“I took FSFE to court. This is my story”

&gt; A female colleague and me had dared to discuss wage transparency and gender pay gap in the office. […] Our boss Matthias was beyond furious. After that office meeting, he told my colleague “there will be consequences”.<p>Under German law you are not only allowed to talk about your salary with your colleagues, it is expressly illegal for your employer to try and stop you from doing this. I’m surprised a German boss would warn of “consequences” for doing that, and if FSFE had a union I doubt he would have gotten away with it.

Wow, this is horrible. It sounded like the court sided with you even though it was beyond their remit&#x2F;reach to be able to fine them, which I think is pretty damming of the situation.<p>I hope that you can take some time out to recover and then go on to find something worthy of your time and effort within a positive environment.<p>(edit: grammar)

&gt; we both felt secure that the free software movement is progressive, and cares about being inclusive and equal opportunities oriented.<p>Unfortunately it has been proved very often that this is not true. This is not the first case of racism and sexisme in FOSS and probably won&#x27;t.

For the record, the FSFE published a response here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fsfe.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;statement-20201220.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fsfe.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;statement-20201220.html</a><p>&gt; [...] we felt it necessary to state unequivocally that this post does not reflect the reality of the facts and contradicts the verdict by the Berlin Labour Court.<p>&gt; The court judgement of 19 November 2020 (reference number 42 Ca 5723&#x2F;20) did not acknowledge any factual basis to the assertions. Furthermore the judges concluded that our former employee&#x27;s own statements prove that she “neither experienced hostility, nor was she offended, nor in another form intimidated or demeaned”. Additionally they found, she received equal treatment, and that “the boundaries of socially acceptable conduct” were “not exceeded”.<p>&gt; Until the end of the proceedings, we do not wish to comment any further [...]

Does anyone know where I can find any relevant court documents? Specifically the &quot;The court basically says that even though they recognise my claims as true [...]&quot;.<p>If the court claim is affirming of her claims, and her story stands up, this is worth carrying forwards.<p>There are few organisations that can successfully promote and defend free software, for one of the major ones to be headed by a person who behaves like described is incredibly concerning - what other lies and manipulations does he partake in?

Without context and without knowing what was her job, I&#x27;m very surprised at how poorly written this is. It should be much better organized, the points she makes should be made clearer and it shouldn&#x27;t read like the rough first draft of a rant.<p>She should also include the excerpts of the judgement since they sided with her. If she was tasked with rewriting the text announcing Stallman&#x27;s departure and she produced something this bad, it&#x27;s no wonder it wasn&#x27;t published.<p>I&#x27;m not saying that there isn&#x27;t a problem, but in a story about an employee who was fired due to discrimination instead of incompetence, competence does matter and if her job had anything to do with communication then she does fail spectacularly at this job.<p>If, however, she was a software developer, then it&#x27;s another story and her complaint has probably more merit.

Without ever having heard of this case, I&#x27;d like to add two, maybe unrelated, datapoints:<p>* I know Matthias Kirschner personally (though not very good). This story does not fit the character I met.<p>* There is a campaign of disinformation, character assassination and harrassment going on against the Debian project, the FSFE, and their members (maybe other projects as well). This has been going on for multiple years now, presumably all orchestrated by the same individual, impersonating a multitude of different persons.<p>Edit:<p>I also met Malina Galina in person, she made a positive impression on me. I just found out the linked text also shows up on her twitter account.

I believe the author has legitimate grievances, but I found that article very hard to read and understand (except that it&#x27;s clear the author and Matthias had very bad interactions). It reads as a confusing diary entry or a first rough draft, not an article for public consumption.

And I was considering donating to them for Christmas. I can do better it seems.

As an individual is there anything we can do to support this case?

Thanks for sharing.

The official FSFE Statement: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fsfe.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;statement-20201220.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fsfe.org&#x2F;about&#x2F;statement-20201220.html</a>

I don&#x27;t understand this &#x27;wages gap&#x27; issue. Any organization is interested in extracting maximum value from hired labour, ideally paying the lowest possible wage that a person agrees to work for. There is no some special incentive to pay women less than men: the only reason it is possible is that because women agree to work for less. So, it&#x27;s on them, not on &#x27;sexist&#x27; &#x27;misogynist&#x27; entrepreneurs.<p>As a consequence, if a woman agrees to work for less for doing the same job with the same results, it would make her much more attractive for hiring. A no-brainer, really.

Thank you malinagalina for writing this and yannovitch for submitting it. These things are hard to hear about when you mostly follow a group&#x27;s official channels.<p>In my mind this article lacks some detail to be 100% convincing (I can&#x27;t really imagine that a discussion of pay would be penalized, especially in Germany, <i>especially</i> in such an org), but my donations are halted for now. Should this be true the least thing to expect would be Matthias Kirschner stepping down.<p>For the mean time: Which other Europe&#x2F;Germany-centered FOSS organizations are there doing similar work one could support instead?

Operations like the FSF have a single goal - to promote Free Software.<p>If they can also promote equality at the same time, then great.<p>But the goal of promoting equality and free software are not equal - free software is the <i>primary</i> goal.<p>If the organisation is acting <i>illegally</i>, then it&#x27;s a matter for the police. But if the organisation is focussing on it&#x27;s primary goal rather than a 2ndary goal you think is more important, it&#x27;s probably a sign it&#x27;s time to quit and start your own organisation with different goals...

I didn&#x27;t think my respect for the FSFE could get any lower, and then along comes this.

This would be easier to read with spacing between paragraphs. Or reader mode.

Why is this flagged?