Bonum Certa Men Certa

Mark Shuttleworth and the Question of Liability (Debian Volunteers He Pressured Before the Suicides)

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 22, 2024

Mark Shuttleworth

Humanity for me (zero-cost "human resources")

OUT of respect to the original author, we did not edit the recent articles about Debian suicides [1, 2], but we can comment aside, i.e. in separate articles.

It's no secret who runs and controls Debian. It's companies like Google (the host), ARM, Canonical and so on. They just use SPI as a sort of "proxy" through which to "herd" unpaid labour - contrary to what Debian used to be in the 1990s. Much of this unpaid labour is in fact connected to other companies (employment), which exercise control over Debian through this "staff". It's not a new issue and it is a lesser issue when scholars do this because of the way universities used to be run (nowadays even universities act a lot like for-profit corporations).

Moreover, there's the lingering issue of obligations and liabilities as per employment law; the labour of love from the "Ubuntu" South African, who now 'resides' in a tax shelter around the UK, has become Microsoft bait. Mark Shuttleworth uses Debian volunteers' labour to sell Microsoft's proprietary spyware. Is that ethical? Will this be considered moral?

Worse yet, it seems like he pays money to silence/censor critics. As the earlier article put it: "In one of the hysterical legal filings constructed by Software in the Public Interest, they claim that informing the victim's family about their rights is tantamount to harassment. They even admit that the family has no desire to make a complaint, but the snivelling SPI lawyers claim it is harassment anyway simply because it is inconvenient for Mark Shuttleworth. Ubuntu is the African word for sharing but Shuttleworth appears to be more willing to share his money with lawyers than volunteers who died."

So says Daniel Pocock, who has received his share of threatening letters. Have millions of pounds been spent trying to silence him instead of taking his message to heart? And notice all the malicious personal attacks on him; they like to misuse the term "harassment" (clearly projection) while they're abusing not only him; they're abusing family members who have nothing to do with Daniel's articles. If Mr. Shuttleworth is lawyering up, maybe he's afraid he might in fact be held liable for deaths; on more than one occasion Mr. Shuttleworth publicly pressured unpaid volunteers who later killed themselves due to stress. So who does the "harassment" here? Shuttleworth or Pocock?

After the suicides there are typically attempts to silence family members too (same thing that happened at the EPO after suicides). And apropos the SPI, one associate has noted, "they extracted equipment from his home" (according to the above), which could be considered evidence tampering.

Whether Shuttleworth will be criminally prosecuted remains to be seen; he's very well connected because of his wealth, which he places in some remote island because he respects UK tax laws as little as he respected them in South Africa (he was dragged to court over it).

"Ubuntu" is a beautiful word with a positive message, unlike what the distro became. To Mr. Shuttleworth, Ubuntu was just "Debian plus sex" since the very beginning.

Other Recent Techrights' Posts

Audio: Julian Assange Tells US Judge That Espionage Act and First Amendment Contradict One Another, But Pleads Guilty (to Save His Life)
Have a listen to Julian Assange and the judge in Saipan
How to Help Pay Assange Debt (£520,000 Plane Bill and Beyond)
Budget travel was not permitted
Wikipedia Co-Founder (Not Wales) Expresses Support for Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange, Says Assange Will Probably Continue
probably exactly the sort of thing that the US prosecutors did not want
Windows in Åland Islands: From 100% to Less Than Half
Åland Islands lost the sense of urgency to move to GNU/Linux
Not Just Slow News But Also Late News (Julian Assange Landing in Thailand)
Why did AP take so long (nearly a week) to release these?
[Meme] Smart Alec Poettering
How many Microsofters can the Debian Project withstand?
Getting Rid of Microsoft Does Not Go Far Enough
Microsoft already has many problems. One day Microsoft won't exist anymore. But that does not guarantee users' freedom.
Alyssa Rosenzweig's LibrePlanet Talk About Freeing the Apple GPU
Alyssa Rosenzweig is the graphics witch behind the reverse-engineered drivers for the Apple GPU. She previously led Panfrost, the free drivers for Arm Mali GPUs powering devices like the Pinebook Pro. She graduated in 2023 with a Computer Science degree from the University of Toronto and now writes free software full-time.
Links 30/06/2024: LLMs Under Fire and Dictatorship of the Old
Links for the day
 
