Death of Elias Diem: FSFE mailing list archives hidden

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 20, 2025

09:00 Mon, 20 Oct 2025

Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.

In August 2016, a message appeared on the FSFE mailing list telling us about the death of Elias Diem.

FSFE has recently blocked all access to their mailing list archives.

People trying to click the original link see an error. (Use the Wayback machine to access a backup copy of the hidden message).

The backstory is simple: Matthias Kirschner admitted that FSFE misfits have confused people to give them money. People say the FSFE is an example of identity fraud. Here is the next big leak, FSFE met with FSF in 2018, they agreed to stop tricking people but seven years later, they are still tricking people:

Subject: [GA] FSF/FSFE relations, next steps
Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2018 15:30:38 +0100
From: Matthias Kirschner <mk@fsfe.org>
To: FSFE General Assembly <ga@lists.fsfe.org>
CC: Carlo Piana <carlo@piana.eu>

[The whole process about negotiations between the FSF and the FSFE
should be treated confidential, and I do not want to see anyone sharing
information about this process outside this group, without coordinating
this with me.]

Dear members,

During FOSDEM we had another meeting with the FSF about how to move
forward with their request to change our name. From the FSF's side it
there was John Sullivan and Henry Poole (an FSF board member) and from
our side Jonas and myself.

The suggested next steps are (if no disagreement from your side):

* We would publish a joint statement in the next weeks clarifying we are
  different organisations, we have some different approaches to issues,
  that people often confuse us, and that we together want to solve this
  confusion to work better for the future of software freedom. Our
  general council, Carlo Piana, will help on this to make sure there are
  no legal disadvantages for us for any further next steps.

* There will be a series of meetings between us in the next couple of
  months. The first one would be between John Sullivan and myself in
  early March. In the meeting I insisted that we will not talk about how
  we change our name, but that the meetings will be open minded about
  possible solutions how to work together in future, and that we do not
  from the beginning already exclude certain options. After a long back
  and forth it seems, they accepted this.

# Background

The FSF was not happy about some of our past activities.  mainly the
Legal Network, us not endorsing their endorsed GNU/Linux distributions
on the website, our Free Your Android campaign (no focus on Replicant).
We had several meetings before about that during the last years, and
they asked us to rename ourself so they are the only ones speaking as an
"Free Software Foundation".
After the last meeting about this in April 2017, we had a discussion and
decided to first ask this question before taking other steps (attached
you find the briefings from last year and the discussion we had then):

  Dear John,
    after our meeting in Barcelona we had a constructive discussion in the
  FSFE about your suggestions for a rebranding. It became clear that for
  the further discussion it would be crucial to get a reply on one of our
  previous questions:
    * How does a re-branding benefit Free Software at large?
    Would you be able to send us an answer by your board on this?
     The feedback was that we would rather like to see a stronger
  cooperation, and working closer together than a split. In the framework
  agreement it is written:
      We intend, in the future, after we have gained experience working
    together, to develop a system wherein these decisions are approved
     jointly by a specific list of several major FSFs.
    Now after 15 years, we believe we have the experience of doing that. It
  has not always been a pleasurable experience, but we now know what the
  current tensions and activities are. That is why we believe that now is
  a good time to negotiate what such a system for joint decision
  making would look like.

and put those potential next steps on hold until we get a reply and can
better evaluate the situation.

As written above, the meetings with John would now focus on finding good
solutions in an open minded way how to work together in future.

Best Regards,
Matthias

--
Matthias Kirschner - President - Free Software Foundation Europe
Schönhauser Allee 6/7, 10119 Berlin, Germany | t +49-30-27595290
Registered at Amtsgericht Hamburg, VR 17030  |   (fsfe.org/join)
Contact (fsfe.org/about/kirschner)  -  Weblog (k7r.eu/blog.html)

When Elias Diem died, we also heard about the FSFE receiving an anonymous bequest of €150,000. In the financial reports for 2016, look at the total amount of donations, €395,971, it is much bigger than 2015 or 2017.

The bequest is confirmed in one of the emails that are blocked in the archive. The email has vanished from the Wayback machine.

Subject: Re: transparency about the fellowship
Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2018 21:31:07 +0200
From: Reinhard Müller <reinhard@fsfe.org>
To: discussion@lists.fsfe.org

Dear all,

Am 2018-07-09 um 20:57 schrieb Daniel Pocock:
> A single fellow also made a bequest of EUR 150,000 to FSFE and they were
> not identified publicly.

