An Effort to Tackle Slavery in 'Open Source' Clothing
This morning I became aware of the crowdfunding video launch by Daniel Pocock. I had not heard anything about it prior to this. "Please have a look," Pocock told me. "Does it make sense?"
"Is this something that can be announced or not yet?" I asked. "I have to add some extra text in the GiveSendGo campaign description too," he said around the time he publicised the whole thing, having also shared the details with the EU.
"I will publish a blog about it before lunchtime," said, so he must have kept it 'under the wraps' for a long time. I knew nothing about it until this morning and I didn't participate in any of the preparation. The original outline said:
Censorship ethical questions in big tech & Debian
This campaign funds a civil rights lawsuit to examine the concerns of censored developers in the free, open source software ecosystem. As each fundraising milestone is achieved we will release another batch of emails, including the mysterious debian-private from 1996 up to 2018, over 70,000 emails. Please give what you can and share widely to help us reach the full target.
The sum claimed is symbolic (to make a point), but some of the allegations made by Pocock aren't without merit. I know some of the details of those stories. What GAFAM operatives (sometimes salaried staff of GAFAM) did to Pocock is shambolic. They had done the same to other people. It's important to put an end to this kind of behaviour.
In his civil claim he states: "In the case of the GNOME Foundation, which employs an Executive Director and a few other staff, the last two people hired in the Executive Director role were both removed by the board after a period of only a few months in the job. This further reinforces the perception that board members, under the influence of certain corporations, are seeking an Executive Director who acts as an extension of the donor corporations rather than somebody who builds a stand-alone, independent and credible non-profit association."
The GNOME Foundation is now controlled by IBM, a "Microsoft company". To GAFAM, the GNOME Foundation is now in "safe hands" (controlled by their salaries). █
Image source: Album of Turkish Costume Paintings (NYPL b12578496)