Most of the money you see in and around Free / Open Source Software, Hardware and other projects is in the hands of large companies, groups and self styled organisations, with little or none reaching the actually contributors/maintainer/developers of your favourite projects who actually do the day to day work.
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My Debian activity currently is restricted to the packages I do maintain and those I choose to maintain. I am here to support new and existing upstream projects I have built great working relationships with over years. I would feel extremely bad if I abandoned these good people.
Debian Mentors was a great passion. I was privileged to mentor and assist in other ways, new contributors and those building up their reputation within the project as a whole. I am sad to say that I shall not be returning to Debian Mentors while I see bullying and discrimination by a minority within the Debian Project. I can only apologise to those who will now wait months for any help within Debian Mentors.
I do contribute to the Debian Project, but I do not align myself with the project, I am independent.
As I found out recently, the 2010 Equality Act. here in the U.K. does not protect volunteers. This information provided to me by the Equality Advisory Support Service is very shocking. This lack of protection allows Companies, Charities and Not For Profit Organisations to mistreat and discriminate groups or individuals at will as I have found out myself.
I may circle round back to this after I have done further research and update on further actions taken or to be taken.
Update: 2025-08-25
I would ask those in the U.K. to consider signing the below linked petition and hopefully stir the U.K. government into looking at the rights of volunteers and others in extracurricular activities e.g. contributing to Debian.
I believe that this type of safeguarding I would hope expands to cover groups such as Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and other organised volunteer (in whole or part) projects.
graphviz is a large mature project primarily coded in C. Sadly the current maintainer is not using the graphviz Salsa repository that already exists in the debian group.
This current situation is restricting any chance of collaborative development/maintenance of the package. This really needs to be rectified.
Update: 2025-09-07
For context, I filed the bug below in November 2024.
Since deciding to stop Debian contribution in the area of Debian Mentors, I have not been idle. I have been doing commits for packages I maintain and also contribute to i.e. upstream projects and other activities that include Ubuntu bug squashing etc.
With my disabilities, it is important to face challenges be they during my daily activities or within the Free/Open Source Software community. These challenges are hard, fun and make me feel useful.
A change long wanted by me. dh_dwz not to be run by default in debhelper compat 14. This I am sure will result in system speed increases, but only time and testing will tell.
