Mollamby, Suicide Cluster, not trademark, the real reasons for Debian legal expenses, evidence
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
During FOSDEM, people asked me fresh questions about the dramas and falsified statements distributed on some Debian web sites.
I want to make it as easy as possible for people to see that some of those documents are forged and fraudulent so I've extracted the relevant snippets of the documents here.
Defending trademarks or just censorship?
Here is one of the statements that is obviously a lie:
The Debian Project will continue to take all necessary measures to protect and defend its trademarks and other interests.
We can fact check and verify that statement is a lie very easily. Using services like DNSlytics, we can search the database of all domain names and find out how many contain the Debian trademark. There are over 2,655 domain names containing the trademark:
The Debian Social Contract says "We won't hide problems" but it turns out the social contract is not honoured. What we have is a lie to cover up another lie. A layer cake of lies for Debian's birthday, the Debian Day, being the day a volunteer organized his suicide. The layer cake of lies seeks to obfuscate that death.
Selectively reporting suicides
The suicide of Ian Murdock was widely reported. They even had a ceremony for him at FOSDEM.
Discussing other suicides was very inconvenient. Frans Pop had made written complaints before he died. We can go to the web site of the medical examiner in San Francisco and download the report about Ian Murdock. Why can't we talk about Frans Pop and Adrian von Bidder, discussed as if it was a copy cat suicide just a few months later?. Here is the key part of the legal documents where they seek to hide it:
Translated from French to English, it says that people asked if Debian might be responsible for the suicide and Debian is wrongly accused of covering up the suicide. Here is the message where Joerg Jaspert covers it up:
Subject: Privacy of -private list ; missing even one bit of common sense and decency Date: Sun, 22 Aug 2010 00:28:34 +0200 From: Joerg Jaspert <joerg@debian.org> Reply-To: Debian Account Managers <da-manager@debian.org> Organization: Goliath-BBS To: pascal@debian.org, lidaobing@debian.org CC: debian-private@lists.debian.org, listmaster@lists.debian.org
...
Unfortunately we also had the misfortune to read information on twitter that, to our current knowledge, must have been gathered from this -private list. We think this a very unfortunate event that is missing every kind of common sense and decency, and therefore saw forced to suspend the accounts of the people leaked from membership on this list.
Pascal/Lia Daobing: You both are no longer subscribed to debian-private, for the next 4 weeks. The one and only reason this list exists is to have a place where we can share information that is not immediately leaked into the public. Twitter is not -private. Please, in the future, respect the rules of the environment you are in, especially in such a special case like this.
Frans Pop had made his grievances public before he killed himself. Therefore, the volunteers being punished had very good reason to express concerns publicly.
Therefore, the legal documents, written in French, are fraudulent. They say there was no cover-up but these punishments were a very big cover-up.
Mollamby, who created this moniker?
Debian is a portmanteau of the names Deb and Ian. It is not uncommon to create names like this in the technology space.
At some point volunteers started using the moniker Mollamby to express concerns about a perceived relationship between Molly and Lamb. That is, Molly de Blanc and Chris Lamb. I feel the Mollamby phrase also represents the wider problem of relationships in Debian. These relationships are deterring talented women from Debian.
Here is the point in the legal documents where they become hysterical about people using the moniker Mollamby:
Here is the message from Nicolas Dandrimont when he asked me to consider his girlfriend for an Outreachy internship:
Subject: Recusing myself from Outreachy applicant selection decisions, internships funding Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2016 12:37:46 +0200 From: Nicolas Dandrimont <olasd@debian.org> To: leader@debian.org, outreach@debian.org CC: mapreri@debian.org, pocock@debian.org
Hey all,
As of today, the person I'm involved with, Pauline Pommeret, is applying to an Outreachy internship in Debian ....
To avoid an obvious conflict of interest, I am recusing myself for any decisions regarding applicant selections for this round.
...
Cheers, -- Nicolas Dandrimont
This sort of thing appears to be really common in Debian. Nobody can prove exactly who is doing it but people frequently complain about it. Why should other women waste time doing smalls projects without payment just to get an interview when other candidates are granted free travel to conferences with their partners?
Subject: retiring from Debian Date: Sun, 08 Feb 2015 19:25:00 +0100 From: Bartosz Fenski <bartosz@fenski.pl> To: debian-private@lists.debian.org
I wasn't too active recently but with the latest activity of our leader and official support for women-mini-debconf I want to retire from the project.
I don't want to be part of this anymore.
Please hereby approve my retirenment statement.
See you in project where everyone will be welcome. Not only women.
regards Bartosz Fenski
-- Please respect the privacy of this mailing list. Some posts may be declassified 3 years after posting as per http://www.debian.org/vote/2005/vote_002 Archive: file://master.debian.org/~debian/archive/debian-private/
The English lawyer wrote another document where he does not deny the Mollamby hypothesis, he only says it is a privacy violation:
Who created the name Mollamby after all?
Here they were together at an OSI board meeting at the offices of Microsoft:
As DebConf19 approached things got worse. de Blanc posted comments on her blog about breaking up in April 2019:
A few weeks after that, people in Brazil took numerous photos of the Albanian women sitting with Chris Lamb at the DebConf dinner. They took photos from every direction and published them on Flickr. People speculated that Chris Lamb was lovestruck:
These were the words of Lamb:
Subject: Re: report from OSCAL'17 Date: Wed, 24 May 2017 09:06:53 +0200 From: Chris Lamb <lamby@debian.org> To: ... , debian-project@lists.debian.org, oscal@openlabs.cc
[ ... snip ... ]
Just to underline this. It was *extremely* remarkable and commendable that not only did the demographic skew of the organisers about 15-20 years younger than a typical conference, I would wager the gender split was around 70-80% female:male.
The Albanian open source community is very healthy indeed.
Regards,
-- ,''`. : :' : Chris Lamb `. `'` lamby@debian.org / chris-lamb.co.uk `-
The two women sitting beside Lamb are Anisa Kuci and Kristi Progri from Albania.
Here is the tweet a few weeks later when the woman sitting next to Lamb found out she was chosen for an internship worth $6,000. That is at least four times the normal salary in Albania:
Here is the Tweet when Molly's job at GNOME Foundation finished. Molly made this public herself, how can the lawyerists accuse people of violating her privacy?
Now look at the GNOME Foundation team list. Anisa Kuci, the woman who was sitting beside Chris Lamb at DebConf19 appears to have Molly's job. Molly and other women too all unceremoniously replaced with two women from Albania. As Lamb put it, 15-20 years younger.
So much Debian money is spent on diversity (DEI). What are the results achieved from those expenditures? Is this good for women or is this good for the men who control the bank account?
Why are they asking the lawyerists to stop volunteers talking about the Mollamby phenomena when it is all highly visible on social media anyway?
There are over 2,650 web sites using the Debian trademark in their domain name and nobody is making any effort to stop them. This wasn't about trademarks, it was about covering up evidence of a suicide cluster and obfuscating the truth about career prospects for women. █
Please see the chronological history of how the Debian harassment and abuse culture evolved.