Many people noticed Debian Developers have started making wholesale leaks of material from debian-private.
This finishes off the same year where we saw the death of Lucy Wayland, the cover-up of a controversial $300,000 donation from Google and the blackmailing of Norbert Preining.
What these divisions demonstrate is a maturity gap. The cabals running the project have never really grown up. Like a 15-year-old who receives a Ferrari for his birthday, the Debian Account Managers are not mature enough to handle the power associated with their positions.
Anybody familiar with the content of debian-private can see this is true: some leadership figures who have been in the project for decades are still behaving the same way that they did in the nineteen nineties yet we are about to begin 2020.
Another key reason for division is the rise of the Mollies. There is a hidden message in Molly de Blanc's fateful FOSDEM talk, where she boasts about humiliating people just days after the death of Lucy Wayland. The missing piece of the puzzle, leaked during DebConf, is that Molly was dating the Debian Project Leader, Chris Lamb. Lamb had become frustrated with day-to-day leadership responsibilities and wanted to stick to more prestigious things, like the invitation to the Cambridge University Dept of Computer Science. When other members of the community ran into problems, Lamby had simply handed them off to his girlfriend, de Blanc, for her sinister social experiments, which she was gloating about at FOSDEM. The Mollies used other volunteers in Debian like lab rats, refining nefarious techniques like misquoting people and gaslighting. They subsequently applied these skills to take down Richard Stallman, founder of the FSF.
Many organizations invest significant time and money preparing their managers to handle the responsibility of a major leadership role. Debian doesn't. Lamb and de Blanc's handling of certain situations demonstrate the consequences.
Many of us have been to leadership seminars organized by our employers from time to time. Nobody can ever recall one where the presenter delves into whispering networks, demotions and expulsions, mocking people present at the event itself. The human relations philosophy espoused by de Blanc can be summarized in one word: cyberbullying.
Yet as developers mature, some were able to see this maturity gap and either became frustrated with the project or quit. The cabal leaders haven't listened to these people, even continuing one of their experiments on a volunteer who's father recently died. With such extraordinary arrogance, it is no wonder that some people have gone beyond quitting and started to make those wholesale leaks.
