Last month: First Female Debian Project Leader (DPL) Affirms Low Profile and Inferior Status of Women in GAFAM
The Debian Project has allowed GAFAM (including salaried Microsoft employees) to vote in GRs. It moreover lacks diversity. It hardly has any women in it. The "token DPL" wasn't elected, she was merely appointed for putting down her name.
How many GAFAM employees voted for slop in Debian? Did any of them disclose the conflict of interest?
The Register MS reports that "only 450 of 600 votes in Debian were accepted," a reader has alerted us. Quoting the article in question, "[t]he rules of the vote saw community members asked to rank each of the eight proposals. Just under 600 people voted, but Debian’s election team rejected many for unspecified reasons, leaving almost 450 valid votes to count."
"What kind of filtering is that?" the reader has asked.
My guess is, they made the voting process so complicated - unlike a straightforward referendum - that some newer voters put it an invalid (hence impossible to decipher) vote and there was no validation (input sanitisation aside) in the process to help voters correct their mistakes.
As a result, some people (probably newer people) weren't able to have a say in spite of trying to. They say that for democracy to function access to booths/voting and simplicity in the process are both highly essential so that nobody feels discriminated against, intimidated, uncertain etc.
At the end they allowed slop, which is tragic and causes a lot of anger right now (both inside the project and in social control media). Users of Debian GNU/Linux cannot trust the code of Debian (no audits; easy to insert back doors) and unpaid volunteers like DDs and DMs don't want to babysit botspam, they'd rather interact and work with other human beings. █