alt Hacker NewsCitation needed. I honestly do not know what you are referring to. Even if I had to take your "sexual predator" at face value, I would still have to balance that against the good stable reliable distro they have been done for so many years.
Replies
I believe this is the guy he's talking about. By linking to this, I'm not saying the allegations are true, but it's the discussion I've seen mentioned elsewhere, which I believe OP is referring to:
https://x.com/LundukeJournal/status/1944505084919816337
> Tomorrow, July 14th, at the annual Debian Conference (DebConf ‘25), Jeremy Bicha will be speaking.
> Bicha, as we learned last week (after he defaced an open source wiki page, calling people “Nazis”), is a registered sex offender — convicted after having committed “thousands” of assaults of young children.
> Bicha, an employee of Canonical (the parent company of Ubuntu) will be representing both Debian and GNOME at DebConf 25.
Edit: Digging deeper into the X threads, this seems to be one of the root the sources of the claim:
https://wng.org/articles/the-high-cost-of-negligence-1617309...
Edit 2: Just to be clear, I myself am a Debian user. Not a hater. I'd just hate to see Debian's reputation needlessly tarnished by having the wrong people promoted to publicly represent the project.
Jeremy Bicha
I too had no idea what he’s talking about, so I did some digging.
So, an open-source contributor who works for Canonical on Ubuntu gave a talk at Debconf. He is a convicted and admitted sexual predator who served time in prison for his crimes. This all is pretty well-documented.
But… then what? He did the time for his crimes. He’s on the national sex offender registry. What now? Should he be unemployable? Should his contributions to open-source projects be rejected? Should he not be able to give a talk on some technical topic he’s presumably an expert on?
Either we agree that serving your prison sentence is sufficient atonement for your crimes or we have to work to change the prison system such that it is. I don’t know that excluding someone from contributing to society for the rest of their life is the right answer.
Please note that this is a very shallow summary for those who (like me) were unaware of the drama here. I have no idea of the extent of his crimes past what I wrote above, nor if the time he served “seems” appropriate (not that a single value there could ever be considered appropriate by everyone simultaneously). My assumptions are that he was convicted, served a reasonably appropriate amount of time, was released, and has committed no further crimes of that nature in the intervening period since (any or all of which I could be wrong about).
I also have seen accusations of rude/antagonistic behavior outside of this specific topic, but am leaving those aside since they weren’t part of GP’s complaint.