Correction: We recieved a large sum out of an inheritance where the
deceased explicitly wished to remain anonymous. We never claimed that
this person was a Fellow, and to keep anonymity of the person intact, I
will also not make any statement about whether or not the deceased was a
Fellow.

> Every corporate donor who contributes over 10%
> is named publicly.  Does anybody feel that the same transparency
> principle should apply in cases such as bequests?

We clarified this with "Initiative Transparente Zivilgesellschaft" whose
rules we follow regarding transparency, and they confirmed that it is ok
to follow the deceased's wish for anonymity.

Personally, I do not see a large risk of the deceased person trying to
influence FSFE's policy in future.

> The dissemination of the fellowship statistics on the team mailing list
> stopped shortly after the extraordinary general assembly.

Huh? There hasn't been any change in this. The statistics is still sent
each Sunday on 4:00 by a cron job.

For others reading here: the statistics shows the number of supporters
by country and the development over the past months and years. It is
sent to the "core team" mailing list so that people coordinating an
activity can get feedback about the development of supporter numbers.

> I notice that
> the fellowship numbers had been increasing last year but in the last few
> months it has been decreasing.  Personally, I suspect that two factors
> may be responsible:
>
> [...]

Maybe it's the discussion currently happening on some public mailing
lists which create the impression that FSFE is mainly busy with its own
internals rather than doing actual work. It is unfortunate that such an
impression comes up, because it does not match reality.

Thanks,
--
Reinhard Müller * Financial Team
Free Software Foundation Europe

In 2017, minutes from the FSFE annual general meeting tell us they put the money into a financial reserve that they can use to pay redundancy payments whenever people stop donating to the FSFE. In 2018, they removed elections and Fellowship representatives from the FSFE constitution, in other words, confirming the FSFE is not really a community group, it is a lobbyist for corporate interests. In the minutes of the 2021 annual meeting, the misfits admit that the bank account is losing value due to inflation and fees.

The real reason they are hiding the email archives now is to stop search engines from showing us messages about the origins of the FSFE. They don't want people to look at the early discussions when people like Elias Diem were tricked into joining them instead of the real FSF. Ironically, Google has been the biggest sponsor of FSFE in many years but they don't want the FSFE history visible in Google search results.

In Switzerland, there is no public report from a coroner and no official cause of death is disclosed to the public.

Nobody has really commented on the fact he spent Saturday with a work colleague. Did they spend the last day of his life discussing their unpaid duties and chores in the FSFE "community"?

I found news reports telling us that a man of 39 years died in the location described by the FSFE email. None of the news reports give the name of the man so while we can consider the possibility that these are reports about Elias Diem, we can not be certain they are about the same death unless they give us the name.

News reports use the word accident in a very liberal sense to describe any unexplained death.

Here is the original email sent to the FSFE mailing list, translated from German:

I have some bad news. On Saturday afternoon, Elias was hiking in the Graubünden mountains with our mutual friend Roman Willi. On the descent, Elias chose a different, shorter route than Roman on a small section, about 100 to 200 meters. It wasn't a particularly dangerous spot. It was a steep grassy slope and some rocks. Elias fell on his way. When Roman reached him, he found him unconscious but breathing. Since there was no cell phone reception, Roman had to run to the nearest alpine pasture on the nearby hiking trail. This took him about a quarter of an hour. Rega was alerted. The two of them, along with the farmer's son, sprinted back to the scene of the accident. Shortly thereafter, Rega arrived on the scene. Unfortunately, the Rega doctor could only pronounce him dead. Elias had suffered a severe skull fracture and cerebral hemorrhage. He was certainly unconscious immediately after impact.

The more precise location was the descent from the Glegghorn to the Fläscheralp. Police mountaineering experts visited the scene of the accident today, Sunday. Their findings indicated that no particular danger was visible from the top where Elias had started. For an experienced hiker like Elias, it was acceptable to choose this route.

Information about a farewell will follow in a few days.

If I have forgotten to add someone to the email list, please forward this email to them.

(To protect human life and make the work of the emergency services easier, at a bare minimum, you should always carry a Personal Locator Beacon (PLB) when hiking, four-wheel-driving, sailing or engaging in other activities outside the areas covered by mobile phone networks. In addition to a PLB, it is highly recommended to obtain an amateur radio license and carry a handheld radio.)

Was he tricked to spend his Saturday talking about FSFE work?

Remember the sweatshop weekend in Darmstadt, Germany where people were tricked to work for free and sleep on the desks.

Adrian von Bidder-Senn also died in Switzerland. He died on our wedding day and they discussed it like it was part of the Debian suicide cluster.

Death of Elias Diem: FSFE mailing list archives hidden

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