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: Final post to debian-private

Bruce wrote:
> You are right to leave debian-private. 

I'm not really leaving it - I'm just not going to post to it.

> You did indeed violate
> confidentiality. 

I'm not so sure.  If someone writes me a private e-mail about something
unimportant, I usually don't worry about saying "so-and-so wrote me an
e-mail on this subject".  But I wouldn't cross the line and post the 
contents of the message without getting permission.  

Posts to debian-private should be treated like private e-mail.  What you
can and can't do is fairly wishy-washy and depends on the situation.  As
far as debian-private goes, I don't remember signing a "blood oath of 
secrecy" when I signed up as a Debian developer.

I'm not going to post to this list anymore because I think the 
"confidentiality" of this list is going to cause more problems than 
benefits.  It's a political stance - I'm not doing it because I feel 
remorseful (or something like that).

In particular, I think we're losing prospective developers because they 
can't really get a "handle" on what's going on just by reading debian-devel.

> In this case, it's a matter that I wanted to keep
> quiet because of the impact of this topic on the CD manufacturers. They
> provide an important service to our users and don't charge all that
> much for it. We owe them some consideration.

That's a prime example of something that you (Bruce) considers sensitive,
but really isn't that sensitive at all.  That particular topic definitely
belongs on a public list.  Frankly, I can't think of anything we've 
discussed on debian-private that can really be considered "sensitive".
Sure, there were some rather embarrassing episodes -- but things probably
would have occurred differently if we hung our dirty laundry out to dry.
 
> I agree that the users opinions are important and that we should carry out
> some arguments on public lists. Of late debian-devel has become useless for
> that purpose - it's too noisy. Perhaps more list splitting will help.

The new debian-policy list seems custom made for this purpose.  It's not 
too busy right now.  It has basically the same list of subscribers as 
debian-private, and thus it will have essentially the same signal-to-noise 
ratio.  The primary distinction is that discussion there is "on the record".
It's a shame we didn't have the DFSG debate "on the record" -- now it will
forever be a secret as to how we came up with it.

Cheers,

 - Jim

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