Matthias Kirschner, FSFE: Plagiarism & Child labour in YH4F
Their original announcement promised an award ceremony in June 2022. Many people noticed that June came and went and there was no news about the awards. It looks like they moved it to October. Why? Could it be because the ILO decided to call a week of action against child labour from 3 to 12 June 2022?.
One of the most startling things in FSFE's recent announcement is the obfuscation of the children's names. While we can see the name of Kylie Minogue in the credits of her early TV appearances, we can't see the names of the children who did unpaid work for FSFE. They only show the names of the children who won a prize and even then, FSFE only shows us their first names.
Matthias Kirschner wants to be a middleman. If you use the code created by these children and if you want to make a donation then he wants you to give the money to him and not directly to the children who wrote the code. Obfuscating the names of the real authors in this way is very close to plagiarism.
If you look at the FSFE staff list, none of the adult staff are developers. They are entirely dependent on children and volunteers to write code.
An earlier report tells us that over 100 children registered for the program. We don't know how many of those children started working on a project or how many hours each child worked. We only know 6 children received fixed-fee payments in the form of prizes at the end.