About
Director, Software Freedom Institute
Software engineer, Free/Open Source Software innovator.
Financial markets experience, specializing in FX and derivatives and a wide range of associated software and APIs such as Kondor+, Misys, Reuters RMDS, Interactive Brokers TWS API, UBS Secure Connect.
Software engineering experience in messaging, real-time systems, monitoring, devops and the Free Software community.
MicroMasters in Data, Economics and Development Policy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Bachelor of Computer Science, University of Melbourne.
Debian Developer, Ubuntu and Fedora Developer, author, radio ham.
Photos
Biographical details
(Related: Wikipedia article on Daniel Pocock (censored)).
Languages: English (native), French (B1), German (A2)
Irish Australian Software Engineer well known for the development and promotion of Software Freedom. Contributor to the book Monitoring with Ganglia. Published numerous packages in the Debian and Fedora distributions of Linux.
Early years
Pocock was born in the suburb of Coburg in Melbourne, Australia, close to where Irish broadcaster Jill Meagher disappeared. Pocock’s mother is an Irish immigrant.
During primary school years, Pocock’s family resided in Wandong which would subsequently become ground zero for the Kilmore East bushfire. Pocock spent some years at St Patrick’s primary school in Kilmore.
Pocock began high school at Catholic College Bendigo. Another notable alumni from the same era is Jacinta Allan, the current Premier of the State of Victoria. In 1993, at age 14, he was one of the youngest people in the state to complete the amateur radio exams. He acquired the callsign VK3TQR. His callsign is logged in the NASA SAREX mission STS-59. Pocock was subsequently one of 20 high school students selected by the Royal Australian Air Force for the Spring Engineering School at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra (certificate). Pocock completed his final year at Xavier College in Melbourne where he participated in the debating team, rowing, cross country running and athletics (alumni).
Education
Pocock earned a degree Bachelor of Computer Science from University of Melbourne in 2002.
Pocock’s undergraduate team project involved the JACK software subsequently used in the first autonomous drone trial. The trial is described on the Pentagon web site.
Pocock started his first business using a post office box at the University of Melbourne. A neighboring post office box was used by Julian Assange to start Wikileaks. The entire post office has since been removed.
Pocock completed the MicroMasters in Data, Economics and Development Policy from MITx in 2020 (diploma).
Community service
In 1997, Pocock began applying his Linux skills as a volunteer system administrator for the Virtual Moreland Community Network in the region of Moreland in the northern suburbs of Melbourne. Pocock’s project successfully hosted web sites for many early social causes, including the campaign to defend the Wik decision of 1996. Pocock immediately attracted support from Australia’s opposition leader, Kim Beazley and one of Australia’s first doxing attacks from the far right media.
As a consequence of this work, Pocock was nominated for the web page competition in the Loud Festival, a prominent national event organized by the Australia Council (certificate).
Pocock began developing a Content Management System in PHP and used it to assist hundreds of local groups to go online in the early days of the Internet. He offered the same solution as open source for the community users and business clients.
In 1998, Pocock and Peter Eckersley were selected to represent the interests of the Melbourne University Student Union on the University of Melbourne oversight committees for information technology.
During 1999, Pocock was elected to the post of Environment Officer in the Victorian branch of the National Union of Students (Australia). When the Australian woman Schapelle Corby was arrested in Bali in 2005, Mr Pocock created the site Don’t Shoot Schapelle (now defunct) opposing the death penalty (Hackers attack pro-Corby web sites, The Age, 6 May 2005).
In 2017, the Fellowship community associated with the Free Software Foundation Europe elected Pocock as the Fellowship representative. Cornell University Internet Voting Service results. It has been noted that the polls closed on the 101st anniversary of the Easter Rising.
November 2018, Pocock attended the UN Forum on Business and Human Rights. In the session on Safeguarding Human Rights Defenders, Pocock made a brief intervention about the risks of trusting companies like Facebook and Twitter with data about friends that may eventually fall into the wrong hands. (UN Video). Shortly after attending the forum, on 7 January 2019, Pocock published a blog about the membership status and membership rights of volunteers contributing to free software projects. The same day, Pocock’s blog was removed from the Planet Mozilla blog syndication service, no explanation was given at that time (evidence of censorship).
