US/Europe divergence: health & safety, criminality & Debian harassment culture: Open Digital Ecosystems submission F33370170
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
10:30 Tue, 10 Feb 2026
On 3 February 2026 Software Freedom Institute lodged a submission with the European Commission's inquiry into Open Digital Ecosystems. All the submissions can currently be browsed and searched online. Here is a direct link to our submission F33370170. Due to JavaScript, the pages load very slowly in some web browsers.
Please save a copy. Every time somebody posts inconvenient truths about the Debian harassment culture, the misfits launch a pestering campaign to have the documents censored.
Some people downloaded an earlier version of the submission on 2 February 2026. On the evening of 3 February 2026, I updated the document with a new version to fix some PDF hyperlink issues in the table of contents.
The submission includes a full copy of the claims submitted in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Thousands of submissions were made from all around Europe. This appears to be the only one including evidence about health and safety, evidence about criminality and evidence about a White House employee from the Obama administration. Everybody from the Pope to President Biden's celebrity dogs Major and Commander got a well-deserved mention.
The claim demonstrates the inconvenient coincidence that the US military removed themselves from the Debian open source mailing lists just before a whole bunch of European developers died. This could have been nothing more than coincidence but the optics are not good in the current climate.
Message-ID: <3B4F65ED0509E441A6DA0C468CFF5D4A0F40B7@kleb3209klns008.EUR.DS.ARMY.MIL>
From: "[redacted] (7th Sig Bde, IAM)" <[redacted]@us.army.mil>
To: "'security@debian.org'" <security@debian.org>,
"'debian-private@lists.debian.org'" <debian-private@lists.debian.org>,
"'team@security.debian.org'" <team@security.debian.org>
Subject: Re: remove me
Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2006 07:36:59 +0200
List-Id: <debian-private.lists.debian.org>
Remove me from your mailing list, For some reason I just started getting
all kinds of mail that I did not request.
[redacted]
The implication is at least some people could see the burden of Debianism was constantly increasing. Remember some people even felt help from a therapist or psychiatrist was needed for this group.
Subject: Total world domination through therapy and free software! Date: Sun, 31 Dec 2006 13:25:08 +0100 From: Amaya <amaya@debian.org> Organization: Debian - http://www.debian.org/ To: debian-private@lists.debian.org
Russell Coker wrote: > True. But we can only change some things and only in some areas.
Sure, we are just humans :)
> I will always have little sympathy for someone who complains bitterly > about unfairness when by any objective metric they would be regarded > as being in the most fortunate few percent of the world's population.
Yes, as in having clean tab water. Ack.
> Do you think it might be beneficial to have some group sessions at > Deb-conf's to help us deal with these things?
I strongly believe in the group sauna effect :)
> Debian has a huge pile of money that is apparently not being spent, > booking a good psychiatrist for a day for every DebConf would not make > much of an impact on Debian finances and might have a good impact on > productivity.
s/psychiatrist/therapist/ Maybe someone that is experienced in large voluntary communities could give a talk, or workshop, or both.
It would be interesting to know wether anyone knows a person that could help us this way. I could talk to some people if the idea doesn't look stupid to the rest you the people reading this.
-- ·''`. If I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution : :' : -- Emma Goldman `. `' Proudly running Debian GNU/Linux (unstable) `- www.amayita.com www.malapecora.com www.chicasduras.com
Some of the victims were confirmed cases of suicide, some of them may be accidents from overworking. Thiemo Seufer (Christmas day working, car accident in Germany), Richard Rothwell (undercapitalised open source company, suicide in UK), Frans Pop ( Debian Day volunteer suicide, Netherlands), Adrian von Bidder-Senn ( discussed like a copy-cat suicide, died on our wedding day, Switzerland), J.H.M. Ray Dassen (died shortly after spats that coincided with his 40th birthday, Netherlands), Elias Diem (died by hiking accident when with a work colleague, may have been fooled to give huge bequest to FSFE nigerian fraud).
The claim also lists European victims subject to blackmailing, humiliations, exploitation and other harassment from the overlords. These people did not die. They include Daniel Baumann (Switzerland), José Manuel Santamaria Lema (Spain), Dr Norbert Preining (Austria), Sonny Piers (France) and Dr Jacob Appelbaum (US citizen residing in Germany) and numerous Albanian women revealed by the female whistleblowers.
Certain American multinationals got richer and richer while the people who built the open source eco-system were left to sleep on the tables at TU Darmstadt in Germany:
The claim demonstrates how open source developers, intoxicated by the money from American multinationals, spent France's national holiday plotting to blackmail people with the hammer as a metaphor for coercive control.
I wasn't at the blackmail meeting. I was in Lyon watching the French police and military parade:
It is my understanding that police in multiple countries were already looking at this very closely before it was published on the European Commission web site.
More blog posts about the lawsuit.
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