The debian-private mailing list leak, part 1. Volunteers have complained about Blackmail. Lynchings. Character assassination. Defamation. Cyberbullying. Volunteers who gave many years of their lives are picked out at random for cruel social experiments. The former DPL's girlfriend Molly de Blanc is given volunteers to experiment on for her crazy talks. These volunteers never consented to be used like lab rats. We don't either. debian-private can no longer be a safe space for the cabal. Let these monsters have nowhere to hide. Volunteers are not disposable. We stand with the victims.
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Re: exchange with Richard Stallman

I have been listening quietly to this discussion as a new package 
maintainer, certain that I had nothing to add to the discussion. Well, 
obviously, I was wrong :-)
I discovered Linux when someone gave me a copy of the first Linux 
Journal. This is the first, and so far the only, magazine that I have 
ever read from cover to cover. (I even read the fine print in the 
masthead) The part of that magazine that turned by head the most was the 
GNU manifesto. I called Borland the next day and returned C++ 4.0 that I 
had just received for a full credit. I also called InfoMagic and ordered 
their Linux CD. Although the GNU manifesto changed my attitude about 
software and it's production and use, what changed the practical 
implementation of these new ideas, giving me the tools to make it real, 
was, of course, Linux!
Now, I know how much Linux developers are supported in their efforts by 
the existence of GNU software. It is just not clear to me how this 
imposes a responsibility on Linux developers to support the goals of the 
GNU project even when they are divergent from the goals of the Linux 
project. 
It seems to me that Bruce rejected Richard's directional requests more 
because they seem to be an attempt on Richard's part to define work tasks 
for the Debian development group. These tasks further Richard's goals but 
do not necessarily further our goals. 
This attitude on Richard's part reminds me a lot of Henry Ford. He would, 
for instance, require that that shippers use crates of a specific 
dimension with holes drilled in pre-specified places just so he could use 
the plywood from the dismantled crates as floor boards in the car he was 
making. Many of Richard's interests lately seem to be in getting other 
development groups to do work that furthers his goals regardless of what 
they may cost the other developers.
Richard's approach to defeating the proprietary software monsters is to 
competitively remove them from the playing field by excluding them from 
his environment. The approach with Linux on the other hand is to defeat 
them by out-supporting their application programs. It is to this end that 
projects like wine and dosemu are so valuable. It is these strategic 
differences between GNU and Linux that have made cooperation difficult in 
the past (reference libc for instance) and will continue to make 
cooperation in some areas impossible in the future.
It will always be my position that cooperation is always more productive 
than competition. I must just point out that, for the most part, what 
Richard has proposed is not cooperation. 

Thanks for your time,

Dwarf

------------                                          --------------

aka   Dale Scheetz                   Phone:   1 (904) 877-0257
      Flexible Software              Fax:     NONE 
      Black Creek Critters           e-mail:  dwarf@polaris.net

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