In 2020, Pocock published a number of emails from the debian-private mailing list revealing why he felt the claims against Dr Jacob Appelbaum were falsified.
Pocock has subsequently been subject to a campaign of online harassment by a subgroup of Debian Developers who are obsessed with censoring his blogs. Pocock estimates that over $120,000 in legal fees have been spent trying to undermine his blogs about social issues in the free software communities.
Career
Pocock founded his first consultancy business, SkySoft Pty Ltd as a student in 1997. His clients included Work Solutions Group, a winner of the Telstra Business Awards and his content management system hosted the first web sites of several leading political figures including Lynne Kosky and Lindsay Tanner. He eventually dropped support for the content management system as Drupal and Wordpress became the dominant tools in that space.
After graduating, Pocock moved to Europe where he has worked for Barclays Capital in Canary Wharf, Thomson Reuters in Paris and UBS in Zurich.
Pocock founded the Software Freedom Institute in 2021.
Codes of Conduct phenomena
In 2020, Pocock argued that the Outreachy program, where he has several years of experience as a mentor, was effectively paying women not to be too outspoken in the open source world. (Techrights).
In 2021, David Arroyo Menéndez, a researcher from Universidad Rey Juan Carlos and author of the Damegender software posted statistics about diversity on the debian-women mailing list. Steve McIntyre, a former Debian Project Leader, sent a public reply threatening to censor Arroyo Menéndez if he published any more statistics. In defiance, Pocock published a blog suggesting that the statistics could be analyzed using a Regression discontinuity design to see if the rate at which women joined Debian was increasing or decreasing after the Code of Conduct was introduced. Pocock’s initial summary of the data showed that fewer women were actually joining Debian after the Code of Conduct and Outreachy mentoring programs were introduced.
In comments reported by The Register, Pocock explained that the Code of Conduct phenomena in open source organizations was a form of kangaroo court being used to deter and deflect questions about accountability.
On 21 March 2022 Pocock published an open letter asking the Association for Computing Machinery and other professional bodies to consider whether the Codes of Conduct in the open source software workplace are effectively impersonating the Code of Ethics of a professional body (the open letter).
Harassment and abuse victims contacted Mr Pocock for support with poor behavior
Shortly after the FSFE Fellowship elected Mr Pocock as their representative in 2017, female volunteers contacted Mr Pocock and asked for support with harassment. Mr Pocock made several visits to Albania and Kosovo. He was a witness to various situations involving poor behavior, harassment and possible abuse involving 16 year old volunteers.
In October 2017, Mr Pocock filed an internal report with Mozilla (email evidence
Larissa Shapiro from Mozilla replied that kids were at risk (email evidence)
Emma Irwin from Mozilla admits it is a serious matter and recommends Mr Pocock give evidence to Marta, Mozilla’s HR investigator (email evidence)
Mozilla produced an internal report but it has never been published (email evidence)
One of the women, Anisa Kuci, wrote an email thanking Mr Pocock for his support (email evidence on blog).
During these interactions with the victims, Mr Pocock wanted to show empathy with the victims and commented to the women that his cousin had been in the highly publicized choir of Cardinal George Pell. The prosecution of the Cardinal was proceding concurrently with these discoveries of harassment and abuse in the open source supply chain. This very brief revelation to the victims in Albania started an avalanche of gossip and inuendo about harassment in open source communities.
Toastmasters
Pocock participates in the Toastmasters International organization. Upon finding there were no active clubs in Kosovo, Pocock took the initiative to establish a club at the Innovation Center Kosovo (video from Kosovo TV news report).
Red Hat, Inc and Fedora
In March 2021, Pocock wrote about his concerns at the risk of modern slavery in the open source supply chain. The blog post was syndicated on Fedora Planet.
In January 2022, Red Hat, an IBM subsidiary since 2019, began proceedings against Pocock and the Software Freedom Institute to prevent them using the domain name WeMakeFedora.org. IBM Red Hat’s claim was denied by the legal panel and IBM Red Hat was cited for harassment and abuse of the administrative procedure.
