
What happened to Eric Douglas? - joshmanders
https://github.com/open-source-society/computer-science/issues/253
======
bargl
To address the other comments I'm seeing...

I don't get it just because he might not want to be found doesn't mean that is
what is actually happening.

> I contacted the Human Resources at Pagar.me, the company i have worked with
> him, i'll try to get his house phonenumber.

He worked with him so I'm guessing he knows him in real life. Which also means
he's probably a better judge of whether or not Eric would want to be found
then someone who just decided this was a good soapbox to stand on.

Personally if something happened to me and I had a BUNCH of people come
looking for me I'd be touched. If I wanted to disappear I'd also make that
pretty clear with a, "Hey going off the grid" message. Now that's not to say
you don't have the right to just up and leave, you should be able to, but
people who care have the right to reach out and try to get in touch with you.

Sure it can be an invasion of privacy but it all depends on Eric. How does he
feel about this? No one here can tell it depends on how HE would react.

Every other answer (including mine) is projecting on how you'd feel if you had
hundreds of people trying to find you. I personally prefer to live in a world
where people come looking for me when I disappear rather then in a world where
people say, oh man haven't seen him in a while, he must have built a bunker in
the woods and disapeared. EVEN if I wanted to disappear and you came to find
me I'd be kinda thankful.

It also completely depends on intent, how well you know someone (which at
least one person in that thread worked with him), and the fact that you aren't
trying to harm them in any way.

That is ALL predicated on the fact that this is not witch hunting. TenHundfeld
summed it up better than I can.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11135414](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11135414)

~~~
VonGuard
A friend of mine in a communal living situation once got sick and stayed in
his room for days. We did not see him at all, and his door was closed. The den
mother of the place, a SUPER paranoid woman, kept telling us to leave him be,
let him have his space, that he was fine.

Day 3, we busted down the door and found him unconscious, dehydrated, nearly
dead, all from the freaking flu he just wouldn't take care of.

Took him to the hospital and pumped him full of fluid and he was fine. I'm
very glad we were nosey and did not just "let him be."

------
chrissnell
Every time I read one of these stories on social media where a bunch of people
are looking for someone, I think of this:

[http://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=dancing_man](http://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=dancing_man)

What if Mr. Douglas doesn't want to be found? Collectively, we get all up in
arms about the iPhone backdoor debacle because of its obvious violations of
one's personal private space, but we'll simultaneously engage in internet mob
tactics to find this guy.

> I contacted the Human Resources at Pagar.me, the company i have worked with
> him, i'll try to get his house phonenumber.

Wow.

~~~
nwah1
It's an excellent point to bring up, although I would say there's a distinct
difference between tracking someone down to find out if they're ok and
tracking them down for the types of things mentioned in the article.

Asking "are you ok?" doesn't put pressure on them, unless as Maddox said,
they're in witness protection etc.

But remote possibilities like that ought not be a primary consideration. You'd
never be able to say anything to anyone without fearing the worst possible
outcome.

------
EvanPlaice
That was right around the time the OSSU-UI and OSSU-API teams left the project
en masse.

Tracking profile progress via GitHub issues wasn't feasible so we were working
on a site where users could login with their GH account, choose a curriculum
track, and manage their progress.

Between the 2 teams there were about a dozen very active contributors. Things
were marching quickly toward a MVP. One contributor even purchased a domain
name for the site.

Eric came kind of late to the party to the actual development. We had already
elected team leads and used a consensus model for decision making. Eric either
didn't understand or didn't approve of the direction some things were going.

He probably meant well but he was leaning very heavily on the 'my way or the
highway' approach to coercing the devs. At one point I stood up for the
decisions the teams had already come to a consensus on and was threatened with
being kicked from the project as a result. I left soon after when he started
screwing around with write access permissions to the project repositories.

One of the other core contributors reached out to me directly a few weeks
later. From what I heard, Eric decided to ditch the existing development
effort in favor of building a static generated HTML site. As a result, all of
the active devs left.

That's pretty much the exact point in time when his contributions stopped.

 _Aside: I don 't know if this has anything to do with it but he was trying to
get me or one of the other devs in the US to create a non-profit organization
(ie 501c) for the project._

------
ajarmst
Pretty creepy. Being concerned for a family member or close (IRL) friend is
one thing. Marshalling an Internet horde because someone stopped checking in
on Github is entirely another. If you only know someone by their @ handle,
then you don't know them well enough to start investigating their lives. I get
that some people don't have an IRL to contrast their virtual presence with,
but that's a pathology, not an invitation to stalking. Once more from the top:
If someone doesn't share his or her contact information with you, then it's
very likely they DON'T WANT YOU CONTACTING THEM, much less organizing a them-
themed flashmob. Jesus.

~~~
SFjulie1
In free software project, some users push to far the idea that software
belongs to them, their creator included.

Just to be clear, if the guy is dead, well he does not care anymore.

If he is alive he has most likely opted out of the web since web access is
almost not a blocking factor.

Hence, it is a choice or it is death, and in both case if a project cannot
survive any of this outcome it is dead itself.

That is what I fear will happen to a lot of free software/open source projects
in the future since very few core commiters tends to produce the majority of
commits for long times.

------
esnard
[https://github.com/ericdouglas](https://github.com/ericdouglas)

He used to commit every single day until November 26th, so its absence is
worrying. I hope he's fine.

------
nilved
Perhaps they enjoy their privacy. This has happened before (_why, Mark
Pilgrim) and is tantamount to a witch hunt.

~~~
Tenhundfeld
How is this a witch hunt? That term implies some type of persecution, i.e.,
you're trying to expose and punish someone.

That's not really what's happening here. People just seem concerned by the
unexplained, sudden disappearance. They're not saying he's done something
wrong. If he popped up and said, "Hey folks, all good here, just busy," I
think this would be done, no problem.

If you're simply trying to say it's an invasion of privacy, sure, that's an
argument to make. I'm not trying to be a "grammar nazi", but that phrase has a
specific meaning that doesn't apply here, IMO. I'm trying to figure out if
you're simply misusing an idiom (again, IMO) or if you're truly seeing this as
some type of vilification of Eric.

~~~
nilved
Just misusing the term.

------
vanderZwan
I have wondered the same about Steven Sprang, who was behind the Brushes app
for iOs, and apparently just vanished from the internet one day:

[http://www.brushesapp.com/](http://www.brushesapp.com/)

[https://github.com/sprang](https://github.com/sprang)

[https://twitter.com/sprang](https://twitter.com/sprang)

~~~
esnard
Well, according to WHOIS brushesapp.com have been updated on 2015-08-01, so I
guess he's fine.

------
donohoe
He stopped posting Twitter on or around the same date too:
[https://twitter.com/ericdouglas_](https://twitter.com/ericdouglas_)

