Adamant Conformism is an Enemy of Science
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." (George Bernard Shaw’s (1903) Maxims for Revolutionists)
Daniel Pocock, an Irish-Australian software engineer, has just explained how some archaeologist demonised him. That's not to say archaeologists are bad or anything, but watch who can become a Debian Developer in 2023:
For nm.debian.org, at 2023-09-13: I would like to apply to change my status in Debian to Debian Developer, non-uploading. Using Linux since 2001, I switched to Debian in 2006 and appreciated its technical qualities. I discovered the Debian Social Contract and its commitment for the Free and Open Source Software as described in the Debian Free Software Guidelines, which are in accordance with the requirement of open data and reproducibility in my scientific practice as archaeologist. The way Debian is organised and ruled as all-volunteer organisation fit perfectly my own ethical guidelines. For these reasons, I have become a contributor of Debian, translating Wiki pages since December 2011, and working with the French Translation team since January 2013, as reviewer and then, encouraged by Vincent Thomas, as translator of all kinds of Debian files, from web pages to debconf.po. I contribute also to the Debian Description Translation Project (>7.3K package descriptions translated or updated, more than 11K descriptions reviewed) and man pages. Since 2014, I contribute regularly to the various official communication channels for the project (DPN, Bits from Debian, Micronews, and Debian News) along with the Publicity Team. Since 2017, I help Debian to have booth at Captitole du Libre (Toulouse), and at FOSDEM this year. I attended the Toulouse Mini-Debconf 2017 and Marseille Mini-DebConf Marseille 2019, where I co-organised a French translation team Sprint with Thomas Vincent. To be more involved in the project, I joined Debian France association since 2019, and become Assistant Treasurer last year. I would like to formally become a member of Debian to get more involved in the project, and I think my experience will be valuable to the community, especially to the Publicity team.
So he basically translates stuff into French, he does not develop anything, but he wanted the title "Debian Developer". That just seems... wrong.
This page says "Debian Developer, non-uploading since 2023-11-16" (so he succeeded).
To me, personally, this resonates with what I heard yesterday. To quote: "Of course, I started using Debian before the non-uploading developers came in and ruined everything! Like the time I volunteered to help with their diversity effort, and they totally did not even acknowledge me, and then hired Molly to do the gig… true story."
So basically what we have here is people being promoted to Debian Developer status without developing or even compiling (or packaging) anything, just having a romantic relationship with those who do or showing blind faith/loyalty to those who do.
Unfortunately Debian is being 'flooded' with fake "Debian Developers" who never developed anything. This is a recipe for complete disaster; I saw how this panned out at Sirius Open Source, where one man who had spent years brownnosing the CEO brought not one but three romantic partners into a Support Engineer role. None of them had any engineering background! █
Context: At IBM, "Brownnosing is the Norm."