J.H.M. Ray Dassen & Debian, Red Hat, GNOME unexplained deaths
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
17:00 Fri, 16 Jan 2026
January 2026 has been a particularly difficult month for the people of Switzerland as we contemplate the very tragic circumstances around the deaths at Le Constellation, Crans-Montana and whether such tragedies occur spontaneously or whether they are linked to the behaviour and culture of certain organizations. When contemplating that, the similarities to the Debian cultural problems immediately come to mind.
Out of 272 developers marked "Removed" from the Debian keyring, we only know the stories of a small handful. For example, those who were removed secretly for the purpose of blackmail, like Dr Norbert Preining and those who committed suicide, like Frans Pop (the Debian Day Volunteer Suicide) and Adrian von Bidder-Senn (our wedding day). For most of the 272 removed developers, we don't know if they are alive or dead.
Look at how the snobby people spent seven years leading on Phil Wyett in the onboarding process before deciding to slap him in the face. They go through this huge process of pretending to get to know each new co-author but they don't seem to know us at all. They pretend that we are a "family" or "community" but if that is true, how could 272 people be removed from the keyring without anybody knowing what happened to them?
Security-minded people are right to be suspicious about what is going on here.
All I can suggest is looking at each one on a case by case basis and trying to identify patterns.
The next person known to have died is Ray Dassen in May 2013.
Looking through the enormous debian-private leaks on IPFS we can see a lot of talk from the 1990s. Numerous email threads started when Joel "Espy" Klecker suddenly announced he was going to die the next day.
When Frans Pop sent his resignation/suicide note the night before Debian Day there was another big discussion and severe punishments were inflicted to ensure secrecy. At each death since then, the discussion became smaller.
By the time J.H.M. (Ray) Dassen died, the post-mortem email threads were minimal. No reason for the death was stated either in public or in private. Nonetheless, people seemed to remember the punishments given out after previous deaths and everybody obediently kept their heads down.
In addition to the secrecy around certain types of death and the fear of punishments, we can see that Ray Dassen was an employee of Red Hat (now IBM) and this probably created even more reluctance for people to speculate or say anything at all. Is Debian really a hobby for volunteers or is it a modern slavery system where people have to "behave" like the boss is watching us twenty-four hours per day, seven days a week?
We can look at the other Red Hat deaths, for example, Daniel Bristot de Oliveira to see if there are any similarities.
Ray Dassen was one of the key people involved in the GNOME desktop on Debian. Therefore, it is important to look at both his life and his death in the context of all the other GNOME issues. Clytie Siddall was another Debian/GNOME death and she died not long after Dassen.
One of the first big similarities we see is that Ray Dassen was one of those people who contributed much of his life to the idea of a free software movement. Frans Pop, like other victims, had told us he was motivated to work for free by the charade of a Debian philosophy.
The Wayback Machine has captured Ray Dassen's personal blog. Read it here. We can fact check and verify that he was one of the people who may have felt duped by the charade of a Debian or open source philosophy.
The archived copy of his web page includes the logo for the EFF's Blue Ribbon Campaign against censorship. The recent trend towards Code of Conduct gaslighting would have him turning in his grave if he hadn't been cremated.
Almost all the deaths are male, but then again, there are hardly any women participating in unpaid open source jobs so we can't say whether gender is immediately relevant to the pattern of deaths.
Most of the people who died did not have a regular family environment. The death notices for Ray Dassen (copies below) do not mention anything about a spouse or children. Looking at the other deaths, some of them were single, like Frans Pop while Adrian von Bidder-Senn had been married for five years without any children. Ian Murdock had been divorced.
The next similarity we find is the age. Most of the deaths appear to be occurring between the mid-30s and 40s. Ray Dassen died immediately after his fortieth birthday. In fact, there is a statistically significant type of death known as Birthday syndrome whereby people are more likely to die around their birthday. Researchers found the syndrome is even more significant around milestone birthdays, for example, developers turning 40 or 50.
Families are entitled to their privacy at a time of grief and I don't think it is fair to put pressure on Dassen's family to disclose the cause of death, even though we know he died at a peak period for the Debian suicide cluster. On the other hand, I resigned from some of my voluntary activities at a time when I lost two family members and the snobby set have spent more than seven years demanding public explanations to satisfy their selfish egos.
As long as no other details are available, all we can say for sure is that he reached that Milestone birthday without having any spouse or children at exactly the same time that many other people were coming to realize the extent to which they had been duped by the "family" and "community" charade created by the PR departments in the controlling corporations.
It is important not to forget the real motivations of Ray Dassen and Daniel Bristot de Oliveira.
