Incinerated workers & Debian unhealthy culture
In June, a worker at the Caterpillar factory fell into a tank of molten iron and was instantly incinerated. Health and Safety inspectors were quick to determine that the lack of guard rails was an obvious factor in the death.
Earlier this year I explored the huge volumes of email experienced by Frans Pop before the Debian.Day suicide. Like the Caterpillar forge, debian-private and Debian in general lacks guard rails.
Thinking about the Shaya Potter incident in 1998, I decided to do the same thing that I did for Frans Pop and chart the email volumes on debian-private in the twelve months leading up to Potter's mistakes.
Potter appears to be quite a brilliant developer. Reading through his history, I could only empathize with his story. Potter was selected for an elite internship at the Naval Research Laboratory while still in the middle of high school. Back in 1995, the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) had selected twenty high school students to spend a week at the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) in Canberra. They gave us nice certificates.
I wanted to know more about Potter's story: what really happened here? So I did the same thing that I did for Frans Pop. Here is the chart, it shows that email volumes on debian-private were steadily growing at the time that Potter made these mistakes. There is a lack of guard rails.