Friday the 13th & Debian Developers afraid to nominate in DPL elections
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
08:30 Fri, 13 Mar 2026
Today is Friday the 13th and it is also the last day for people to nominate in the election for a Debian Project Leader.
In political parties, people are usually very keen to nominate for any vacancy on a committee. In most other organisations, it is not unusual for people to be shy about elections.
The role involves doing a lot of administrative work that you will never get paid for. Knowing that you will not get paid for this work, people accept these chores in the hope they can improve the organisation and have some sort of legacy.
The mindless outbreak of nitpicking against former leader Branden Robinson has changed the equation dramatically. It shows us that a leader's legacy is disposable. Look at how Andreas Tille got rid of Branden Robinson.
In other voluntary organisations, like sports clubs, they typically have a big board on the wall with the names of former leaders. There is a contract between generations. Former leaders are entitled to give their opinion in open meetings, just like anybody else.
When they censored Branden Robinson, the misfits bounced a cheque. People are even less likely to volunteer for things in future, whether it is the leadership role or any other chore.
In Debianism, each team is somewhat independent. Theoretically, the mailing list managers, the IRC managers, the Planet service managers or the Community Team nazis can each make their own decision to censor the leader if they wanted to. This means the leader never really has genuine freedom to act and he or she can always be blackmailed, manipulated and forced to dumb-down to the mindlessness of the crowd.
The FSFE Fellowship elected me as their representative, a leadership role, in 2017. Even while I was in the role, the cowards who run the mailing lists were already nitpicking what I say and hiding things from the community. They didn't have the guts to run in the elections themselves because they are cowards. They didn't even wait for my term to finish before censoring certain topics, like the theft of a bequest, which is a censored topic on mailing lists.
The best way to encourage people to nominate for the election will be for the existing leader, Andreas Tille, to withdraw all the privacy attacks, settle the lawsuits proactively and ensure the next leader can walk in and find the desk is clean ready to work on productive things.
Don't hold your breath waiting for transparency about these attacks on my family. There is still time to watch my video and contribute to the crowdfunding campaign. █