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: new maintainers

On 23 Mar 1997 bruce@debian.novare.net wrote:

> The part that seems to be intolerable to me is that I can not, in all
> honesty, tell someone that I know who the programs in Debian came
> from. That's where we will _lose_trust_ in comparison to the closed
> systems like Caldera and Red Hat and the _really_ closed systems like
> NT. It will take only one catastrophe to make it clear to the world
> that Linux can't be trusted, and I can not stop that catostrophe
> whatever I do. I can only show others that I have taken reasonable
> steps to avoid it for Debian.

While I agree with you that some form of verifying new maintainers is
required, I disagree that "one catastrophe" is all it will take to tarnish
linux' or debian's reputation. 

The "_really_ closed systems like NT" have already had many more than
just one catastrophe and they are still trusted. People are still
putting them directly on the internet (which is IMO completely insane
and just begging to be hacked - NT should only ever be on the net if
protected by a properly configured firewall/gateway).


This is a marketing/perception problem, not a technical one....and
therefore should be fought with marketing means, not technical -
Publicity and press releases highlighting linux' security, and debian's
added security of having a large, open development team to scrutinise
the system rather than a small, closed team.


in any case, security is NOT the reason why people buy NT. There are two
main reasons why people buy NT: 1) familiarity with the brand minimises
their fear of the unknown, 2) nobody *ever* gets sacked for buying
microsoft, no matter how badly suited it is to the task at hand.

craig