Mailing the story:

A senior Debian developer, Australian Anthony Towns, has left some core teams of the project and gone quiet in the last couple of weeks, according to project sources. Towns made an oblique reference to his decision on April 18 with an entry in his personal blog which read, in part: "One of the freedoms I value is the freedom to choose what you spend your time on and who you spend it with. And while I’ve spent a lot of time arguing that people in key roles in Debian still have those freedoms (hey, 2.1(1), don’t you know), reality these days seems to be otherwise."