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: Call for votes

   > I think we have more people working just on "liason with the FSF"
   > than debian has as core developers (as opposed to random packagers
   > like myself.)
   Hm.

To clarify a bit, remember that 
	1) Cygnus ships "CDK", the Cygnus Developers Kit, which includes
		gcc, g++, binutils, gdb, libg++, a bsd-based libc,
		gas, and lots of other bits.
	2) Cygnus employees are the "primary maintainers" for:
		g++, gdb, gas,
		most (maybe all?) of binutils (via bfd)
		a number of gcc "backends" (sparc, h8/300, z8000, others)

All of these involve a lot of interaction with the FSF - for example,
when the FSF wants to print a CDROM, they want a public release of
just about everything shortly before the CDROM deadline, so it gets
tested and the CDROM is both solid and current (it seems that the
money the FSF gets from media sales is a signficant source of
funding...)

A more serious example is the gcc issue: the official maintainer of
gcc is kenner@nyu; he coordinates, does engineering work himself, and
"owns" the tree, but we maintain an independent source tree (pulling
in changes from snapshots, getting our fixes to the correct FSF
maintainers so it gets integrated there as well.) This is a lot of
work, but is necessary to the relationship. I think we're between one
and two FTE's just on the synchronization...

It also helps that our founders know RMS personally from years and
years ago (Tiemann wrote g++, gumby was an MIT-AI lab hacker, and
gilmore, well, his username has been "gnu" for a long time :-) They do
step in and deal with the relationship directly at times.

So, between the time spent by the individual maintainers, the merging,
and the founders' work on it, we probably use at least as much
bandwidth as bruce+ian+shimon+the other ian+peter tobias (plus others
I've missed, these are just the names that come to my mind - not meant
to credit or discredit, just to give an idea of scale - probably
aren't more than five more people to add to that list anyway, right?)
do just to get Debian to happen *at all*.

In summary, it doesn't surprise me at all that a relationship between
the Debian Project and the FSF would be too "expensive" to
consider. And remember, if all of the important parts of debian are
GPL'ed or BSD'ed, the FSF can choose to take their own resources to
start from there and produce a release of their own, "standing on our
shoulders" as it were... so it isn't like we're trying to stop the FSF
from doing something themselves.