Bad faith: complainant seeking revenge for whistleblowing about bad faith


Insults submitted by the complainant as evidence show they started harassing my family and I in 2018.

If we drill down, we find they started this harassment in September of that year.

In April 2017, the FSFE members elected me as their Fellowship representative. There is a significant overlap between members of the FSFE (approximatley 1532 people at the time of the election) and co-authors of the Debian software.

In the beginning of September 2018, in my role as Fellowship representative, I wrote that the FSFE was acting in bad faith by using a name derived from the real FSF. Various emails have since been published to prove there is bad faith and that both the FSF management and the FSFE management are aware of the bad faith. Of particular concern to me, as I expressed in the blog post from September 2018, a volunteer who had contributed a bequest of EUR 150,000 may have been fooled by the bad faith of FSFE. In other words, if the FSFE was not using a name similar to FSF, the volunteer may have given his bequest to the real FSF.

Evidence: FSFE election result.

If you hire an engineer to inspect a used car, you would hope that they would be able to verify basic things like the authenticity of the serial number (VIN) on the vehicle chassis. As the elected Fellowship representative, I had an obligation to report the FSFE was not what it claims to be.

The money that volunteers and private individuals have contributed to FSFE over the years is far more than the value of most used cars. Therefore, in the case of FSFE, there is both evidence of bad faith and there is quantitative evidence, the financial reports, showing us the impact of that bad faith.

The attacks against my family commenced immediately after I published the evidence of bad faith by FSFE. The email was sent to the LibrePlanet list on 11 September 2018 and the attacks began about one week later, as shown by the date of the email from Chris Lamb below on 20 September 2018.

The attacks against my family and I are a predecessor of this harassment through the UDRP. It has been a continuous pattern of harassment over six years now. It appears that this harassment, of which the UDRP insults are just the latest instalment, is part of an overall reprisal for the reports I gave the community in my capacity as the Fellowship representative.

Using the UDRP to insult and harass a volunteer community representative as a reprisal for performing their duties is clearly an act of harassment and bad faith as anticipated by UDRP rule 15(e).

Evidence: email from Mirko Bohm: I would like to thank you for your contributions to FSFE and for your commitment not to shy away from asking the difficult questions and calling out the need for change where it exists.