Bonum Certa Men Certa

Is Ubuntu Compromised? Push Away From GNU and GPL Led by Army Officers.

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 19, 2025,
updated Mar 19, 2025

Red glasses on a white table

We'll try not to name anybody

Over a decade ago the founder of Canonical put a person from the military industry in charge of the company. Many people didn't pay attention to that; she was female, so assumptions could be made about disposition.

Earlier this year we reminded people that over a decade ago "Canonical appointed a 'former' Microsoft manager" to lead the desktop and the current such leader is promoting Microsoft. That already seems quite tasteless.

But wait, it gets worse. Last year there was an explosive (albeit ignored by the mainstream media, as usual) series about (pseudonym) Edward Brocklesby & Debian. Were critical packages like SSH compromised? Yes, but who's responsible for it? Debian kept it secret.

What if we told you that the person who pushes Rust into Ubuntu (to replace GNU) comes from the Army, where he worked on mass surveillance, according to himself? He later went into the same industry the former CEO of Canonical had come from. His Web site says that he: "Architected and built multiple high-end bespoke Electronic Surveillance capabilities."

He proudly advertises this in his CV.

Seems too young for his role at Canonical, which put him in a position to attack GNU via "Rust people" [1, 2]. No Ubuntu users should treat this as meaningless; to me, it'll be hard to trust Ubuntu on security anymore. Look who's being put in charge; they shamelessly demand back doors in everything.

I've used email to ask some people who know this kind of stuff reasonably well, based on their professional experience.

"They don't always tell you when you are working for GCHQ," one of them replied. "They use a range of techniques to break projects into small pieces and use pseudonyms to obfuscate military terms so people don't know how their work is combined with pieces from other people and how it is eventually used."

What's curious is that Rust is pushed in (into Ubuntu and its derivatives) by someone who comes from the Army and strives for mass surveillance. It's not easy to brush this aside. Why would Ubuntu seek to abandon a mature and well-working GNU implementation in favour of some untested stuff controlled by proprietary software of Microsoft?

An associate suggested that we "drill down into why Canonical and former Army officers are attacking the GPL hammer and tongs..."

The net effect will be negative and thus absurd, unless of course the aim is to weaken or sabotage Ubuntu users. Sami Tikkanen has explained the problem of incompatible implementations for instance. There are other problems.

They do this "because they serve Microsoft," another person told us (and covered it before). The above quotes aren't from some random people. One of them works in that domain; he knows this stuff better than me.

Perhaps people should ask Canonical what the thinking behind it was...

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