Lucas Nussbaum & Debian pregnancy cluster
21:30 Sat, 11 Oct 2025
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
On 6 August 2018, Lucas Nussbaum posted a message to debian-private (leaked) telling us that his partner had just given birth to their first child.
Nussbaum is a former Debian Project Leader (DPL), therefore, anything he does is noticed more widely by his followers.
Another former DPL, Stefano Zacchiroli (zack), also based in France, had announced the birth of a child in July 2016.
While neither of their partners are Debian Developers and both of the babies came long after the peak in the Debian pregnancy cluster, they are still significant because of the psychological impact on the community.
Nussbaum's baby arrived immediately in the middle of a huge effort by his successor, Chris Lamb, to bring Albanian women to tech conferences around the world.
Subject: semi-VAC for some time Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2018 16:21:37 +0200 From: Lucas Nussbaum <lucas@debian.org> To: debian-private@lists.debian.org
Hi,
My excuse for not attending DebConf finally arrived, just before the end of DebConf! Margot Nussbaum-Richard was born on August 4th (in pure "We release when it's ready" tradition, slightly late), weighting 3.2 kg. Both her and her mother are doing very well.
Given this is my first child, I don't know yet what to expect in terms of time commitment, but I plan to shift my priorities towards her stable release management, and then the Margot-LTS initiative. However, I don't plan to give up on my Debian involvement, and look forward to attending DebConf next year and meeting you all at FOSDEM.
I must admit I haven't followed the discussions around the Debian parents club closely. Is there a good plan to buy Debian baby swag? Apparently there's some at cafepress.com?
- Lucas
In the year after Nussbaum's baby, a large number of Albanian women were given flights and accommodation for DebConf19 in Brazil. Four of the women were sitting at the same table as the former Debian Project Leader Chris Lamb. People dared to ask if Lamby was lovestruck.
Six years have now passed since they took the Albanian women to Brazil and we still haven't seen any of them follow up with Debian technical work. Therefore, it looks like the dating hypothesis was correct. After Zack and Nussbaum had their babies, the men coming into contact with Albanian girls for the first time almost had kittens. All the selection criteria and procedures were thrown out the window as they fell over themselves in the rush to buy diversity flights for single young women in that demographic.
Please see more blogs about the Debian pregnancy cluster.
Please see the chronological history of how the Debian harassment and abuse culture evolved. █