Software Freedom Institute has successfully acquired the World.IP.Day domain. It hosts a Planet site syndicating independent blogs analyzing WIPO, the EPO and software patents. World IP Day is on April 26.
There has been a lot of noise about the censorship of the debian.community domain in 2022.
In 2018, WIPO had their own whistleblower scandal. Reports emphasize the extent to which the WIPO boss Francis Gurry used his position to stop people speaking up. This is analogous to the censorship of the former debian.community web site. Gurry himself had been accused of awarding a contract to a friend and in a prior scandal, it was alleged that Gurry bribed people to vote for him. (disclosure: Gurry and I are both University of Melbourne alumni).
A full report describes the details.
In response, Gurry publicly attacked free speech rights of the press.
Software Freedom Institute was not the owner of the censored debian.community domain and was not a party in the case. Nonetheless, the WIPO lawyers used their dossier to insult the Institute's director, myself, in various ways. Notice the pattern?
The lawyers in the WIPO panel are Matthew Kennedy, Clive Duncan Thorne and Oleksiy Stolyarenko.
Rogue Debian developers insulted me at a time when I lost two family members. The overbearing demands of Debian in such a situation are so hideous that I can fully empathize with those people who are comparing Debian to a cult. Cults ask their members to disconnect from their family, their job and reality in general. Looking through the emails about the unexplained death of Jens Schmalzing, or the violence against Ted Walther and many other examples of Debian group behavior, the cult comparisons appear to be just as relevant as they are offensive.
Personally, I felt certain content on that web site was disturbing and I didn't want anything to do with it. On the other hand, it is all based on facts about Debian, none of it appears to be falsified in any way.
The demands of loyalty and obedience around Debian are such that regular Debian participants are encouraged to show a higher loyalty to Debian than to their employer. A lot of employers have looked at the evidence and become concerned about how to set appropriate boundaries on open source collaboration.
In 2022, the Institute was the respondent in the botched attempt by Red Hat to seize and censor the domain WeMakeFedora.org.
The case was processed by the ADR Forum rather than WIPO. When the ADR Forum notified us of the case, they informed us that the panelist would be a lawyer associated with IBM. In fact, the lawyer in question had a leading role in the Federation Against Software Theft (FAST), a lobby group funded by IBM. A fellow director of FAST is another lawyer who spent 35 years working for IBM. IBM is the owner of Red Hat, therefore, the proposed panelist would clearly have a conflict of interest. When this was pointed out, the lawyer in question immediately resigned from the process and ADR Forum appointed another lawyer to replace them.
Nonetheless, conflicts of interest like this are usually not so easy to detect. We don't know if Matthew Kennedy, Clive Duncan Thorne or Oleksiy Stolyarenko have ever worked on legal projects for any of the companies who give money to Debian. Nonetheless, there are enough companies giving money to Debian that there is a high probability that at least one of the lawyers has done work for one of those companies. These lawyers may also be participating in the FSFE legal network which is also used to plot against volunteers in various ways. The FSFE refuses to let volunteers and Fellowship representatives subscribe to the legal network email list and the archives are hidden. This goes against the promise of transparency and it provides a haven for conspiracies and abuse of power. In fact, in almost 30 years of Debian, there has never been any attempt to give a transparent report about which companies are funding the project with cash or employee time. This is the reality of many non-profit organizations: the non-profit status is simply an illusion to obfuscate the identity of the organizations who control the revenue.
Subject: Forced to disclose infomation from debian-private Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2003 12:52:37 +0000 From: Jon Middleton <jjm@debian.org> To: Debian Private <debian-private@lists.debian.org> [The following is not signed as I have no access to my gpg key from work] After the announcement of the Debian servers being compromised, I have been told by my employer (I'm in the UK) that I am expected to disclose any information that the company thinks it should know even thought I have agreed to not disclose infomation on this list to any non-debian developers when I joined the project. Has anyone else been placed into this position by there employer ? Or advice about what I should do ? My intial reaction is that I should resign from Debian so that I can not learn information which I will be expected to disclose, until I could find an employer that would respect my response-abilities from my involvement in the project. -- Jon 'There's a lot of "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" going on, but the bathwater is so foul that many companies don't mind the occasional loss of baby.' -- Bruce Schneier - CRYPTO-GRAM, July 15, 2003
Subject: Re: Debian-private and people who are working on other distributions Date: 29 May 1997 11:20:00 +0200 From: Kai Henningsen <kai@khms.westfalen.de> Organization: Organisation? Me?! Are you kidding? To: debian-private@lists.debian.org bruce@pixar.com (Bruce Perens) wrote on 28.05.97 in <m0wWyBw-00IdetC@golem.pixar.com>: > My opinion is that people who are working on other distributions should > probably voluntarily remove themsleves from the debian-private > subscription list. I see a pretty clear ethical conflict. Can I hear > discussion on this, please? I think that's entirely dependant on the details. Suppose someone packages some software for Debian, packages the same software for RedHat, and is on more-or-less internal lists for both. As long as [s]he doesn't go shopping with what [s]he learns on those internal lists, I don't see a problem. Now suppose that the chief marketing guy for RedHat is on debian-private, and releases an announcement on cola pointing out some discussions here so RedHat looks better. Very obvious problem here. There's all possible shades in between. It's really hard to solve in general. Personally, I'd prefer people to notice conflicts of interests themselves - regardless what specific points those are related to, other distributions is just one possibility - and either directly sign off in that case, or ask what people feel about it. As with all ethical problems, this won't always work right. MfG Kai -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to debian-private-request@lists.debian.org . Trouble? e-mail to templin@bucknell.edu .
Subject: Are the RMs being paid? Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 16:05:25 +0200 From: Christoph Berg <myon@debian.org> To: debian-private <debian-private@lists.debian.org> Hi, before I vote on the let's-or-not-recall-the-DPL GRs, could someone give me an update on whether dunc-tanc or anyone else remotely Debian-related is actually paying the RMs? (both/neither/whom?) It probably won't influence my votes, but I'd like to know if I'm voting on some what-if scenario or not. Christoph PS: Sorry if that information was already posted somewhere else, there's just too much traffic on lists. -- cb@df7cb.de | http://www.df7cb.de/
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