Cultification: best candidates avoiding Debian leader elections
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
13:30 Thu, 12 Mar 2026
We will never know the names of the people who thought about contesting the Debian Project Leader elections but decided not to raise their hand. In fact, the people who spend time thinking about it remain totally invisible.
Anybody who does volunteer for this position is going to inherit all the conflicts created by previous leaders. One of the most recent conflicts was the case of Phil Wyett. Mr Wyett, a British Army veteran, bravely shared all the private insults sent to him by various misfits. Wyett had tried to privately escalate the snobbiness to the current leader, Andreas Tille. In a parallel incident, we saw former leader Branden Robinson exposed to snobbiness. He tried to escalate concern about snobbiness on the debian-project mailing list. Andreas Tille's response was laced with more snobbiness, Tille did nothing to resolve the dispute. Wyett and Robinson are two more festering wounds in the culture of Debianism that every future leader is going to inherit.
A genuinely good candidate for the role is going to understand the risks created by these previous conflicts are too great. The candidate has to risk their own time, their money and their reputation and they will not be paid anything in return for that.
We already have damning evidence about the Debian suicide cluster to reflect on.
As I was reading the news yesterday about the murder-suicide on a Postbus in Switzerland, I was inevitably reminded about the death of Adrian von Bidder in Basel on our wedding day (detailed history) .
If you were elected leader of Debian in April and one of the victims like Phil Wyett or Branden Robinson committed suicide a few weeks later, how would you handle that? What if one of the victims went even further and engaged in a deplorable murder-suicide?
Another big story in the news this week is the story of Iran laying sea mines in the Straight of Hormuz. They tell us at least a dozen mines have been hidden below the water. Anybody who becomes leader of Debianism today is inheriting a whole bunch of virtual landmines, nasty surprises that could blow up in their face.
The best candidates will think about that and decide the risk of being in the captain's chair on the day somebody else dies is too big a risk for their reputation.
Andreas Tille is one of the older developers and he appears to be very close to retirement age. His children appear to be fully grown adults who can support themselves. Therefore, Andreas Tille's family may suffer a reputational risk but not a very big financial risk if he loses his job one or two years before he was going to retire anyway.
For younger candidates with a large mortgage to pay and small children to support, the thought of inheriting more Debian deaths is an unacceptable risk. Such people will not nominate.
That leaves us with the people near retirement age, the girlfriends who are fully supported by their spouse and the people using fake names.
There is no clear binary test to determine if an organisation is a cult or not. Nonetheless, when leadership candidates have to contemplate inheriting the legacy of snobbiness and suicides, when the set of possible leaders is restricted to those willing to tolerate and stubbornly ignore the stigma of this culture, we have clearly reached the point where most outside observers can agree that Debianism has become a cult.
Cult members themselves typically won't realise they are in a cult until after they quit.
The best way to encourage people to nominate for the election will be for the existing leader, Andreas Tille, to withdraw all the privacy attacks, settle the lawsuits proactively and ensure the next leader can walk in and find the desk is clean ready to work on productive things.
Don't hold your breath waiting for transparency about these attacks on my family. There is still time to watch my video and contribute to the crowdfunding campaign. █