Jean-Pierre Giraud, Possible Forgeries & Debian: elections, judgments, trademark already canceled, archaeologist
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
People have been looking at the latest attacks against my family from rogue elements of Debianism.
It is important to start with some fact checking.
The big thing to remember is that I resigned from some of my voluntary activities around the time my father died. This is all an ongoing violation of my family's privacy that has been sustained over multiple years now. To confirm, the death of my father is a fact.
The second fact is that the insults were created by a rude little man called Jean-Pierre Giraud from Toulouse, France. I don't remember if I ever met him. The Debian introduction message tells us that he is not even a real developer, he is actually an archaeologist who seems to have spare time for insulting the real developers. Fact checking, this is the commit where Monsieur Giraud distributes insults and lies.
People have strong suspicions about forgeries and it is hardly without precedent.
In 2023, in Slovakia, fake audio recordings of a political candidate were distributed 48 hours before an election. Slovakia has a news moratorium in the 24 hours before an election. The news moratorium prevents the television, radio and newspapers from giving the candidate a right-of-reply. Therefore, the media in Slovakia were duped into reporting on the fake recording 48 hours before the election but after the curtain came down in the form of a moratorium the media were unable to publish a correction.
As noted in the same article, Ireland also has a news moratorium from 14:00 on the day before the election and it appears the Debian insults and lies were being distributed at the last minute in the hope that some gullible journalist would reproduce them. It is no surprise that the Debian suicide cluster exists in this group, their behavior after the death of my father has been truly evil.
The Debian constitution tells us that we are volunteers:
3.2(1). Developers are volunteers who agree to further the aims of the Project insofar as they participate in it, and who maintain package(s) for the Project or do other work which the Project Leader's Delegate(s) consider worthwhile.
Therefore, if we are volunteers, why should we have to waste time reading through 19 pages of hatred written in a foreign language by racist Zurich lawyers? Yes, they are racist because they don't respect my personal time, they don't respect our families.
Now we can see the big lie by looking at the sequence of events.
The Debian trademark in Switzerland was actually canceled by an order signed on 6 November 2023.
Copies of the cancelation order were posted by registered letter to the Intellectual Property Institute (IPI) and the judge in the Canton of Vaud.
The judge knew the trademark was canceled.
The judge didn't have to go looking for this information because it was delivered to the tribunal in a registered letter.
The Swiss trademark office confirmed it was canceled on 13 November 2023:
It is possible to confirm the date by searching for the trademark in the online search tool at https://www.swissreg.ch
The suspicious document being distributed by Jean-Pierre Giraud, the archaeologist, has a date of 27 November 2023 on the last page. That is two full weeks after the cancelation:
The document appears to be a mish-mash of accusations and insults from different lawyers who don't understand software and copyright. I don't know these people and I never met any of these people.
If the trademark was already canceled two weeks before this, why would they want to create a document anyway that insults my family and I at a time of grief? If the document is real, a stab in the back two weeks after the trademark was canceled anyway, what is the real motive?
Nonetheless, on 3 December 2023 I published a blog post confirming that I had taken the decision to cancel the trademark. As noted in the blog post, the death of Abraham Raji at DebConf23 was a factor in my decision to cancel the trademark unilaterally. These are the words that I wrote at the time I canceled the trademark:
Given the enormous damage that these avoidable deaths do to both the brand and the community, it feels absurd to spend money fighting over whether some independent web site has tarnished the trademark too.
For me, that was the end of the matter.
With the trademark canceled like that, why on earth would there be a judgement full of racist hatred as distributed by Jean-Pierre Giraud? The matter was already concluded by the cancelation procedure. The document distributed by Jean-Pierre Giraud has a dirty smell about it.
After I told the community about my decision to cancel the trademark in November 2023, there was no further public communication about the matter. Everybody seems to agree that I canceled the trademark unilaterally on 6 November 2023. At the time, nobody posted anything contradicting these facts. Jean-Pierre Giraud, an archaeologist from Toulouse, France, only began circulating this suspicious document the day before the European elections in Ireland.
Another red flag in this suspicious document is the order to transer the trademark to Software in the Public Interest:
Anybody can go to the Swissreg.ch web site and see that no such transfer took place. The trademark was canceled and removed from the registry. In such circumstances, it is not possible for a judgment to order a transfer from one owner to another. The Swissreg.ch web site report for the trademark makes it clear that no such transfer of the trademark has taken place. Here is a screenshot taken today on 19 June 2024:
Ultimately, I resigned from some of my voluntary roles around the time my father died. Why would a Swiss judge insult my family at such a time? I looked at this document and it felt like a forgery. This is a new low for the immature misfits at Debian.
