One of the consequences of the
Debian pregnancy cluster is that the earliest children are now growing
up and some of them want to participate in
Debianism too. Or at the very least, they want to put Debian on their
CV and use the trademark as a tool to help them take credit for the substantial
work done by real developers and innovators who bootstrapped the free software
ecosystem.
To see how it will work for those children, we can look at existing cases
with nieces, nephews, cousins and girlfriends.
I can't imagine any other organization where we would be talking about
other peoples' family members like this. In
Debianism, however, people have been attacking my family for a number
of years now. They publicised rumours about interns seeking a relationship
with me in
Google Summer of Code and
Outreachy. As long as those rumours are sustained, it is only
fair that I can publish information to defend the honor of my family
and my former interns. In other words, it is necessary to look at every
relationship in the group. That includes romantic relationships and it
also includes cases where somebody's child or niece/nephew appears to be
jumping the queue.
Phil Wyett recently complained that he had been waiting seven years for
his Debian Developer application to be completed. He became disillusioned
and stopped contributing altogether.
When one of the
Debianist power couples introduces their child to
Debianism, will their child be left waiting seven years in the new
maintainer queue like
Phil Wyett?
When travel bursaries are awarded for attending
DebConf, will children, especially females, automatically receive the
diversity money?
In 2024, for
Ada Lovelace Day,
Tassia spoke about
being a Debian wife:
Most of that group became close friends; I've married one of them, ... we've had our own child and had the pleasure of introducing him to the community; we've mourned the loss of friends and healed together
March 2014: look at the schedule for the
Women's MiniDebConf in Barcelona. We can see
Tiago and his wife
Tassia both came from Canada to Barcelona.
Bartosz Fenski realized what was happening and resigned:
To: <debian-private@lists.debian.org>
I wasn’t too active recently but with the latest activity of our
leader and official support for women-mini-debconf I want to retire
from the project. I don’t want to be part of this anymore. Please
hereby approve my retirenment statement. See you in project where
everyone will be welcome. Not only women.
Bartosz is not sexist and he is not complaining about women.
Everybody knows there is a culture of nepotism and favoritism. Certain
people appeared to be asking for Debian funds to go to Barcelona with their
partners.
A few months after Barcelona,
Tássia Camões Araújo was given the title of
non-Developing Debian Developer and then
immediately appointed to the team of three DebConf chairs.
Now we fast forward ten years. On 22 October 2024 there was an event
Online MiniDebConf Brasil 2024. They had a session, in Portuguese,
comparing online and in-person events. There is a moderator and
three speakers for the session. The schedule gives their names as
Paulo Santana,
Antonio Terceiro,
Thais Araujo,
Tássia Camões Araújo.
Paulo introduces the other three participants. Using Youtube
auto-translation, we see what he is saying: the three speakers are
all related to each other. It is not clear if
Thais is the sister, cousin or niece of
Tássia. Her last name suggests she is a cousin or a niece. In fact, the word
nepotism is derived from the word nephew, the male form of niece.
Remember,
Tássia had previously served as one of the DebConf chairs and
Antonio Terceiro was appointed to the
DebConf committee in 2019.
Paulo has told us that
Thais Rebouças de Araujo is related to both of those people who
have influence over DebConf opportunities.
Remember, in 2019, DebConf19 was held in Brazil. A large group of women
from Albania and Kosovo were brought to the conference. None of the women
were asked to pay for their own flights or accommodation. Everything they
needed was fully paid for them. At the conference dinner, four of those women
were seated at the same table as the former Debian leader
Chris Lamb. A few weeks after the dinner, the Albanian woman seated
closest to Lamb was awarded an
Outreachy internship.
Evidence: a lovestruck leader?
Between 2019 and 2022, they spread numerous rumours accusing my last
Google Summer of Code intern of having a relationship with me. The
woman was half my age and already married.
In this video, she tells us how they tried to manipulate her.
Here are some of the examples of the
Debian/Zizian mob, people I never met, spreading rumours:
and the following year it came up again:
In 2022, the misfits
spent over $120,000 on legal fees to insist there had been wrongdoing,
despite the woman
telling us clearly I was a great mentor and she didn't want to be part
of a group that behaves worse than a student union.
On 12 September 2023,
Thais Rebouças de Araujo used the name
Thais Rebouças in
the schedule for DebConf23. Without her full name, we can not tell
she is related to
Tassia.
On 15 September 2023,
Thaís Rebouças de Araujo, using the name Thais R. Araujo
asks to join the Debian Python team and help maintain packages
Robber, Delta and Pytest-executable.
She puts Debian Python on
her LinkedIn profile:
Remember when
Vincent Danjean joined Debian? He
told debian-private (leaked):
When I did the NM process, I knew that I had to give some personal information
so that my AM knew me better. I also knew that these mails will be read by FD
and DAM. But I knew they will not be public even between other DD.
So, I wrote some things about my personal life. I also wrote opinion on other
DD (my AM ask me to react to some public claim from theses DD).
I do not want that these mails become public (even between DD and even more
external people) because I do not remember what I wrote exactly, I do not want
to check/rewrite/filter public/private parts, ... These mails have never be
intended to be read by people other than the ones that already read them.
Did anybody ask
Thaís Rebouças de Araujo to provide collateral? Or was she immune
from such requests because of her relationships with other members of the
group?
On 7 June 2024,
Thaís Rebouças de Araujo registered a business under her own name,
registration number 55,442,988/0001-30 with share capital of BRL 2,500
(Source:
business registry).
Her subsequent conference appearances all appear to be beneficial
for her business.
