Jonathan Carter & Debian betrayed Joel Espy Klecker
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
In the last blog about Klecker, I looked at how Debianists deceived the community about their knowledge of his illness. In fact, while Klecker was alive, it looks like they deceived him too and after he died, they bounced the cheque, metaphorically.
Looking at Debian mailing lists today we frequently see people using gmail.com addresses to obfuscate their identity and who they work for.
Back in the days of Klecker and Bruce Perens, it was more common for people to use an email address associated with their employment or institution. Perens had used his pixar.com email address and Mark Shuttleworth used a thawte.com email address. We can look through the debian-private archives that have been disclosed in recent years and see many other company names too.
Was young Klecker starstruck by these big names and was this a reason he was willing to work for free while bed-ridden with a terrible illness? It may not be. I found various pieces of evidence suggesting why Klecker was willing to work on Debian without payment. This email from debian-private gives us a hint about how much weight Klecker puts on the names/trademarks of institutions in email addresses:
Subject: Re: State of the project Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2014 18:31:09 +0100 From: Marc Haber <mh+debian-private@zugschlus.de> Organization: private site, see http://www.zugschlus.de/ for details To: debian-private@lists.debian.org
On Tue, 18 Nov 2014 23:43:06 +1000, Anthony Towns <aj@erisian.com.au> wrote: >? "?Debian always was known for its communication "style". There were >even shirts sold ><http://www.infodrom.org/Debian/events/LinuxTag2002/t-shirts.html> in >memory of Espy Klecker with a quote he is known for: Morons. I'm surrounded >by morons." > >That's totally my favourite Debian shirt.
Mine as well. And it would be soooo un-CoC-compliant!
Greetings Marc -- -------------------------------------- !! No courtesy copies, please !! ----- Marc Haber | " Questions are the | Mailadresse im Header Mannheim, Germany | Beginning of Wisdom " | http://www.zugschlus.de/ Nordisch by Nature | Lt. Worf, TNG "Rightful Heir" | Fon: *49 621 72739834
-- Please respect the privacy of this mailing list. Some posts may be declassified 3 years after posting as per http://www.debian.org/vote/2005/vote_002
Here is the shirt:
If Klecker felt these people were morons, why did he hang around?
The answer is on Klecker's web site which has been preserved for us like a time capsule at the Wayback Machine.
It is on the bottom of every page too.
The web site is at www.espy.org.
At the bottom of the page we can see a copy of the logo for the Free Speech Online Blue Ribbon Campaign from the EFF.
It goes much further than Klecker. After Klecker died, they named a server after him, klecker.debian.org and people were keen to place their own personal web sites and opinions there. Here is an example of a message that appeared after the September 11 attacks, which initiated many other private discussions too.
Subject: On WTC events sympathize or comdemnation expression Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2001 19:52:13 -0300 From: Pablo Lorenzzoni <spectra@debian.org> Reply-To: spectra@debian.org Organization: Projeto Debian To: debian-private@lists.debian.org
Hello ALL!
I were watching this nonsense flame-war about a possible Debian manifestation regarding WTC events. Let me state my position:
1 - I am not against any way of life... let it be islamic, catholic, agnostic, american, whatever... 2 - I am against every violation of Human Rights. It doesn't matter which circunstances surround it. 3 - I believe Debian Project is not a political organization per se. But it is very much clear (at least to me), that been the *only* (AFAIK) open-source distribution of a universal OS, Debian project have political strength. This also means we have a political responsability, just like the ones who vote for president but weren't ever candidate, or political-faction-affiliate. 4 - I'd like to express my sympathy to the victims of every Human Rights violation... but, of course, it is out of my reach. However, I **do** want to express it every chance I've got. This is one good chance. 5 - I believe that there's no distinction between technical and other fields. After all, the humans made everything happen. In a moment like the present one, these "walls" of "we are a technical community, so we have nothing to do with it" just don't apply at all. First of all we are humans.... then geeks. 6 - The first thing I've done as soon as I heard what happened was to try to find out if any of us were among the victims. AFAIK we are all safe. The reason I've mentioned it is that if one of us were hurt, probably this discussion would never start and our main webpage would be all black for the next 30 days.... The fact we are having this discussion scaries me very much. Are we loosing our humanity?
