Matthias Kirschner & FSFE People Trafficking, coercion of volunteers
Reprinted with permission from the Free Software Fellowship.
Bounties have recently been offered for evidence of defamation and other malicious actions from the management of free software communities. This incredible picture comes from Albania.
Matthias Kirschner, FSFE President took controversial paternity leave in March and April 2018 while volunteers were doing most of the work without pay. These are facts.
Upon his return, he immediately left his wife Kristina to change the nappies and went back out to another OSCAL conference in Tirana, Albania during May 2018. He had attended OSCAL more than once.
This picture captures the happy daddy with a bunch of women at least ten years younger. Readers may recognize some of the women. All these young women appear far more dignified than the President of the FSFE. Some of them are developers, the President of the FSFE never wrote any code. The local drink is called Raki.
There have been serious concerns expressed about trafficking of women and volunteers in Albania's Open Labs group. The photo is from the Pazari i Ri fish market.
FSFE's REUSE campaign promotes Modern Day Slavery
FSFE, a registered charity in Germany, has now created a dedicated micro-site for their REUSE campaign.
What is this campaign about? Well, FSFE is asking unpaid volunteers to spend extra time adding more license text to our work. Their campaign asks us to do that for free, to spend time working on license text and spend more time running a tool to check the license text. Why should unpaid volunteers spend time and effort doing this? Why don't we just spend more time writing code? Well, the answer is buried in the front page of the micro-site:
Kirschner: A REUSE-compliant project makes the jobs of legal experts and compliance officers much easier.
Kirschner is talking about the legal experts and compliance officers in very large companies like Google, Amazon and IBM, his sponsors.
Is it really appropriate for a taxpayer-subsidized charity to be bullying unpaid volunteers to do this extra task for free and helping those big greedy companies? This doesn't sound like a real charity. It has just been revealed that Microsoft paid $0 in tax on the $314 billion surplus from transactions through Ireland in 2020. Here is that definition of People Trafficking from the US State Department:
Human trafficking can include, but does not require, movement. People may be considered trafficking victims regardless of whether they were born into a state of servitude, were exploited in their home town, were transported to the exploitative situation, previously consented to work for a trafficker, or participated in a crime as a direct result of being trafficked. At the heart of this phenomenon is the traffickers’ aim to exploit and enslave their victims and the myriad coercive and deceptive practices they use to do so.
People tricked into running the FSFE REUSE tool may be victims of trafficking within this definition. Remember, when women in FSFE's office asked to be paid for all the hours they work, Kirschner sacked them all.
People trafficking is a real problem
Undercover police in London released this photo of a woman being trafficked by an Albanian man in Oxford Street, London.█
