35.1 An apology

We feared that these acknowledgements would become an exhibition of our negligence and ingratitude, and at least to some degree this has turned out to be the case. There were plans for things to be better. We took care to thank those who helped us in Marpa’s IRC channel, thinking that we could use the channel’s backlog as a source for these notices.

The European Union (EU) had other ideas. In 2018, the EU passed the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which suddenly brought our plans to nought. Under the GDPR, logs like that for Marpa’s IRC channel could not possibly be made conformant in a way that kept their administrators safe from legal action. In theory this applied to similar, highly-profitable databases maintained by large corporations, as much as it did to the volunteers generously maintaining the backlog for our IRC channel. In practice large corporations have been able to largely neutralize the GDPR, deftly parrying most enforcement, with their worst possible outcome being a cost-of-doing-business fine. For the typical volunteer, however, even winning a legal action is ruinous, given the costs.

Whether or not some were aware of GDPR’s highly discriminatory effects when it was being drafted, the realization of the GDPR’s practical implications for volunteer-driven open source effort came to our community very abruptly, and after it was already in effect. Our backlogging was done in EU jurisdiction, and no measure to save our IRC backlogs could be taken without exposing innocent and generous volunteers to almost certainly disastrous legal action. My notes for these acknkowledgements needed to be cobbled together from other sources.