Frans Pop & Debian Day 2024: 31 years of deception and modern slavery

Debian was founded by Ian Murdock on 16 August 1993. One of the key developers, Frans Pop, was writing his resignation/suicide note on the night before Debian Day in 2010. It is the Debian Day Volunteer Suicide.

On Debian Day 2024, we are yet to see any major public reminder about Debian Day on the usual outlets like bits.debian.org. These days, it seems more common for the oligarchs to use such channels for spreading defamation and character attacks about volunteers and our families.

Some local groups put up a list of Debian Day gatherings but they have had little public promotion either.

Modern slavery: How Debian fooled Frans Pop and other volunteers

The US State Department published some comments about modern slavery.

Human trafficking can include, but does not require, movement. People may be considered trafficking victims regardless of whether they were born into a state of servitude, were exploited in their home town, were transported to the exploitative situation, previously consented to work for a trafficker, or participated in a crime as a direct result of being trafficked. At the heart of this phenomenon is the traffickers’ aim to exploit and enslave their victims and the myriad coercive and deceptive practices they use to do so.

In other words, according to the US State Department, pretty much any sort of coercive or deceptive practice that allows one person to exploit the work of another can be referred to using terms like modern slavery or human trafficking.

We will look at two cases where volunteers were deceived and subsequently died.

Frans Pop reveals how Debian deceived him

Frans Pop resigned for the first time in 2007 complaining about the huge emotional burden of Debian culture.

Subject: [Very long] Post-partem rant and retrospective
Date: Thu, 31 May 2007 03:56:11 +0200
From: Frans Pop 
To: debian-private@lists.debian.org

I've decided to write this in a separate mail because I'm afraid this may get long. Quite a bit of this has been written before, but I hope some of you will bear with me.

[snip]

So, what has made me decide to leave the project. It's a combination of just plain emotional stress over the whole Sven Luther issue, frustration with the inability of the project to deal with that and with some other issues, and frustration with the fact that a fair number of members of the project seem to feel that as long as you don't upload packages with trojans, pretty much anything is OK.

Yet somehow he was fooled to return. He was given a free meal and he was deceived by the illusion that the environment around Debian is a place for social and ethical advances in computing:

Subject: Revoking retirement from the project
Date: Fri, 19 Oct 2007 13:51:06 +0200
From: Frans Pop <elendil@planet.nl>
To: debian-private@lists.debian.org

On Thursday 31 May 2007 03:55, Frans Pop wrote:
> As already announced in an earlier mail, I am hereby retiring from the
> project.

Right. We are now almost 3 months after I made my resignation final (or 5 months since I first announced it) and after a lot of soul searching the past couple of weeks and looking at what I've been doing over the past few months, I've come to the conclusion that I'm not ready to abandon the project after all.

As my account is still active (which is probably not completely surprising), I guess that technically I'm still a DD and thus that this message should be sufficient. If not, please let me know.

The main factors that have prompted this decision have been two real life meetings (Sledge's BBQ and a small dinner in AMS) and also watching the moving "last lecture" from MIT's Randy Pausch [1]. The first have made me realize the strong ties I've developed with some DDs and the last has made me reconsider whether I should give up so "easily".
I also want to thank the many people who sent me a message (either on d-private or privately) in reply to my resignation mails. Though not an important factor, they have helped to make me reconsider.

The fact that I want to be a DD again does not mean that I'm ready to go back to the level of involvement/activity I had before my resignation. I am rather disappointed at the progress on social committee and on DSA and FTP-master issues since Debconf, although both seem to have been revived recently.
For the time being I'm going to be doing just the things that I enjoy and feel like doing. I certainly won't be taking on any major responsibilities until there is a lot more clarity how social issues are going to be handled in the future.

It seems to me that one problem may be that people treat social problems like a bug: they first have to reproduce the problem themselves and experience it at first hand before being willing to acknowledge that there _is_ a problem and act accordingly.
I hope that the past events have shown that this does not work and that we need mechanisms to either intervene early so escalation is prevented, or at least need to act consistently after measures have been taken. I think that as a project we have to learn to trust and accept the judgement of others in such matters.

Cheers,
FJP

[1] http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/21/1448229

The vast amounts of money spent on lawyers to shut down web sites proves that the principles espoused by the Debian Free Software Guidelines are not taken seriously. The DFSG, the promises about freedom and transparency, they have all just been a sham to suck in victims like Frans Pop to work for free.

Between 2021 and 2022, over $125,000 was spent to shut down web sites containing "critical commentary" about Debian. The WIPO censorship order was signed off on 3 May 2024, World Press Freedom Day.