When I registered a business in April 2021, the rogue Debianists immediately
started attacking my family and spreading rumours. Remember when they attacked
Dr Norbert Preining at Christmas 2018? This was the
"Call for experiences of Norbert Preining" thread:
On 18 July 2024, the
GNOME misfits open a topic in their Discourse forum
spreading defamation about
Sonny Piers. Over 21,200 people have looked at it so far:
On 28 July 2024,
Tássia Camões Araújo and
Thaís Rebouças de Araujo give a talk together. Once again, in
the schedule, we only see the name Thais Rebouças so we don't
get any hint they are related. In the beginning of the talk, each of them
introduces the other to the audience. They do not mention the family
connection.
DebConf101: forget merit, its all about who you know
On 22 October 2024 there was an event Online MiniDebConf Brasil 2024,
as described earlier, where they revealed many of these people are related
to each other.
On 14 July 2025, at DebConf25 in France,
Tássia Camões Araújo and
Thaís Rebouças de Araujo repeat the same talk from the previous year,
DebConf 101. Therefore, it looks like
Tássia Camões Araújo and
Thaís Rebouças de Araujo both got funding for a trip to France.
In December 2025
Thaís Rebouças de Araujo graduated. The plan worked and an employer
has hired her even before graduating. She is now at a company called
Place Tecnologia e Inovacao S.A:
What we see here is quite tragic for everybody else in the history of
Debian and free software.
Tássia Camões Araújo is the wife of
Tiago so they both get to travel together. It is not clear if they
asked for and received Debian funds on every trip. Now
Thaís Rebouças de Araujo has arrived, she has given a talk with her
aunt(?) and she has had at least three long distance trips from Brazil, visiting
India in 2023, South Korea in 2024 and France in 2025.
Remember,
Abraham Raji did a lot of work organising
DebConf23 in India. Volunteers
were asked to contribute their own money to the cost of the day trip.
Raji chose not to pay and he was left out of the paid kayak excursion,
he was left alone to swim unsupervised and he drowned, an avoidable death.
The cost of the flights for
Tássia Camões Araújo's niece to come from Brazil to India for DebConf23
is more than the cost of providing a free day trip for everybody.
Bringing somebody's niece from Brazil to India was considered a more
important expense than keeping the group together and safe during the day trip.
For better or worse, this looks like the situation the Catholic church was
trying to avoid when
they decided it was better for priests to be celibate.
In a local community organization, for example, an amateur sporting club,
it is quite normal to have multiple people from the same families participating
because they are all living in the same district.
Debianists have claimed to be a merit-based organization. The
Debian Social Contract promises transparency. People working remotely can't
easily tell when money is given to somebody's girlfriend or niece.
In this case, like many others, the woman is using different permutations
of her name. Some women have been using aliases. People who look at the
conference schedule or watch it online are kept in the dark about many of
these relationships.
Applicants for the
Outreachy internships were asked to spend time doing unpaid coding tasks
to compete on merit. How do those women feel when they see somebody's niece
was given travel and speaking opportunities at every conference?
Every other applicant for funding is expected to share the public links
to their work. Here are the links we found for
Thaís Rebouças de Araujo:
It is interesting to compare the contributions of
Thaís Rebouças de Araujo to people of the same age in the glory days of
Debian volunteering. People like
Shaya Potter,
Joel "Espy" Klecker and
Chris Rutter. The early leaks of debian-private include a
lot of evidence about how people used to join and contribute spontaneously
before money arrived and spoiled the community.
In most organisations, I can't imagine people would ever be pushed to
write blogs and emails documenting conflicts of interest like this.
At the time when my father died, the
Debian/Zizian mob started their obsession with attacking my family and
spreading rumours that I was having a relationship with an intern in
Google Summer of Code. They even tried to trick the intern to make a
complaint about me.
She refused and she didn't want to be associated with these people who use
women to start rumours.
The snobby set use the Debian trademark and donations to denounce and rub
out people who have done decades of real open source development work. Then
the same cyberbullies use the trademark, the money, speaking opportunities and
whatever else to help their romantic partners, children and nieces/nephews to
build a public profile for themselves.
The hypocrisy is extraordinary. Thousands of dollars of diversity funds were spent
taking
Thaís Rebouças de Araujo and other personal friends to conferences so they can
put Debian on their CV and get an advantage in the job market. Yet people who do
enormous amounts of real work like
Dr Norbert Preining,
Sonny Piers,
Richard Stallman and I have all been subject to vicious and dishonest attacks on
our reputations. Then these imposters come in and take our place. When the imposters
appear on a stage at
DebConf or when they call themselves a Debian Developer, they are taking
credit for the work that everybody else has done in the past. They are standing
on the shoulders of giants.
They are shaming and humiliating real developers for making the slightest
mistakes with woke language and pronouns and then they put somebody's
niece up on a pedastal and pretend she is the next
Linus Torvalds.
In the talk at DebConf23, the camera pans around the room. We can see the room
is nearly empty. Many talks were nearly empty. All the interesting people like
Richard Stallman,
Linus Torvalds and I are subject to censorship. People don't expect anybody
to say anything interesting so they don't bother going to DebConf.
Joel "Espy" Klecker's favorite expression is timeless. R.I.P. Espy
(1979-2000).
Please see more about
the Debian pregnancy cluster.
Please see the
chronological history of how the Debian harassment and abuse culture evolved.
Freedom (The Open Frontier)
Friends (Our Fedora Story)
Features (Engineering Core)
First (Blueprint for the Future)
comments? additions? reactions?
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