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: FSF negociations

    Bruce> I need a poll on how positive or negative you guys are on
    Bruce> these FSF requests:

    Bruce> 1. Install 100% unstripped executables on the hard disk.

    Bruce> 2. Install source code on the hard disk whenever the binary
    Bruce> package is installed.

    Bruce> 3. Make X-Windows, Emacs, and VI standard, not optional,
    Bruce> parts of the system.

I vote no to all three.

I have been following in amazement this entire story, and perhaps I
miss something fundamental given that I know very little of how debian
came about and how you and other authoritative debian individuals
have interacted with rms.

I only know I like debian better than other distributions.

I do not understand what these three points have to do with free
software. Perhaps point 2 is related, but I have always interpreted
the GPL to mean that the source would be available, with or without
the binary, on some ftp server or on a CD or whatever medium, not that
I _must_ have the sources on the system where I have the binary.

I don't understand any of this from the technical point of view
either. Why would I want to be able to debug all the executables?
Isn't this why we have official developers? And if I really felt that
a bug ought to be fixed, as others have said, I would only then go get
the sources. I maintain just one package and find it difficult to
debug that, why on earth would I want to be able to debug the kernel?
Linux is becoming more and more popular even in professional
environments(*) exactly because it not perceived any longer as a
system that only computer geeks who can debug kernel core dumps with
vi can run (no offense, computer geeks out there: I really would like
to be one. Some people however need only an affordable and reliable
system to do some work).

A big selling point of Linux is that it runs on as small a box as
possible. At times that means no room for emacs (that I love), or X
(love that too but it's a hog), or anything that is not strictly
necessary (at one stage I had Linux on a 386sx with 5MB of RAM and 120
MB of disk, and it was a useful for work as well! Try that with
Windoze!!). Not to mention the costs (memory and disk).

Giuseppe

(*) I work for the European Space Agency. The science operations for
the next big (G-buck range) X-ray satellite will be run on a cluster
(22) of Linux boxes.