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: giving money to gnome

Scott Hanson wrote:

> As far as I can tell, JFL is marketing this CD as a 'Debian + KDE'
> CD... the emphasis is on Debian, not on KDE. It's an update to the
> Debian 1.3.1 CD they sold over the summer.
> http://www2.Germany.EU.net/shop/JFL/linux/debian.html contains some
> blurb (in German-- but even if you can't read German, you can see
> 'Debian' in the headline and that 'KDE' first appears as colored
> bold text on the 2nd line).

> But then at http://www2.Germany.EU.net/shop/JFL/linux/KDE5.html they
> have another blurb where they talk about a 'new KDE CD-ROM with a
> complete debian GNU/Linux'. So maybe they aren't sure themselves
> whether this is a KDE CD with debian thrown in, or a debian update
> with KDE thrown in. But I see a lot more references to Debian on
> their Linux web pages than to KDE.  So I'm pretty sure this is
> primarily a Debian CD, not a KDE CD. We'll know for sure when it
> goes on sale next week and can see the cover.

That's just marketing.  For people who want a Debian CD, they present
it as a Debian CD with KDE thrown in.  For people who want a KDE CD,
they present it as a KDE CD with Debian thrown in.  I would market
it that way too :-)

Curiously, the sequence of events (on debian-private) the way I
remember it is quite different from what I've seen described here
recently.  I'll see if I can find some mails in my archive to support
my memory.  Note that I'm trying to summarize the interaction with
the KDE people here, not the arguments among Debian developers.

Bruce Perens wrote: (Oct 27, "Debian + KDE disk")
  I got this from one of the KDE folks.

  From: Martin Konold <konold@fiwi02.wiwi.uni-tuebingen.de>
  > There will soon be a third party product consisting of Debian 1.3.x
  > plus KDE which will happily donate 2,50 Deutsche Mark to the SPI. I will
  > tell you when I know more about it. I hope you do not mind. The cover
  > shall clearly state the differences in lincenses.

  I told him  "I really wish you would not do that. However, we can't stop
  you." It sounds to me as if they are using our own policies against us.

There were a number of protests from Debian developers, and the next
day Bruce Perens wrote:

  However, I am willing to go along with the suggestion that we earmark
  donations from their disk for use in making a free replacement for Qt.
  This is what I sent Martin:

  > I discussed this with the Debian developers. We have decided that we are OK
  > with your making a disk containing KDE and Debian, but we will earmark all
  > donations we receive from that disk for use in building a free replacement
  > for Qt.

Martin Konold (from the KDE group) replied:
  > That is 100% ok for us.

Then Rob Browning commented:
  And assuming that their internal structures are at all compatible, my
  guess is that this replacement might be constructed most easily as a
  wrapper library around GTk (as was mentioned previously).

Several people volunteered to work on such a project, then David Welton
wrote:  (Nov 3, still the same thread :-)
  If FreeQT doesn't look like it will be viable anytime soon, is there a
  particular reason why we don't earmark the money for gnome?  It seems to
  be a bit closer to fruition, and a much more workable solution (see the
  gnome people's comments regarding this).

Bruce Perens replied:
  I agree it would be more proactive to earmark the money for GNOME.
  I think it qualifies as a "free Qt replacement".

Craig Small:
  GNOME would be a "free KDE replacement".

At this point, the discussion just stopped, and I don't think the KDE
group was ever informed about the decision to give the money to GNOME,
until things blew up last Tuesday.

What still puzzles me is where the decision to earmark that money came
from in the first place.  Why didn't it just go into Debian's
treasury?  If it's really just money for the Debian part of a
Debian+KDE CD, then that seems the most logical.  Do the reasons for
earmarking it still apply?

I agree that supporting GNOME is a good thing, but I don't see the
link with the KDE CD.  Let's turn the thing around: why would our
level of (financial) support for GNOME depend on how well the KDE CD
sells?

I realize that at this point it would be difficult to un-earmark the
money even if I manage to convince everyone.  I really hope that the
KDE group goes for the FreeQT deal.

Richard Braakman


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