Dirty Laundry at Debian and Elsewhere
We cannot just brush aside real issues involving real people and their families
My wife and I use Debian on our laptops and our sites also run on Debian. But we cannot so simply ignore the fact of drugs in Debian [1, 2], many suicides in Debian (a lack of Duty of Care), and serious abuse inside Debian.
As a project, collectively, Debian has been failing at keeping standards high like in the 1990s; it'll suffer unless it's corrected. Maybe it's too late already.
Yesterday a Debian Developer (they might say "former", but he keeps the copyrights, so the term former is likely inadequate) wrote about the "Tom Silvagni appeal" and mentioned Debian further down, stating: "A lot of these disputes involve questions of politics, status and humiliations. If you look at the cases in the Debian suicide cluster, some of the men wrote complaints about being tricked to work as unpaid volunteers while fellow "volunteers" really got paid all along. Some of these people wrote about feeling humiliated just as victims of rape and abuse feel humiliated. Why did Adrian von Bidder-Senn die on our wedding day?"
In our case, it was even worse. My wife generally runs a site about GNU/Linux and it's not political. It's very apolitical. Moments ago, for instance, it spoke about GNU/Linux adoption in Vietnam.
Nevertheless, my wife was subjected to a lot of abuse online. Cybercrimes and hate crimes were committed against her. To be clear, a court ruled about the identity of the abuser (by negation) - or attribution where Tor gets in the way - while not denying that abuse happened. The Judge moreover noted that, in her view, neither me nor my wife did anything to invite or deserve this abuse.
It's sad that when we simply engage in advocacy of GNU/Linux there are some criminal-minded people who would attack unpaid volunteers, members of the community who just try to advance Software Freedom. █