4.04 Linux Not Found, No Such Agency (NSA)
The CoCs never failed Microsoft
Julian Assange Turns 53 in a Couple of Days, Give Him the Gift of Freedom From Debt
Julian Assange turns 53 on Wednesday
IBM's Abandonment of Disabled People (Orca and Wayland Incompatibility) Has Basically Killed Their "DEI" Channel (Room)
The "DEI" channel (Matrix room) as been silent for 4 days
[Meme] Just Because You Throw Money at Lawyers Doesn't Mean You'll Win
Welcome to the second half of 2024
Paulo Henrique Santana (Collabora) on the Debian Brazil Community
There was similar material in DebConf22
Making the Wikileaks Site More Active Again (and Gradually Exiting "X" or Other Social Control Media)
As soon as Assange got kidnapped the Wikileaks Web site reached a near-standstill
Marco Calegaro on Hacking Art Into a Community
talk by Marco Calegaro
Links 01/07/2024: Chokecherry Leaf and Agile Manifesto
Links for the day
Johannes Åsgård on Making the Raspberry Pi More Free With librerpi
Johannes (also known as dolphinana)
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, June 30, 2024
IRC logs for Sunday, June 30, 2024
200 This Week
Monday started with 40 articles/pages and this is #200
Press Complicity and Public Apathy All Along Enabled 14 Years of Illegal, Arbitrary Detention and Coercion Into Plea Bargain of Julian Assange on Brink of Death
They basically blackmailed him into letting the US 'win' the argument
At the End Journalism a Crime (If It Involves Accessing or Gaining Access to Documents Marked "Confidential" or "Classified" by Those Looking to Hide Their Misconduct/Crimes)
At least in the US, especially where the imperialism is at stake
Links 30/06/2024: Tensions in Korea and Japan, Criminalisation of Sleeping Outdoors
Links for the day
100% Slop/Spam From linuxsecurity.com
This is the kind of stuff that's killing the Web faster
Gemini Links 30/06/2024: Murdoch and Ideal OS
Links for the day
In the First 6 Months of 2024 Thailand Moved to GNU/Linux, Not to Windows Vista 11
maybe users moved from Vista 10 and 11 to GNU/Linux, seeing where Microsoft was heading with forced hardware "upgrades"
Eko K. A. Owen, New Outreach and Communications Coordinator for the FSF
Nice to see many new additions to the FSF's team
Microsoft Has Slaves and Enablers, Not Partners
Obligatory meme too
Tobias Platen Covered Freedom-To-Play Games in LibrePlanet 2024
Freedom-To-Play games using Taler
[Meme] Opening a 'Webapp' With 'Only' 4 GB of RAM
Until 2020 none of my PCs ever had more than 2 GB of RAM
Destination 'Five Percent'
We reckon GNU/Linux can break the 5% barrier some time by the end of this year, even without counting Chromebooks
A Crisis of Online Journalism
Almost a week ago a journalist was forced to plead guilty for an act of journalism
Germany One of Many Countries Where Microsoft's Bing Lost Market Share After All That LLM Nonsense (Bing Chat and Further Rebrands/Renames)
openai.com traffic plunged 60% last month
Microsoft’s Latest Antitrust Scrutiny
4 new stories
Microsoft Layoffs, Mass Plagiarism, and More
outrage included
[Meme] Walking Outside the Guardrails of the Walled Gardens Built by Monopolies
So-called "advertiser-unfriendly" material was never a problem for Wikileaks
GNU/Linux Climbed 0.25% This Month (in statCounter)
Around midday on Tuesday we'll start seeing preliminary data for July
Ilya Gulko Introduces Pollyanna
"Pollyanna is a web framework that makes it easy to create your own libre social space, such as a social network or blog."
'FSFE': Underage Labour, GAFAM Fronting, and Identity Theft to Undermine the FSF's Current Fundraiser
