Shaya Potter & Debian WaReZ expulsion
In recent years, Debian leaders have abused their positions to leak rumors and gossip about some developers while hiding far more serious scandals.
One of those is the shadow expulsion of Shaya Potter (blog, CV) in 1998.
Potter was a child prodigy who began a US Navy internship when he was fifteen or sixteen. At the same time, Novare, Inc was hosting some Debian infrastructure on their company servers.
Potter claims his software was being deployed to the USS Theodore Roosevelt (Secure Tactical Access Terminal) while at the same time, Debian records show that he was stashing WaReZ on master.debian.org, a server operated by Novare.
The case of a navy intern committing piracy is interesting for a wide range of reasons that have a lot more to do with Debian than the navy.
Potter began co-authoring Debian as a minor. It appears that he was 19 when he was caught with WaReZ but it is not clear what age he was when he actually downloaded these illegal copies of software. The age of majority varies between different countries and different states of the US. Therefore, there was some confusion about whether it should be handled as a juvenile offence. I recently wrote about the concerns with FSFE encouraging minors to do unpaid work on open source projects.
Earlier this year I wrote about the fact that only 86 of the original Debian co-authors agreed to form an association with a constitution. If we look at the names of the people who consented to form an association, Shaya Potter is not in the list. If Potter did not consent to the constitution then he wasn't a member at all. Morever, the association only came into existence at the end of the vote in December 1998. Potter was supposedly expelled in November 1998, one month before the vote. Therefore, as the organization didn't really exist yet and as he hadn't consented to be a member, we can't really say he was expelled at all.
Nonetheless, it looks like his position with the US Navy also ended the year after the Debian drama. Barely five years later, Potter went on to win the LISA'05 award for the best student paper.
The great irony in this case is that people were angry with Potter for violating copyright law. Yet this was the first time the developers forcefully removed the name of a Debian co-author from the software. Therefore, by removing his name and failing to give him equal credit as a joint author of the Debian software, they were violating his copyright interests. They set a precedent for violating the copyright interests of other authors, for example, the violent suppression of Ted Walther in DebConf6.