The "rival" discussion mailing list

[Florian Snow]

Hi Paul,

Thank you very much for your well thought out email (as always).  I agree with you that we need to resolve this, but I have no idea how.

Daniel's grievances with the FSFE are largely based on what I would call a misunderstanding. Yet he reacted angrily to any attempt of clarification.  He repeatedly told others what work they needed to do, but was never willing to participate himself.  He told us we didn't engage with him in person when we had the chance and when some of us responded by telling him he hadn't even stopped by to say hello to anyone at events that we had hoped we could talk, he called those people bullies.

He repeatedly makes claims that he must know are not true, both about what he claims is going on within the FSFE and, more recently about who is in charge of unsubscribing people from his mailing list.

The problem with the whole thing is that when he lies about things, he does not mind publishing private information or redacting it in a misleading way. He also uses private information out of context to support false claims.  When we respond to it, we stick to the rules, so we do not publish his countless hostile exchanges with the GA and we certainly do not publish more private information to refute his false statements.

If you're interested,  perhaps have a look at the Debian mailing lists. There is more of a public record of bad behavior there and Daniel's mails to those public lists are very similar to what we received on internal lists.

I tried for a long time, but I don't know how to get through to Daniel and I have run out of new ideas to try. I thought he was nice and reasonable based on meeting him in person and based on his writing at the time, but he appears to have gone on a rampage and I have no way of communicating with him anymore. I regret that very much.

Happy hacking!
Florian