looking to raise funds at the same time as the FSF
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, June 29, 2024
IRC logs for Saturday, June 29, 2024
Links 29/06/2024: Astronauts at Risk, Ukraine Updates
Links for the day
Fedora and Red Hat Leftovers
mostly redhat.com
Microsoft is Now Googlebombing or Spamming 'Open Source' and 'Linux' to Promote Proprietary Surveillance, Azure
Notice the title and the image, what's being promoted etc.
Seychelles: GNU/Linux Doing OK
Seychelles cannot be considered poor
This War Crime Footage, Nothing Political Per Se, Is What They Made Julian Assange Plead Guilty To (War Criminals Not Convicted, Only Those Who Expose Them)
Wikileaks' Julian Assange: Exposing the US Military Crimes
Gemini Protocol Isn't Even Remotely "Dead"
"Lupa knows of 505,000 (half a million!) working Gemini URLs at present, up from about 425,000 this time last year"
About 10 New Free Software Foundation (FSF) Members Per Day
The total changed from 46 to 47 while typing the article
20 Years Passed, Let's Go Even Faster Now
We are hoping to bring more original stories
Vista 11 Adoption Unusually Low in Germany and It's Going Down, Not Up
This is not happening only in Germany
Kevin Korte on Computers Being Allowed to Make Decisions Based on Cryptic Algorithms and Proprietary/Secret Data
It uses buzzwords where none are needed
[Meme] Garbage In, Garbage Out (linuxsecurity.com)
It is neither Linux nor security, just chatbot-generated slop
Microsoft-Invaded CISA Spreads Anti-Free Software FUD (as If Proprietary Software Has No Memory Safety Issues), Brittany Day Uses Chatbots to Amplify and Permutate the Microsoft FUD
linuxsecurity.com became an anti-Linux spam site
Microsoft Laying Off Staff in an Act of Retaliation and Union-Busting
retaliatory layoffs at Microsoft
Gemini Links 29/06/2024: Content Drowning in 'Goo' and LLM Slop
Links for the day
Windows Lost Almost 92% Market Share in Egypt
From over 99% to just over 7%
In Ecuador, GNU/Linux Adoption Surged From Under 1% to Over 4% in About 3 Years
Not even counting Chromebooks
LibrePlanet: Cultivating Backups (of Recordings)
an appeal to recover some of these talks
Microsoft/Windows Machines Are Turned Off (or Windows Deleted/Decommissioned) in Web Servers, as the "Market Share" Collapse Continues
Taking full history into account, this is a decrease of over 90% in some cases
Corwin Brust Hosting Freedom: A Behind-the-scenes Tour With the GNU Savannah Hackers
"the "smiling faces" behind it."
Android at 90% or More in Chad
Windows below 2%
David Wilson: Cultivating a Welcoming Free Software Community That Lasts
"a feeling of shared ownership for all users."
Julian Assange Might Continue Wikileaks, But Certainly Not Yet (Recovery Time Needed)
And probably at a symbolic capacity only
Bringing in 12 Santas and Taking 13 Out (Old Interview With Julian Assange)
Julian Assange's life inside the Ecuadorian embassy
Neil Plotnick on GNU/Linux in the High School Classroom
uploaded to the LibrePlanet instance of MediaGoblin
Asia Appears to be Fastest to Adopt GNU/Linux
the home of a considerable majority of the world's population
Alexandre Oliva's LibrePlanet 2024 Talk About "Software Enshittification"
in spite of technical difficulties encountered while recording
What They Used to Do With Mono They Now Do With Systemd (Lower and Deeper Down Than Userspace)
Now we have a project started primarily by Red Hat (and managed by Microsoft GitHub, which is proprietary) being managed by Microsoft and primarily serving Microsoft and IBM
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, June 28, 2024
IRC logs for Friday, June 28, 2024