Ulrike Uhlig & Debian, the $200,000 woman who quit
[Article 3 years old]
Reprinted with permission from disguised.work.
Debian has been participating in the Outreachy internships, originally called Outreach Program for Women, since 2013 (that is 8 years).
In 8 years, only one Outreachy, Ulrike has become a Debian Developer. And she quit.
Google Summer of Code (GSoC) internships are funded by Google. Outreachy internships are funded with money from the host organization although Ulrike either doesn't know that or tried to cover it up after receiving that Debian money.
Each year, there are two rounds of Outreachy, summer and winter. Each round, Debian typically aims to fund two interns. That means Debian aims to fund four interns per year.
The cost to Debian is approximately $6,500 per intern, not counting the slush fund for travel. $500 goes to the controversial Sage Sharp and the other $6,000 goes to the intern. The total cost to Debian is approximately $26,000 per year or $208,000 over all the years. In practice, Debian doesn't always find satisfactory interns so we've rounded this number down to $200,000.
From all those women and all that money, Debian only found one woman who became a Debian Developer, Ulrike Uhlig. Ulrike has quit Debian after just 4 years.
Debian paid $200,000 to find this woman and she quit.
Ulrike claims to be interested in human rights and mediation techniques. Yet she went to the online DebConf and gave a talk with the mafiosi Enrico Zini, this is the fascist who expels people on a whim without any due process or any other basics of human rights. Zini was complicit in expelling Dr Norbert Preining the week before Christmas and also fabricating the rape accusations against Jacob Appelbaum. For Ulrike to give a talk with a gangster like this suggests that she has no understanding of the principles she claims to stand for.
While there is only one Outreachy who became a DD, there is at least one who dated former leader Chris Lamb and maybe more. Molly de Blanc was an Outreachy for the FSF many years ago so she was not a Debian Outreachy. She was the girlfriend of Lamb until their breakup in 2019 when Lamb was lovestruck by Albanian women.
In any other organization a program with results like these would have been cut after the first 3 or 4 years. Why does Debian continue to throw good money after bad?
By failing to manage this money in a professional manner, Debian demonstrates that they are not sincere about women. They use the money as a slush fund to find girlfriends and they don't care about making the serious cultural changes that are required to have more than two percent women in Debian. █
