Techrights

Death of Dr Alex Blewitt, UK

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 05, 2024

[Article 2 years old]

Reprinted with permission from disguised.work.

While this site concerns the links between Debian culture, cyberbullying, suicide and self-harm, we do not suggest that the death of Dr Blewitt is a suicide. Many unexpected deaths occur every day due to accidents and private medical conditions. Evidence from multiple sources suggests that Dr Blewitt was in this category. Nonetheless, the oppressive culture around Debian has become so overbearing that we feel compelled to raise each and every case in the possibility that there has been another cover-up, even though this may cause distress for the friends and family of the deceased.

Debian Developers are shocked to hear about the recent death of Dr Alex Blewitt in July 2022. Dr Blewitt was well known for his work around Eclipse and as the Head of Cloud at the Santander bank.

The InfoQ web site, where he wrote many articles as an editor has published an obituary:

It is with great sadness that we announce that InfoQ editor Dr. Alex Blewitt has unexpectedly passed away. Alex was a well-known writer within the technology space, Java Champion, Eclipse expert, meetup organizer, and more. He was a frequent presenter and attendee at conferences held around the globe, and he will be deeply missed within the InfoQ community.

Dr Blewitt was an early contributor to Debian. Dr Blewitt is one of those early contributors we were thinking about when responding to the WIPO harassment. Dr Blewitt was here before the trademark. Dr Blewitt was here before we were hoodwinked with the constitution. Dr Blewitt was here before the Code of Conduct (CoC) created the toxic environment of accusations and insults that is Debian today.

Bug report #2110 from 9 January 1996. That is before the BTS.

Bugs 85395 and 95835.

Dr Blewitt's name appears in the copyright notices for eclipse-egit and eclipse-jgit.

We have recently gone to great lengths to examine the suicide and subsequent cover-up involving Frans Pop in 2010. There is no evidence whatsoever about Dr Blewitt's cause of death and there is no evidence that he was recently engaged with Debianism. It would be far-fetched and offensive to suggest this was another Debian suicide. Nonetheless, each time there is another death in the open source communities, like the recent death of bullying victim Michael Bordlee in June, we feel compelled to begin examining the case.

In doing so, we are very conscious that our work may have an impact on surviving family members. We regret this but as Debian covered up the Frans Pop suicide, we feel forced to ask questions in public.

If you have any news about deaths or related incidents of cyberbullying under the guise of CoC enforcement, please contact editor@disguised.work. █

Dr Alex Blewitt, Santander, Eclipse, Milton Keynes, Debian, Obituary