The WIPO panel has decided to steal the debian.community domain name. The volunteers are preparing to execute contingency plans to preserve the site on a new domain.
We want to ask the question: was it worth the cost to Debian? The same material will continue to be published on other domains and web sites anyway.
- Approximately thirty Debian Developers resigned while legal action was in process. Others complain about losing motivation.
- Other developers may have been reluctant to join.
- The Frans Pop suicide, which was planned for Debian Day, became public knowledge.
- The pace of publishing defamation and conspiracies from the debian-private (leaked) gossip network will increase.
- Another company has been prompted to protectively register a Debian trademark. The panel have said that they don't recognize the trademark because of the date it was registered was after the WIPO procedure commenced. However, anybody who registers a debian name today based on authorization from the other trademark will be free to keep their domain.
- More people have become aware of their right to register domain names including the name debian and use them within the limited framework of fair use. Shutting them down will be an expensive game of whack-a-mole.
- The report from the panel gives other volunteers hints about the type of evidence they need to collect to prove their rights and legitimate interests to use the name debian.
- Many people in Kosovo have boycotted DebConf. We previously had three women from Kosovo in Google Summer of Code and three more women from the region in Outreachy. Looking at the video from the Debian Outreach meeting, the room is almost empty and none of those local people are in attendance. Announcements on the DebConf mailing list told us they had rooms reserved for local participants but nobody wanted them, so they had to put out an extra offer after the deadline. They subsequently had to increase the travel budget by EUR €16,000 to fly people in from other countries to take the beds that were intended for local people.
- Debian loses credibility in the realm of free speech and freedom of expression.
- Debian has revealed that they will not deny the evidence published on this web site.
- Due to publicity around the case, the Streisand effect, more people know Debian was trying to hide the payments to girlfriends on internships.
We will shortly provide details to help people continue to access uncensored news about Debian.
We are currently deciding whether to appeal the decision of the panel. However, we believe it is more important to focus our energy on research into the Frans Pop suicide and the risks to other volunteers.
We want to offer hope to many of the low-level volunteers and interns who have been sucked in by Debian conspiracies. The legal action at WIPO does nothing to prevent us publishing the same information on other web sites. The Debian cabal took no action to take responsibility for these scandals, they only seek to hide the domain name. They don't care if the same names and photos are published on other web sites. They don't care if they pissed off all the women in Kosovo because they can just go and find some more women in Brazil or another destination. We do care and we want to offer hope: if the Debian cabal admits there was favoritism in the travel budget and if they stop defaming volunteers, we will have no more reason to continue publishing hard evidence about the intern relationships.
This was a hollow and expensive victory for the cabalists but Debian has also lost credibility on free speech.
The empty Debian Outreach meeting at DebConf22, Kosovo
Compare that to the hackathon for women, also in Prizren, in 2017, where 26 people attended.
