Removing myself as a Lintian uploader in the next few weeks

A few days ago, a colleague reached out to me, asking if I could help draft a resolution on digital autonomy and free software for the upcoming renewal of our collective bargaining agreement. Although she's very politicised and generally a great individual, she is not a techie and we never really talked about these issues before.

This took me by surprise. I should have been rejoicing; no, I should have been the one who brought up this topic in our union. Wasn't I the technical expert on these issues? But alas, my first reaction when she came to me was to snicker and tell myself: "That's cute, but nothing's ever gonna change, Big Tech is too strong and our governments don't give a damn."

How sad and cynical is that? That's not the person I want to be.

Something in the Quebecois political landscape has shifted in the last few years with regards to tech. More and more "regular" people seem to be talking about the importance of digital autonomy, how government services shouldn't rely on Big Tech and how we should be using FOSS on hardware we actually control.

A few years ago, I would have been at the vanguard of this change. I would have been part of the creation of Données souveraines Québec. Heck, they are organising a whole conference next week and I'm not even going. How did this happen to me?

I first fell for Free Software for its political ideals: Knowledge Should Be Free, Cooperation Is More Efficient Than Competition, Centralisation Should Be Avoided When Possible, etc. I still believe in all of this, but somehow, after years of fighting for change in the tech world, I have retreated into technical work. I maintain Debian packages as a hobby and to scratch my own itch. I run services for myself and a few friends. I organise Debian User Group meetings.

To be clear, I haven't generally given up. I'm very politically active in my union and at work, I'm a good member of my housing cooperative and I'm still fighting against the industrialisation of natural spaces in my neighborhood. But when it comes time to defend freedom in the tech world, lately, I've just been shrugging and accepting I should use Microsoft Teams like every one else does. I want this to change and to do so, I need to free some time.

Lintian

Two years ago, I added myself to Lintian's Uploaders list. Up until then¹, I enjoyed fixing little issues here and there and liked creating new tags to help out the Python Team, where most of my Debian time was spent.

Lintian was badly in need of a new maintainer and as I felt it was an important project, I decided to step in. 37 releases and about 160 closed bugs later², I'm done.

To be honest, I haven't had much fun maintaining Lintian lately. Bugs keep piling on the BTS, so much so I have mostly been ignoring them for the past few months. In fact, most of the actual work triaging, writing code and fixing bug has been done by Nilesh Patra for a while now.

All this to say, if you care about Lintian, you should consider adding yourself to the Uploaders list, as I'm out and Nilesh can't do all the work by himself.

He's a great person to work with and since I don't want to suddenly leave him all alone, I'll be sticking around for a few more weeks in the hope someone else will volunteer to help out. A smooth transition with a new co-maintainer would really be nice!

If you're interested, don't hesitate to reach out to me on IRC or by email.