Wouter Verhelst is the latest Debian Developer to be removed from the Debian keyring.
Nobody has publicly stated whether this was a resignation or an expulsion. Sometimes there is little difference. Sometimes people are blackmailed to resign.
Wouter was responsible for acts of vigilantism against another volunteer at FOSDEM 2022. Wouter's behavior and anger problems have contributed to the ongoing disclosures that multiple people have made from debian-private (leaked) gossip network.
Wouter effectively used the resources and infrastructure of FOSDEM VZW, a Belgian non-profit, to continue a vendetta from the FSFE e.V., a German non-profit.
In particular, Wouter has been removed from Debian shortly after the disclosures about the Debian Day suicide of Frans Pop. Pop was from Netherlands, Wouter is from Belgium, an adjacent country. Many developers who know Pop personally are frustrated that the vendettas have reached this level.
We found this little gem in debian-private
Subject: Re: debian-private archives Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2001 09:13:14 +0200 (CEST) From: Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org> To: debian-private@lists.debian.org CC: Debian Private-mailinglist <debian-private@lists.debian.org> On Sun, 19 Aug 2001, Aaron Lehmann wrote: > And I found the key by grepping through that archive today. IIRC it > was redhatsucks but they rearranged the letters. Yup, that should now be "rashduckset". -- wouter dot verhelst at advalvas dot be "Human knowledge belongs to the world" -- from the movie "Antitrust"
It looks like his departure from Debian was very sudden because his name is still associated with all his packages. One of his packages is sreview, it is used for post-conference video review at events like FOSDEM. Will another volunteer take over this package? We are waiting for the Statement on Wouter Verhelst