In 2004, Ray Dassen defended freedom of speech:
Subject: Re: meaning of @debian.org Date: Sat, 24 Jan 2004 15:30:52 +0100 From: J.H.M. Dassen (Ray) <fsmla@xinara.org> Organization: Ray at home To: debian-private@lists.debian.org
[Feel free to quote me outside -private]
On Sat, Jan 24, 2004 at 23:53:25 +1100, Hamish Moffatt wrote: > The fact is that your site isn't related to Debian so you have no business > using a debian.org email address in connection with it.
That's your opinion. I'm aware of no rule or regulation in the project forbidding such use at the moment. The most relevant thing I've seen so far is the "Mail/News" part of the DMUP, which is formulated as a guideline ("... is generally encouraged ...") rather than a binding rule.
Ray -- "Text processing doesn't matter." Fortran. Larry Wall on common fallacies of language design
In March 2013, the snobby people like Joerg Jaspert started humiliating Daniel Baumann.
19 April 2013 was Ray Dassen's fortieth birthday. On the same day, John Hasler wrote his resignation email demonstrating his total disgust with the snobby people:
Subject: Resignation Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2013 14:59:27 -0500 From: John Hasler <jhasler@newsguy.com> Reply-To: John Hasler <john@dhh.gt.org> Organization: Dancing Horse Hill To: debian-private@lists.debian.org
I've resigned. Your resignation procedure says I must announce that fact to this list. I've sent the requisite message to keyring@rt.debian.org and orphaned my packages. Please notify me if there is anything I've missed. Otherwise please do not respond. -- John Hasler jhasler@newsguy.com Elmwood, WI USA
Nice. The feud about Daniel Baumann was a reminder about all the previous suicides and it coincided with that Milestone birthday for Ray Dassen.
Having a resignation like that on your birthday is unpleasant but not in the same league as having Adrian von Bidder-Senn die on our wedding day.
27 April 2013, Cajus Pollmeier sent a more polite but equally firm resignation, emphasizing that he has real family and children as opposed to the fake family the Debianists are gaslighting about:
Subject: Retiring Date: Sat, 27 Apr 2013 20:26:17 +0200 From: Cajus Pollmeier <cajus@naasa.net> To: debian-private@lists.debian.org
Hi!
I've noticed that I cannot find as much time to work for Debian as I like to. Family and children need my time in the moment. I hope I'll be able to come back in the future some time.
My packages have not yet been orphaned - I'm currently working on that.
Thank you all for the fun and the good work you all do! Cajus
PS: I just noticed that I've somehow lost my debian-private subscribtion some time ago. If there's something I should know, please CC me.
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On 12 May 2013, a new thread started with the heading nomination and call for supporters for expulsion of Josselin Mouette.
Subject: nomination and call for supporters for expulsion of Josselin Mouette Date: Sun, 12 May 2013 00:15:29 +0300 From: Eugene V. Lyubimkin <jackyf@debian.org> To: da-manager@debian.org
Hello,
[ Josselin and debian-private@ BCC'ed ]
...
On the same day that developers Ana Guerrero & Aurelien Jarno had a baby together.
18 May 2013 Ray Dassen died in Dordrecht, Netherlands.
It is with great sadness that we must inform you that our Ray has passed away.
Ray Dassen
His heart suddenly beat its last.
On behalf of the family and friends
Landgraaf: Sjef and José Dassen
The cremation will take place privately.
For those who did not receive notification, please consider this announcement as such.
We were saddened to learn of the passing of our colleague
Ray Dassen.Ray was a respected member of our TAM team and of Red Hat Netherlands.
He was always available to help people with questions and did so in every community he could find: within the Netherlands, within GSS, within Red Hat, and within the open source community more broadly.
That same attitude made him an excellent TAM, not only in our eyes but also in those of his customers, where he quickly earned respect and trust.
We will miss Ray for his humor, his helpfulness, his collegiality, as a team leader, and for his expertise.
We are very grateful that we got to know Ray and work with him.
Red Hat BV
Acknowledgments
In our sorrow over the passing of our dearly beloved
Ray,we were able to experience your heartfelt condolences.
We express our sincere gratitude for this.
Sjef and José.
Landgraaf, June 2013
Was he fooled by the false promise of a philosophy?
In 2019, funds from the community were used to bring a group of eastern European women from Albania and Kosovo to Brazil for DebConf19.
At the conference dinner, four of them were seated at the table with the Debian Project Leader Chris Lamb.
When men travel to events, they are left to sleep on the tables:
RIP J.H.M. Ray Dassen
Did he feel he had been fooled about Debian?
Tricking an only child (Ray) about what family really means is an extreme example of a social engineering attack. █
Please see the chronological history of how the Debian harassment and abuse culture evolved.