Christmas lynchings: Martin Krafft (madduck), Penny Leach (mjollnir) & Debian pregnancy cluster
On 22 April 2012, Martin Krafft (madduck) wrote to debian-private (leaked) telling us his partner Penny Leach (mjollnir) had just given birth to their first child. The full message is at the bottom.
This is one of the births that was at the peak of the Debian pregnancy cluster, a period when we saw many copy-cat pregnancies. People have joked that copy-cat pregnancies, like copy-cat suicides, are a sign of groupthink or a cult mindset.
Krafft and Leach live in Munich, coincidentally, the same place where we find another couple in the Debian pregnancy cluster. Margarita Manterola (marga) and Maximiliano Curia (maxy) had their baby at almost exactly the same time.
Remember, a few years after this, in December 2018, Krafft was one of the people who wrote about being a victim of the Code of Conduct gaslighting during the Debian Christmas lynchings.
It was like a #MeToo moment for men. Other victims had identified ourselves publicly and then Krafft came along on Christmas day and revealed that he was also a victim:
Subject: Re: Censorship in Debian Date: Tue, 25 Dec 2018 23:44:38 +0100 From: martin f krafft <madduck@debian.org> Organization: The Debian project To: debian-project@lists.debian.org Hello project, It's very sad to read about what's going on. I know that there's been at least another case, in which DAM and AH have acted outside their mandate, threatening with project expulsion, and choosing very selectively with whom they communicate. I know, because I was being targeted. Neither DAM nor AH (the same people still active today) made a single attempt to hear me. None of my e-mails to either DAM or AH were ever answered. Instead, DAM ruled a verdict, and influenced other people to the point that "because DAM ruled" was given as a reason for other measures. This was an unconstitutional abuse of DAM's powers, and in the case of AH, the whole mess also bordered on libel. Among others, the current DPL Chris Lamb promised a review in due time, but nothing ever happened. It's not going to be a constructive use of anyone's time to attempt to establish transparency into issues of the past, and I've disengaged anyway, as a result. But we, as a project, need to ensure that there is more transparency moving forward. And I think it would be wise to review the way that DAM and AH operate. We need to ensure they stick to protocol, and are held accountable for the use of their powers. Thanks for your attention, -- .''`. martin f. krafft <madduck@d.o> @martinkrafft : :' : not-so-proud Debian developer `. `'` http://people.debian.org/~madduck `- Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing systems
If the man is expelled, does the wife or girlfriend get expelled too?
What about the child, Veronica, will she be banned when she grows up?
Most families with a six-year-old spend Christmas playing. Martin Krafft was on the debian-project mailing list opening up to us about his experience of illegal coercive control tactics, in other words, life as a blackmail victim.
Penny Leach is listed in the Debian women statistics page but she is not in some other developer databases. The list tells us she joined Debian women in July 2008.
Links about Leach's work:
Leach's blog vanished in 2017, about the same time people started imposing on her partner, Martin Krafft. Was she forced to censor her blog? Did she take it down out of fear? Wayback Machine has taken the last snapshot on 22 June 2017. If people access http://mjollnir.org/ today, it gives the message:
there used to be a website here, but i upgraded my server and everything caught fire. and i don't have time to fix it. one day it might be back in archived form. xx penny@mjollnir.org
Leach maintained another blog at a different address, http://she.geek.nz/. The last snapshot was 9 June 2012. After that, it began redirecting to Leach's newer blog. Today, it displays the same error message about failing to upgrade her server correctly.
She has published a number of blogs about being a female programmer. One of Leach's blogs is featured on KatteKrab.net, the blog of Donna Benjamin. It is published under the title Penny Leach on Women in ICT . Her blogs are interesting reading. While the world has changed a little since Leach wrote these things, it hasn't changed too much.
When reading blogs like this, it is important to remember there are at least three types of women attending these hobbyist conferences on weekends: there are women like Leach, female developers who date male developers and come to the same conferences together. Then there are some female developers who are dating non-developers. Those women are less likely to come to conferences on weekends because there is a social tendency to do whatever their boyfriend / husband does but if they do come to a conference, they may be there without their partner. Finally, there is the third category of woman, those women who are not developers and they spend their weekends doing whatever their husband does. Leach's writings may be accurate for those women in the same category as Leach but we also need to listen to the views of women in the other categories.
