Joining APRIL(.org), AGM weekend, Paris, 15-16 March 2025

APRIL, a free software organization domiciled in France, has called the annual general meeting (AGM) for 15 March, followed by an APRIL Camp on Sunday 16 March.

APRIL's membership base has declined during the pandemic and recent lynchings in the community, however, there are still over 2,000 members. It is a lot more than similar organizations in other countries. It is ironic that some of these organizations devoted to freedom and transparency can't even report their own membership statistics, therefore, we should be grateful that APRIL is not hiding these things.

Anybody can join APRIL through the online form. You don't need to live in France, however, the membership form, like many official documents in France, is written in the French language.

Upon joining, members receive a welcome email written in French:

Subject: 	Confirmation d'adhésion de Daniel POCOCK à l'April
Date: 	Wed, 12 Feb 2025 17:10:09 +0100 (CET)
From: 	April - Équipe Vie associative <secretaire@april.org>
Reply-To: 	"April - Équipe Vie associative"@april.org, secretaire@april.org
To: 	daniel@pocock.pro
CC: 	adhesion@april.org

Confirmation d'adhésion de Daniel POCOCK à l'April

Bonjour,

Nous vous remercions très chaleureusement de votre adhésion à l'April ! Vous participez ainsi au soutien de nos actions de promotion et de défense du logiciel libre : c'est précieux et encourageant :-)

Vous trouverez dans ce message des informations pratiques sur :

  * votre espace personnel
  * votre alias courriel
  * où trouver de l'aide

In a previous blog, I looked at how cyberbullies in the open source software environment are boasting about ways to exclude people. In fact, excluding people is more than just cyberbullying, it is a direct contradiction of Article 27(1) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

UDHR Article 27(1): Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

Debianists and racist Swiss women: En 2018, il a été exclu ... (In 2018, he was excluded ...)

In Lyon, close to the Perrache railway station, they have erected a monument to all the Jews who were excluded by the previous generation of nazis and their collaborators in the Vichy administration:

 

When the FSFE removed the elections from their constitution, they excluded ninety-nine percent of the community from voting. The FSFE is no longer relevant without proper membership and elections.

In 2024, the Albanian free software group Open Labs simply vanished. The group had published a manifesto about being open and transparent, they received a lot of money from bigger groups and corporate sponsors and then they disappeared.

When FSFE canceled elections and every time the rogue Debianists have a lynching, there are a whole bunch of people who quietly abandon free software organizations and never come back again.

Dr Richard Stallman, however, is not one to give up. He was recently welcomed to events in France. If APRIL is to have legitimacy then it is important for people with a range of different viewpoints to join the association. Moreover, the French constitution includes a guarantee of pluralism which is the opposite of Code-of-Conduct gaslighting.

 

 

Another strength of the French constitution is the commitment to secularism. With some free software environments blinded by groupthink and harboring cult-like rituals, it is important to remember why the French chose to put both pluralism and secularism on a pedestal.

Ironically, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in Paris in 1948, the same city where APRIL will hold the AGM on 15 March.

Another irony, we have seen various web sites studying the phenomena of volunteer suicides in the free software environment. There is the Debian suicide cluster, another list of Debian related deaths and then the Fellowship bloggers also created a list of open source deaths. The deaths of workers at France Telecom resulted in a high profile trial and prosecution. So far, there is no sign that anybody has been prosecuted in relation to the Debian suicide cluster. In French, a suicide cluster is called a wave of suicides (une vague de suicides).

• 2025-01-27: school district of Normandie, teacher's union calls out a suicide cluster, just as elected community representatives called out suicide clusters in Debian and open source. 9 cases and 3 attempted suicides out of 64,375 staff, that is 0.01 percent of the workforce.
• 2024-11-13: Orange, a well known phone company throughout Europe, facing suicide cluster in their home country, France. 30 cases in 2 years. The report puts the workforce at a similar size to the school district of Normandie, 65,000 workers. The incidence of suicide is therefore 3 times higher in Orange, 0.03 percent.

In Debian, there are only 1,000 developers. Five cases out of one thousand is 0.5 percent, fifteen times higher than the incidence of suicide in Orange, which was only 0.03 percent.

Why can other organizations talk about their suicide clusters but these inconvenient revelations are censored in the free software environment? How can we use the word free when the most important topics are censored? These are good questions for people to ask at the APRIL AGM or on the APRIL mailing lists.