In the world of free and open source software, we have the unique phenomena of corporate employees working side by side with developers who work for competitors and also the unpaid volunteers.
After the commmunity elected me as the FSFE Fellowship representative in 2017, I began to receive significantly more detail about wrongdoing that goes on in the world of free and open source software. It is understandably surprising and disturbing for some of the larger companies to discover that these reports about their employees were going to an external volunteer and not to their in-house human resources department.
It is a useful moment to compare this situation to how it worked in the institutional abuse crisis. Australia's Royal Commission published many of the internal documents from the institutions concerned. One set of meeting minutes from the Archdiocese of Melbourne stands out. The Personnel Advisory Board (PAB), a group of highly trusted clergy who assist the Archbishop with the appointment of clergy to different roles, has realized that their board is too big and they need to create smaller sub-groups to handle the more sensitive cases.
Father X____ raised the question of how much is told to whom.
Father X____'s name appears frequently as somebody involved as an architect of the cover-up. His parish web site notes that he went into retirement in 2016. Coincidentally, that was the very moment the Royal Commission was seeking answers from Cardinal Pell.
Miraculously, Father X____ reappeared very briefly in 2023 to give a sermon at the funeral of a relative in a tiny village that few people would have heard of outside the state of Victoria. The following month, three people from that obscure village died in a mysterious mushroom poisoning that made headlines around the world.
Here is a snippet from the sermon, the man who moved pedophiles not only from one parish to another but also from one institution to another. He mentions a family connection with a former superintendent of An Garda Siochána (the Irish police).
By moving known pedophiles around, Father X____ enabled more abuse to take place and this resulted in more lives destroyed by overdoses and suicides.
Those seeking to discredit a former community representative are acting a lot like the institutions in the abuse crisis. As the WIPO UDRP guidelines tell us, anything that tarnishes the brand of Debian or the church has to be censored and covered up.
They are seeking to remove, censor and discredit me simply because people told me things I wasn't supposed to know. They would have preferred that some of these issues with women and children were only known to a select group of people appointed by the companies, just as the Personnel Advisory Board sought to limit knowledge of certain matters to the smallest possible sub-committee of clergy.
While the move to keeping information in-house is understandable and many companies even have an obligation to do so due to the privacy rights of their employees, it is not acceptable that they retrospectively punish me for my knowledge of these things. If punishing me or discrediting me for that role is part of their objective, they are the ones behaving in bad faith, violating UDRP rule 15(e).