When men meet a woman at a weekend open source conference, we simply don't know which of those categories the woman belongs to. Men are not suspicious of women per-se. A lot of men are suspicious because we were told Debian can not even spare some food for our partner but then we see other men arrive with their wife and children. Other women like Leach arrive, they don't realize all this political stuff is going on around them and they are surprised to find that men are suspicious. But we are not suspicious of female programmers, we are suspicious of the opaque, secretive and very unequal division of funds between different families.
In the blog Women in ICT, Leach makes the comment:
The first thing that happens when you're me is that the majority of the time, when I meet someone for the first time and I say I'm a programmer, I'm met with disbelief. "But .... you're a girl!", they say, shocked. I've had this at conferences, after making an intelligent technical remark about the subject matter. "Oh wow... I assumed you were just someone's girlfriend", they say.
I don't feel that men deliberately come to conferences with this attitude. The reality is that open source developers are encouraged to treat our work like a hobby. Many of the conferences and events are on weekends. This, in turn, means some people bring their wives and girlfriends to conferences, regardless of whether those women are programmers or not. Wives and girlfriends with children typically don't come to the conferences. Therefore, the women we typically see at conferences are usually young women in their twenties or early thirties. We don't know which women are programmers and which women are simply there because it is a weekend with their partner. It is a social phenomena much bigger than the ICT industry: a lot of young women will spend their free time engaging in the activity preferred by their partner. For example, if a man plays football on Saturdays, his girlfriend or wife may go to a lot of football games even if she doesn't play football herself.
The Debian Outreachy dating problems seem to be making things worse for women. Personally, I never received any payment from Debian for work that I did on Debian. Virtually none of the men have ever received money out of the Debian bank account. Yet we all know about multiple cases where the woman who receives the $7,000 stipend and the travel expenses is actually the girlfriend of another developer. The Debian France cabal asked me to consider Nicolas Dandrimont's girlfriend for an internship. The Albanian women who received tickets to Brazil and sat next to Chris Lamb at the DebConf dinner have never made any Debian packages. Therefore, when a new woman appears at a conference, people want to know (a) did Debian money pay for her flights and (b) who is her boyfriend, which may seem like a violation of privacy but it becomes a critical question if money from the community was used to pay for her flights.
Women who did nothing wrong feel bad when people ask these questions. Nonetheless, if those women read the full history on debian-private, including the Debian pregnancy cluster, they would probably understand why so many men have these suspicions.
If Debian really cares about women, somebody should publish a full list of every woman who received money. After all, we always worked together on the promise that Debian cares about transparency. Was transparency just another lie? If the list of payments was public then developers can look at the list instead of walking up to each woman and asking her questions.
Wikimedia is publishing every funding request on their public web site. This means other volunteers can see the funding requests and detect conflicts of interest. In 2017 and 2018, the Albanian female whistleblowers informed me that Albanian women were asked to make funding requests from multiple organizations in parallel. Thanks to the public grants information published by Wikimedia, we discovered that some of the women were employees of a business controlled by men from the hackerspace. Therefore, the Wikimedia grants and Debian funds for diversity were subsidizing a man's private business interests.
Subject: [vac] working on a fork Date: Sun, 22 Apr 2012 14:48:12 +0200 From: martin f krafft <madduck@debian.org> Reply-To: baby@hanfstaenglstrasse.de Organization: The Debian project To: debian-private@lists.debian.org Dear colleagues, I will not be working on my packages or other things in the near future, as Penny and I have joined the team of Debian parents and Veronika Moana, born on her mum's birthday as a healthy and gorgeous little girl will get every second of the time I can make available. Till soon, -- .''`. martin f. krafft <madduck@d.o> Related projects: : :' : proud Debian developer^W^W father http://debiansystem.info `. `'` http://people.debian.org/~madduck http://vcs-pkg.org `- Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing systems
Please see more blogs about the Debian pregnancy cluster.
Please see the chronological history of how the Debian harassment and abuse culture evolved.