Well... once this said, I think a polite, well-written expression of sympathy in our main project webpage would be appreciatted by everybody. Not a comdemnation. Not pointing fingers. Just a brief statement that we think human lifes are too important to be ended the way those hundreds ended. Maybe there're people here that disagree with me... maybe this never reach our main webpage... so, in my webspace under klecker, I've already pointed to Orange Ribbon Campaign Against Terrorism (same way I've pointed to EFF's Blue Ribbon one).... I suggest that everybody that agrees with me do the same with the webpages they host (not just under klecker).... the URL is http://www.comnet.com.br/or/
Now, please: observe that I am behind a thick wall of amianthus and all flames will go straight and silently to /dev/null ;-) Feel free to quote or Cc this message.
[]s
Pablo -- Pablo Lorenzzoni (Spectra) <spectra@debian.org> GnuPG PubKey at search.keyserver.net (Key ID: 268A084D) Webpage: http://people.debian.org/~spectra/
What we can see from this email is that people did not agree with each other on certain topics but they could still post blogs about those topics. Many people supported the Blue Ribbon Campaign. The Debian Social Contract, clause 3, states "We will not hide problems" and many people interpret that as a free speech philosophy.
It looks like Joel Espy Klecker was one of many people who gave their time and effort to co-authorship of Debian based on a philosophical belief that they were contributing to a free future for humanity.
Given that Klecker knew he didn't have long to live, he even mentioned his imminent death before dying, the time that he contributed had a greater value than the time other people of similar skill level contribute.
When the Code of Conduct gaslighting was imposed upon Debian, the people who pushed for that CoC were bouncing the cheque that was due to Debian's founders and earliest co-authors.
Only 25% of Debianists actually consented to the CoC. Those who voted NO and those who did not vote at all did not give consent. Klecker, being deceased, was unable to consent. His copyright interest in Debian would have passed to his family and technically, they would have the right to consent in his place up to the point where his copyright expires in the year 2070. They were never consulted or asked if they consent to this retrospective change to the agreement between authors.
We can see that Klecker's beliefs were betrayed again when Debian listmasters began censoring people for using phrases like "wayward communications".
After this outbreak of fascism on debian.org mailing lists, people moved the metaphors and serious discussions to other web sites. Financial reports from Software in the Public Interest, Inc spent over $120,000 on legal fees which appear to coincide with censorship of domain names.
The censorship decision, with overtones of Nazisim, was another insult to Klecker's legacy. Oddly enough, the censorship decision was signed on World Press Freedom Day.
This is why it is so important for me to document the story of Joel Espy Klecker & Debian. As we are all co-authors, we are all in a relationship with each other under copyright law until 70 years after the last one of us dies. We can't ignore that or let somebody's girlfriend come along and snuff out our moral rights for the sake of pretending to be a family all the time.
The tale of Enron's pension scheme
During the Enron era, Enron employees were encouraged to invest their pension funds into the sharemarket and purchased the shares of their own employer, Enron.
From the New York Times:
The lawsuit says that Enron schemed to pump up the price of the stock artificially and violated its fiduciary duty to its employees by failing to act in their best interests.
Developers pooling our copyright interests into the co-authorship of Debian GNU/Linux are, in some ways, like the Enron employees pooling their pension assets into the stock of their employer.
When Klecker was contributing to Debian, he thought he was advancing Free Speech Online and when Enron employees contributed to the 401k pension scheme, they thought they were advancing their future retirement interests. In both cases, the developers and the Enron employees, our futures are being ripped out underneath us when small groups of people change the rules or rig the system.
Red Hat refusal to release source code for RHEL
Red Hat's refusal to release source code for RHEL also feels like a betrayal of the principles that encouraged unpaid volunteers to co-author Fedora and RHEL in the first place. The copyright interests of Fedora joint authorship are very similar to the interests of Debian joint authorship.
Read more about Red Hat unilaterally restricting source code access without consent of the joint authors.
Did Debianists set out to deceive us from the outset or was the decision made retrospectively?
This point is not really clear.
Looking through the leaked debian-private emails gives some hints that some people anticipated fooling future contributors.
Some of these discussions only took place after Joel Espy Klecker was already subscribed to debian-private so he may have been aware this type of thing was going on or could happen in the future.
Please see the chronological history of how the Debian harassment and abuse culture evolved. β