The latest phase of the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp saga is a defamation trial in the United States. Heard falsely accused Depp of pushing his ex-girlfriend down the stairs. The ex-girlfriend, Kate Moss, joined the trial by video link to tell the world that she actually fell. In other words, Heard had tried to deceive the court and public opinion.
Lies like that belong in Molly de Blanc's infamous whisper network. Maybe Heard can volunteer to join the Debian anti-harassment team?
Nonetheless, the Heard/Depp trial demonstrates the foolishness of going to court. Debian is spending vast sums of money on a greedy London lawyer to pursue a malicious claim at WIPO. Today we expose another one of the lies in their legal documents. We cut and paste a phrase that appears multiple times in the legal documents:
baseless claims of their involvement in the trafficking of young female developers
Are these women really developers? We already searched for their code in a previous blog.
We tried to avoid using the names of these women in this blog because they may very well be real victims of trafficking. Debian has decided to open a public case at WIPO and force their identities into the spotlight.
Let us zoom in on the photo of Chris Lamb at DebConf19. Some of the Kosovo girls at the table really did do some development. The two girls closest to Lamb are not from Kosovo. They are from Albania. Twenty percent of trafficking victims in Lamb's country, the UK, are from Albania. In 2017, Dennis van Zuijlekom was photographing these girls and posted them on Flickr under the headline Just another crazy photoshoot with fun-loving glamour-girls Anisa Kuci and Kristi Progri (both of Open Labs Hackerspace).
In the same year, Lamb went to Albania for the first time and posted the comments:
Date: 24 May 2017
To: debian-project@lists.debian.org
From: Chris LambJust to underline this. It was *extremely* remarkable and commendable that not only did the demographic skew of the organisers about 15-20 years younger than a typical conference, I would wager the gender split was around 70-80% female:male.
The Albanian open source community is very healthy indeed.
Six months later and one of the women from the photo shoot was at DebConf18, Taiwan, a long way from Albania, in the arm of the Israeli:
The other woman attended a series of events where Lamb was present, we extracted her travel itinerary from social media.
Shortly after being pictured with the Israeli, the first woman begin working for GNOME. She started at the same time as Molly de Blanc.
These two Albanian girls are best friends who grew up in the same building. Has Lamb fallen head-over-heels in love with Anisa? Suddenly, Lamb's ex-girlfriend Molly and the friend of Lamb's new love pursuit have both got jobs in GNOME. The road is clear for Lamb to move on the girl he wants. The job for Molly could be a consolation prize for being dumped and the job for the other girl looks like a sweetener to get closer to her friend.
A few months later, the two girls are sitting beside Lamb at the DebConf dinner, right where he wants them.
Both of these girls have done a lot of hard work in conference organization but they are not young female developers.
Therefore, how did they get these tickets and internships ahead of so many other women who really are coding?
The woman closest to Lamb was then awarded an Outreachy internship to help the next DebConf. $6000 is a lot of money in Albania. Coincidentally, the conference she was asked to work on was meant to be in Israel, the home country of the developer who had his arm around the other woman in Taiwan.
The legal documents claim the woman is a young female developer but these are her own words from her Outreachy reports:
Week two: The Debian project I applied for is ``Create fundraising material for DebConf20+, document the fundraising processes and support a cycle”.
Week three: These weeks I have been reaching out to nearly 100 possible sponsors around the globe, sending them the sponsorship email based on a template that I had been working on during the application phase of Outreachy.
Week five: Since the first weeks of the internship I started working on fundraising materials for DebConf20 as part of my tasks, using \LaTeX{} which is an amazing tool to work on creating different types of documents.
Week eight: Through organizing big and small events from 300 people conferences to 30 people bug squashing parties to 5 people strategy workshops, I have been able to develop skills because the community trusted me with responsibility in event organizing even before I was able to prove myself.
Week twelve: During the Outreachy internship I did two communication waves to potential sponsors and maintained the daily communication with them. I followed the documentation that was already available in the Debian wiki guiding me through the process of invoicing sponsors through the organizations that Debian collaborates with.
The other woman has a Github profile and the only projects she has worked on are documentation projects. We can see that she has been active in the Albanian hackerspace for 7 years without starting to code. Her Github profile.
The woman is featured in the banner used to promote Outreachy too:
We are sure these women provide very useful services to conference organization. They may well have the capacity to become developers if they stop working on conference organization. As it stands, the legal documents submitted by Debian are simply wrong. We regret that Debian has caused great embarassment to these women by telling WIPO they are young female developers. The Debian claims are a lie, much like Amber Heard's lie about Kate Moss being pushed down the stairs.
If Debian really believes these women are developers, will they pay them developer salaries?