Abraham Raji reveals how Debian deceived him

Abraham Raji is the volunteer who died at DebConf23 in India. On his personal web site, he has a page with the title "Why Debian?". ( Link to backup copy). He includes the following reasons for his decision to contribute time and effort to Debian:

Abraham Raji: There is no room for underhand corporate deals, no unfair treatment behind private mails and everything can be reviewed by the public.

Have another look at the evidence. Over $125,000 given to lawyers for the sole purpose of harassing my family and I after my father died. Censoring web sites. Making up rumors. When you follow the money, you see that the real Debian cult is the opposite of what Abraham Raji perceived it to be. Therefore, Raji had been deceived into contributing time and intellectual property to Debian.

In the "Why Debian?" post by Abraham Raji, he also comments:

Abraham Raji: More importantly no crazy or weird surprises.

Yet it looks like Raji did get a surprise and it may have been a factor in his death. After all the work that volunteers made to organize the first DebConf in India, they were invited to relax with a Day Trip in the middle of the conference.

The surprise for Raji is mentioned in the page: after spending most of the day with his new "family" ( read why Debian is not a "family"), they told him he would have to pay some of his own money to participate in the final activity, the kayak excursion. After all the work he did organizing DebConf23, he even created the logo for them, and with sponsors like Google, he must have felt that this request to contribute his own money too was one of those "surprises" that are not supposed to exist with Debian.

Here is a screenshot of the day trip page, we can see where the request for people to contribute financially is mentioned in the page:

Once again, people found over $125,000 to pay for lawyers to harass volunteers and our families but they couldn't cover the costs of the DebConf23 excursion for hard working volunteers like Abraham Raji.

Everybody who looks at the web site of Software in the Public Interest, Inc and adds up the Debian legal expenses is having a big surprise. Therefore, Raji was under some sort of delusion when he wrote that there are "no crazy or weird surprises" in the Debian "family".

The people who contributed their own money got life jackets. Abraham Raji was not wearing a life jacket when he drowned.

In pictures: how Frans Pop was exploited

Now that we can see that at least two of the deceased volunteers told us, in their own words, that they were deceived about a Debian "family" that doesn't really exist, we need to look for evidence of them being exploited.

If we can prove deception and if we can prove exploitation then, according to the criteria from the US State Department, we have proved there is modern slavery or human trafficking at work under the guise of a family.

There was a Debian QA meeting at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany on the weekend of 9 to 11 September 2005.

• wiki page (vanished) and an archive.org copy of the wiki page
• public email invitation

The email invitation plays on the artificial scarcity. It includes the comment:

As we won't have enough beds, please bring your own sleeping bags and camping mat.

This is a sham. Some people have made an enormous amount of money from Debian. For example, we can see that Mark Shuttleworth built his first business, Thawte Consulting, on Debian in the 1990s and he sold it for $700 million. Yet developers like Frans Pop were offered nothing but a hard floor to sleep on in the back of a classroom.

The same artificial scarcity tactics are rampant today, for example, the request for volunteers at DebConf to contribute their own money to the day trip, despite Debian having huge sums of money to pay legal vendettas.

There is a photo gallery from the meeting at Technical University of Darmstadt.

In this page of the gallery, they have added the comment "Frans is building up, waldi is watching".

The EXIF meta-data for these images appears to have the right times but the wrong dates. The timestamp for the photo is approximately 3pm.

Some time later, we can see Frans Pop having the meal on Friday night. If some organization can sponsor the food, where did the money come from? Why didn't they ask for hotel costs too?

The meal photo has a timestamp around 9pm on the Friday.

It looks like the offer of food, or the offer of a group of like-minded people to eat with, was the minimum amount necessary to motivate some people to come and work without any real payment at all.

In the next photos, we can see that somebody slept using a hammock in the bike racks.

Hammock at night, "Die Fledermaus".

Developer inside the hammock the next morning.

Later in the Saturday, everybody heads out to the car park. Could this be a place for a fight, like at DebConf6 in Mexico? The photos of this group in the car park have the comment "Geeks hiding in cars". But they told us nothing gets hidden in Debian. One of the people in the car park photos is Holger Levsen. Holger was one of the same people named in reports about the DebConf6 fight.

Some time later, they go to have their dinner. There is a photo of the group forced to queue up to get their food.

After dinner, there are more photos of people working. These photos were taken on the Saturday night. We can tell it is night time by comparing them to the earlier photos from the day time. The windows on the left of the photos are reflecting the ceiling lights. There is no sign of outside light.

In this creepy photo, we can see Frans Pop is at the right of a group of three people with their backs to the camera. This is Frans Pop, working without pay on a Saturday night in exchange for nothing more than a couple of meals and a hard place to sleep on the floor. The caption below the photo is "Concentrated hacking", in other words, work. The EXIF data suggests the picture was taken at 10:41pm.

