Rosanna Yuen & GNOME community triple tricked
19:30 Fri, 07 Nov 2025
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
This web site has a tag for the theme of tricking people, in other words social engineering attacks. There appears to be no better proof of this phenomena than the GNOME Foundation today.
We've all just been told that Rosanna Yuen (zana) has been made redundant after twenty years of service.
It looks like the board elections were a giant trick. If they don't like the person you vote for, the controlling corporations can simply use the GNOME web site to libel that person, as they did with Sonny Piers.
For FOSDEM this year, I published a report demonstrating that the GNOME budget is a trick. The report was loaded with major revelations, including the fact the Swiss police had been suspicious of the two Albanian GNOME women and arrested them at Zurich airport. Yet the most relevant thing to note from that report is the fact they had secretly put the second Albanian woman, who is also one of the Albanian female whistleblowers, onto the GNOME payroll. They didn't tell us when they really started giving money to this woman.
Immediately after the evidence was published, they removed the woman from the GNOME web site again. Here it is, before and after:
18 March 2025: Anisa Kuci in the staff list
28 March 2025: Anisa Kuci hidden from staff list
Now look at Rosanna's resignation blog post:
I am also grateful for the folks on staff that have made GNOME such a wonderful place to work through the years. ... And, of course, the current staff of Anisa, Bart, and Kristi, in whose hands I know the Foundation will keep thriving.
She admits that Anisa is still getting paid, nine months after being removed from the team list on the web site.
Any time this woman is given a job now, people look around to see if lovestruck Chris Lamb or somebody else from the DebConf dinner table is in proximity to the hiring process. Debian has spent over $120,000 in legal fees to stop me publishing evidence about the relationships on debian.news. The same evidence is still appearing on deb.news and other web sites. The legal bill to cover up the relationships and Debian suicide cluster may be more than the total redundancy payment given to Rosanna Yuen at the end of twenty years of service.
In Albania, young female students typically earn between ten and twenty euros per day to work as a waitress or shop assistant. It is widely rumoured that some of the female students in photos from the Albanian OSCAL conferences were paid to be there. In other words, we were tricked to believe the women were all volunteers.
Now we see the same phenomena in larger open source organizations: they don't officially include some women on the public list of staff, so we are tricked to believe she is a female volunteer.
On 4 November 2025, at 17:21 UTC, Allan Day used his GNOME blog account to publish a statement on Rosanna Yuen's redundancy.
Twenty three minutes later, Rosanna's GNOME blog account was used to publish an announcement about her redundancy.
Before looking any more closely at what is in these two blog posts, we need to ask: does the simultaneous release of these two blog posts suggest anything? For example, was Rosanna's blog post written for her or was it subject to editorial control before it went live?
Both blog posts tell us that Rosanna Yuen has been at GNOME for almost twenty years and she has been made redundant with a week's notice. We need to wonder why she is writing her final blog post in such an amicable way. Was it written for her, have the controlling corporations helped her find another job elsewhere or are they giving her a large redundancy payment to keep her on good terms?
When thinking about that, it is worth remembering Rosanna Yuen has been present throughout the Sonny Piers scandal and many other incidents over the years. As she was responsible for finance, she knows the identities of all the donors, the amounts they are contributing and the amounts they are paying people.
A tactical dump of GNOME's financial data would create a feeding frenzy in the community. I suspect the redundancy has been smoothed in some way to mitigate that risk. Therefore, when we read the blog that was purportedly written by Rosanna herself, we need to imagine that she is writing it in a favourable manner because she has been given a strong incentive that the rest of us can't see.
GNOME has published the names of their sponsors, the controlling corporations, from time to time. It is clear these companies have very deep pockets. If they wanted Rosanna to stay, they would have found the money to top up the GNOME budget. Therefore, the claim that Rosanna was removed because of a mysterious and unexpected budget shortfall is another trick. Rosanna's removal and replacement with lower paid offshore admin workers in Albania appears to be part of a plan that was a long time in the making. Eventually, the Albanian women will be removed too and somebody else will replace them.
If there really was a budget problem, why don't we see other staff actively looking for other jobs?
People curious about the Sonny Piers scandal need to keep asking for the truth. The two women who won tickets to fly from Albania to DebConf19 in Brazil, sat closest to Chris Lamb at the conference dinner, have been given a series of jobs in a series of organizations. Is that because of a simple explanation like Outreachy dating or is it because they know the real reason the Albanian group had to be shut down? Which subgroup of GNOME board members have the power to facilitate a jobs-for-silence arrangement like that behind the back of everybody else?
GNOME Foundation board meeting minutes after FOSDEM 2025 tell us that people have been asking Karen Sandler to answer these questions.
FOSDEM report
...
A lot of people approached Karen to ask about what had happened with Sonny
...
Executive session opening
The board entered into executive session at 17:34 UTC.
Executive session close
The board exited executive session ac 19:10. UTC
It is important for people to ask the question in written forums that can't be censored by the misfits. GNOME has been using the Discourse forum software for some time and that makes it very easy for the misfits to modify questions and responses. Few participants have enabled Discourse email mode so few people have evidence of what was really asked in previous discussions. People can use the mailing lists of related projects, such as the debian-project mailing list, to discuss the GNOME scandal and ask if key GNOMEists are going to honour the compact of transparency.
Another odd coincidence: Lufthansa has a large call center in Tirana, Albania and at least one of the two Albanian women has also worked there. In another blog, I looked at how Joerg Jaspert, one of the Debian Account Managers, appears to be a disguised employee of Lufthansa.
Why was Sonny Piers attacked in 2024? Because he realized they are tricking us and he dared to ask questions about it. In groups like this, there are certain expenses the board members are not supposed to ask questions about.
Please see the chronological history of how the Debian harassment and abuse culture evolved.
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