On the other hand, consider the following comment from the suspicious document:
Les motivations du défendeur, ainsi qu’une éventuelle faute de sa part, sont sans pertinence, et il n’est pas indispensable qu’il y ait eu enregistrement frauduleux.
Translated to English:
The motivations of the defendant, as well as a possible error on his part, are irrelevant, and it is not essential that there was fraudulent registration.
The long and short of it is that this document does not include any finding of fraudulent intentions or fraudulent actions by anybody. In effect, it is simply saying that one party registered a trademark before the other party. This is a technical dispute about the order in which trademarks can be registered and used.
We can now go and look at the Debian records and see that people accept I have been collaborating on free and open source software projects since at least 1997.
The trademark in the US was only registered after that in 1998.
People who work with me are not at all confused about my abilities, competence and motivation as a Debian Developer.
The archaeologist and racist Zurich lawyers might be confused simply because they are not developers.
In another case well known in Europe, the Irish fast-food chain Supermacs was allowed to keep using their name, which includes the letters "mac", as in Big Mac, because they were using the name Supermacs before "Big Mac" came along.
Nonetheless, there are bigger issues at play here. As noted in my blog in October 2023, the Geneva bar association and Swiss legal profession knew about an unauthorised Swiss legal protection service for almost two years before regulators formally closed the scheme.
Various other facts have come to light hinting at both incompetance and corruption in the handling of the legal protection scheme. After observing these facts about how the lawyers operate, I would struggle to have any confidence in any Swiss legal process.
On 5 June 2024 I began publishing evidence about the Edward Brocklesby affair, that is the SSH package maintainer who was secretly expelled for hacking. It looks like this was very embarassing for the rogue elements of Debian and they wanted to make a reprisal.
The next fact, which we can see from the commit is that the insults were broadcast on 6 June 2024 at 08:35am, just over five hours before the moratorium on election news. It looks like this was just enough time for some gullible journalist to cut and paste it but not enough time for victims to exercise a right-of-reply and question the credibility of these attacks.
Polling day was on 7 June 2024.
If the document is real, why didn't they rush to publish it back in November 2023? Why did it appear out of nowhere just hours before the election news moratorium?
Mozilla made a report about harassment and abuse involving underage developers, where is it?
Back in April 2024, I published the emails about the origins of the conflict in 2017 when Albanian women asked me for assistance dealing with harassment and abuse.
In various ways, we can see that the document they are publishing contains lies and inconsistencies about dates. Such inconsistencies are entirely consistent with suspicions of forgeries and fake news. The emails about harassment all begin in 2017 but the document being distributed by the archaeologist claims 2018:
It is very clear the harassment began in 2017. Therefore, the documents they are waving around contain deliberate deceptions that try to invert the story. The documents don't contain the Mozilla report or any other reliable source from the period when they began smearing my family and I.
Here is the internal report about the harassment. The date is 12 October 2017 so the misfits are clearly lying to judges, tribunals, journalists and the community. I have redacted the section that identifies underage victims.
The next internal email from Larissa Shapiro at Mozilla admits that kids are at risk.
Emma Irwin from Mozilla admits this is a serious matter and asks me to give evidence to Marta, Mozilla's HR investigator.
At the end of the process, Mozilla produced a report about the harassment. I have never been given a copy of the report and the Debianists have not published the report either. I don't feel that possible forgeries like this should be taken seriously at all unless all parties, are granted access to all these original, contemporaneous documents about the origins of the harassment and my unwavering support for the victims.
Evidence: Mozilla confirms a report was produced about the harassment and abuse.
FSFE fraudulent use of FSF trademark
Please see my blog about the FSFE confusing people with the name that is too similar to FSF.
One volunteer gave a bequest of EUR 150,000 to the FSFE. When he was writing his will, he may have believed that this money was going to the real FSF or supporting Dr Richard Stallman.
Here is a screenshot from the FSFE financial report showing us the amount of money they collected up to 31 December 2022 by using a name similar to the real FSF.
I didn't collect any money using any Debian trademark or domain name. I have only used the trademark and domain names to promote my contributions to the code and inform the community about defects in the organization and the code.