Personally, I resigned from some of my voluntary work around the time my father died. People started spreading mysterious rumors about "behavior". What does good behavior look like then? Look at the photos of people working without asking for payment and without speaking about any ethical or privacy issues in our industry. They are working for the promise of a philosophy which is out of reach, like a carrot dangled just out of reach of the horse.

Here is a later photo of the same scene with Frans Pop still working. In this photo, that is Frans Pop with his left hand raised to touch the computer screen.

The EXIF metadata for this photo tells us it was taken at 11:10pm

Work wouldn't be complete if we didn't have the pleasure of meetings. Sure enough, on Sunday, there are some photos with the caption "Debian Meeting". We can see Frans Pop at the back in a red t-shirt now.

Now there are more photos from a dinner and we can see Frans Pop in the red t-shirt again at a long table. The caption on this one is "Dinner at Antalya".

In another photo, we can see two of the developers are sleeping on the table. The EXIF metadata tells us it is 7am. The caption is "It's... errm... early...".

Then there is a photo with the caption "Results of the nightly work".

I'm not sure which morning this is but further into the sequence we can see Frans Pop working again. He is in the top right corner of the photo, near the window. He has a red t-shirt again the next day?

Was Frans Pop exploited on the weekend of 9 to 11 September 2005?

The German legal and tax advisors Winheller have published a blog "Working on Sunday is not permitted in Germany".

It seems to be quite clear. That is the law, like driving on the right side of the road.

Stefan Winheller: Only in exceptional cases is work allowed on Sundays. However, this presupposes that the work is also necessary on a Sunday, namely, it cannot be done on a working day. This is the case, for example, in hospitals as well as emergency and rescue services.

Fines and imprisonment are possible punishments for employers who flout the law. Those penalties may be more severe in cases where workers were tricked into working and never got paid at all.

Did Frans Pop know he had been deceived to work for free?

One of the last emails before Frans Pop sent his resignation was this email from Lars Wirzenius:

To: debian-project <debian-project@lists.debian.org>
Subject: DEP-5 meta: New co-driver; current issues
From: Lars Wirzenius <liw@liw.fi>
Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2010 00:45:30 +1200

The effort to get a machine-readable format for debian/copyright
has been going on for some years now. I think it is time to get it
done. To help with this, I am joining Steve Langasek as a driver
for DEP-5[0].

    [0] http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep5/

The story so far, in a very rough summary:

...

Lars was apparently employed as a contractor by Ubuntu. He wasn't doing this push as a volunteer like Frans Pop.

More significantly, the idea of a machine readable copyright file is not useful for everybody. It is only relevant for some very large organizations. Therefore, there is something grossly unfair about pressuring lone volunteers to work on this. Another rogue organization, the FSFE, has made a similar effort, they call it the REUSE campaign and they have a dedicated web site for REUSE. The following quote stands out:

A REUSE-compliant project makes the jobs of legal experts and compliance officers much easier.

People like Frans Pop and Abraham Raji told us in their own words that they came and contributed their time, their money and their intellectual property to improve the Debian software because of the philosophy.

The push for DEP-5, the machine readable copyright files, commoditizes the work of developers. The company paying Lars Wirzenius and Steve Langasek to "drive" DEP-5 were not going to pay for the time that everybody else had to spend creating DEP-5 copyright files.

When Scott James Remnant resigned from Canonical / Ubuntu in 2011, he wrote a detailed blog post about the early days of Ubuntu. There is a backup copy here but the photos of paid developers with Mark Shuttleworth's private jet have mysteriously vanished.

There is a news report about Mark Shuttleworth and they published a picture of him sitting inside a private jet. The timestamp in the photo is from March 2006, approximately six months after the event in Darmstadt where the developers spent Friday night and Saturday night sleeping on the desks.

Frans doesn't want to be Ubuntu's slave

Marc Haber objects to being an Ubuntu slave. That point appears to resonate with Frans Pop.

Original link

To: debian-project@lists.debian.org
Subject: Re: Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes
From: Frans Pop <elendil@planet.nl>
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 2009 09:28:43 +0200

On Thursday 30 July 2009, Marc Haber wrote:
> I don't think that we shouldn't time our releases according to what
> Mark Shuttleworth says. We are not Ubuntu's slave even if they try
> hard to make it look like that.
>
> Our 18-to-24-month release cycle was a nice vehicle to stay
> asynchronous with Ubuntu, which _I_ consider a desireable feature to
> prevent Debian from perishing. We are not only major supplier to
> Ubuntu, we have our end customers ourselves. I'd prefer that it stayed
> that way.

+1

Please see the chronological history of how the Debian harassment and abuse culture evolved.