Bad faith: lawyers get the lifejackets, Abraham Raji gets none
When you give money to Debian, does it go to lawyers or developers?
Have they found the right balance?
In January 2023, I published a picture of our crew rowing Head of the Yarra. The guy sitting behind me won the award for Emergency Practitioner of the Year. He is just the type of person you would want to have around if somebody went missing in the water. But in all the years we did rowing, I don't remember anybody going missing.
A few months after I published that photo and Abraham Raji disappeared and drowned on the DebConf day trip.
According to the Wiki page for the day trip, volunteers participated in a series of activities throughout the day. To participate in the final activity, the kayak, the volunteers were expected to pay an extra fee. People not paying the fee would be left alone to swim like Abraham Raji.
In Australia, we all learn the basic rules of swimming. Never swim alone is one of those rules. Swim in the marked swimming areas.
Debian people like to reinvent the wheel and find their own way of doing things. The DebConf organizers are particularly bad at this. People are constantly bike shedding about the costs of minor things. They tell the foreigners from poor countries that they have to pay their own visa fees. They expected the Indians to pay the supplement for going in a kayak, which comes with a life jacket, or be left alone.
But according to their own records, they paid over $120,000 to lawyers to attack my family and I. Paying the lawyers was more important than providing supervision or life jackets for victims like Abraham Raji.
Given this vendetta has drained so much of the budget that somebody was left without a lifejacket and he died, it is clear to me that this vendetta is brought in bad faith and it violates UDRP rule 15(e).