns out people make mistakes.
Subject: [semi-VAC] A couple of months? Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2014 20:42:26 +0100 From: Lunar <lunar@debian.org> To: debian-private@lists.debian.org
My fellow Debianites,
I have been diagnosed with kidney cancer, and it seems there's some metastases in my lungs. A few doctors have decided it's worth doing many things to make me live some more. (Another privilege to acknowledge.) I'm going to follow them and see where it goes…
The first things are going to come up pretty quickly now, but I'm not sure how long treatments will last or how much they will affect me. What is clear is that getting better will take most of my life in the next weeks and probably months.
Please take care of my packages if I'm not responsive; or if I'm responsive but don't follow-up afterwards. Basically, consider me unreliable.
I want to keep working on reproducible builds at least a little, as it's a good source of pleasure. You are welcome to join the fun. :)
[ Never to be disclosed. ]
Be well, -- Lunar .''`. lunar@debian.org : :Ⓐ : # apt-get install anarchism `. `'` `-
Moving on from that, we can see that Lunar made significant contributions to the harassment of Dr Jacob Appelbaum. It appears that Lunar was opposed to everything that has been achieved for the right to due process since the signing of the Magna Carta over eight hundred years ago.
It is really important to look at this email now because the cool kids on debian-private might be using similar tactics in the GNOME conspiracy against Sonny Piers.
Lunar did not allow the cancer to get in the way of his fight against due process. He even went beyond that, advocating for gaslighting. Look at the comments about creating a "support group" to brainwash Dr Appelbaum to believe he really might be a rapist:
Subject: Re: Jacob Appelbaum and harrassement Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2016 02:12:01 +0200 From: Jérémy Bobbio <lunar@debian.org> To: debian-private@lists.debian.org CC: da-manager@debian.org
Hi!
Since these stories have been published, I kept myself referring to a zine [1] jointly done by two organizations working on supporting survivors of sexual assault and ending rape culture. I strongly recommend you have a look, it's not that long.
The zine list nine principles on how to support survivors of sexual assault. They've been very helpful to me, you might want to have a look.
[1]: http://www.phillyspissed.net/sites/default/files/survivor-support.pdf
Konstantinos Margaritis: > I'm curious, is everyone else OK with expulsion, without having heard the side of > the accused first? Disclaimer, I do not have any interest to the Tor project, and > this is the first time I've actually heard of Jacob and his behaviour. I'm assuming > that all the stories are true, but I'm not at all comfortable with expulsion, > or any other "punishment" coming officially from Debian, without first hearing his > side and at least having given him the right to respond to many of the emails here.
The process you describe is modeled on “coercive justice”. I think we should instead be supporting survivors, and making sure that Debian can be as safe and welcoming as possible.
The first principle given in the above zine is “Health & Safety First”, and the second is “Restore Choice”.
So let's hear what people who have been abused has to say on what needs to be done for their health and safety:
Alison Macrina who has been advocating Debian and its derivatives to many libraries and activists has made the following demand in her statement, amongst others [2]:
Jake must be excluded from all community activities as a precondition for healing.
Isis Lovecruft who attended DebConf13 and is a longtime Debian user and advocate has made the following demand to the communities, amongst others [3]:
We need to entirely remove abusers from our communities, until such a time as they have sufficiently demonstrated to their victims that their abusive behaviours will no longer continue. Jake should be removed from all places where his victims, their loved ones, and friends might come into any form of contact with him. Given the enormous amounts of pain myself and the other victims have gone through, the draining emotional stress, and (please excuse my rather dark humour) the development time wasted, I am not willing to revisit this issue for at least four years. After that time has passed, it may be possible to reassess whether there is any path forward for Jake.
As such I support preventing Jacob Appelbaum from participating in Debian until a process took place for him to work on his issues enough to make those who have been abused and their friends confident that he will not commit more abuses.
[2]: https://medium.com/@flexlibris/theres-really-no-such-thing-as-the-voiceless-92b3fa45134d [3]: https://blog.patternsinthevoid.net/the-forest-for-the-trees.html
If people want to care about Jake, I suggest listening to Alison again:
People who love Jake and want him to heal should make a support group for him. Those people should bear in mind that he has not apologized nor admitted to any wrongdoing, and they should hold him accountable for what he’s done.
For how this can be done, you can get some ideas from the work of Philly Stands Up which they have documented [4].
[4]: https://communityaccountability.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/philly-stands-up.pdf
Given some of the emails I've read here, we do have work to do in order to keep Debian as safe and welcoming as possible. We do have to educate ourselves and newcomers on boundaries, consent, gender-based violence, abuse prevention, accountability processes…
Others already wrote a few things about this, so I'm not going to develop further, and discussing this on public channels might probably more effective.
Oh, and principle 8 is “It's Not About You”.
Seriously, it's not. Your needs won't help the people who have been abused or Jake.
-- Lunar .''`. lunar@debian.org : :Ⓐ : # apt-get install anarchism `. `'` `-
In my last couple of blog posts on my own site and the Software Freedom Institute site, I've discussed the invalid Swiss judgment based on lies and forgeries. One thing that people have failed to notice is the false judgment attacks the principle of free redistribution. It is this paragraph here:
Translated to English, it says:
Daniel Pocock has revoked the Debian Project Code of Conduct and stated that he has the right to authorize joint authors to use the name Debian in domains. On the site debiangnulinux.org, he has used the Debian open use logo and he has offered a copy of Debian for people to download.
The Debian Code of Conduct was never accepted or consented to by the vast majority of Debian co-authors. Less than 25% of co-authors consented to the Code of Conduct. Therefore, it was not even valid in the first place. You can't revoke a Code of Conduct that wasn't valid in the first place.
The use of the Debian open use logo is authorized very clearly.
If somebody was distributing a virus or some other random software under the name Debian it would be confusing and wrong. But what they accuse me of doing is distributing a genuine copy of Debian. Debian was the birthplace of the Debian Free Software Guidelines and the right to distribute genuine copies of Debian has always been there.
Moreoever, any co-author or joint author of intellectual property has the right to unilaterally redistribute copies of the joint work as they see fit, according to this legal guidance from UC Berkeley:
Joint authorship occurs when two or more people work together on a creative work. In this case, all creators have equal rights to distribute and alter the work, and they must split profits among each other.
That is always the case unless we have entered into a signed agreement with colleagues whereby we agree to only distribute the work through a specific agent or channel. Employment contracts for IT workers almost always include provisions to prevent such unilateral distribution but in Debian, we are not employees and we never signed anything giving up our rights under copyright law.
Pretending that some of us don't have the right to redistribute copies of Debian is a form of gaslighting, a lot like gaslighting Dr Appelbaum with a "support group" to brainwash him to believe the social media rumors that he could be a rapist.
Therefore, while the judgment is invalid, it appears to be contradicting the DFSG. What they have written is actually worse than IBM Red Hat's decision to restrict the RHEL source code.
Lunar, Magna Carta & Debian Social Contract. Rest In Peace. █