Losing Debian: Sruthi Chandran election flop
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
15:30 Wed, 01 Apr 2026
The fact that only one candidate is running in the Debianism elections gives a stark reminder about the state of the so-called community. The main reason why other people did not contest the election is because of fear. Fear of a circle of reprisals that began when Adrian von Bidder-Senn died on our wedding day.
When CentOS died, people tried to carry on in various ways. That tells us a lot about human psychology. People knew the game was over but they tried to continue as if it was business as usual, as if the situation could be salvaged, as if it was only a temporary crisis.
Due to years of censorship, including the payment of $120,000 to steal Debian-related domain names, the Debianists have been living in a bubble and deluding themselves. When Sruthi Chandran nominated on Friday 13th, people acted as if this was a good thing.
Now Sruthi has stopped answering questions on the Debian-vote mailing list and it seems reality has started to sink in. People are coming to realize that the position of Debian Project Leader is the interface between Debianism and the outside world. People can fool themselves and use the Code of Conduct gaslighting to blackmail other volunteers to pretend that Sruthi is a great leader. People are coming to realise that these tricks won't work on the wider community. Given that Sruthi would be Debian's interface to the outside world, we can't just ignore how the world views the candidate who is the wife of another developer.
She has ignored the most serious questions on Debian-vote mailing list. A woman trying to run Debian from a social control media account is the death of Debian. Here is a tally of the number of replies she provided each day for those who use email, the mainstay of Debian communication:
| Day | Count |
|---|---|
| 14 March | 0 |
| 15 March | 0 |
| 16 March | 0 |
| 17 March | 4 |
| 18 March | 0 |
| 19 March | 0 |
| 20 March | 0 |
| 21 March | 3 |
| 22 March | 1 |
| 23 March | 0 |
| 24 March | 7 |
| 25 March | 0 |
| 26 March | 0 |
| 27 March | 0 |
| 28 March | 0 |
| 29 March | 0 |
| 30 March | 0 |
| 31 March | 0 |
That is a total of only 15 replies. She has been largely silent for a whole week since 24 March.
Technically, questions and their answers are supposed to be completed before midnight on Friday, 3 April. The most critical questions have not been answered. In her platform, Sruthi Chandran boasts about being the "Chief orga DebConf India 2023" but there has never been an official report about the death of Abraham Raji at the conference.
Voting runs from 4 April to 17 April, which is the 15th anniversary of the day Adrian von Bidder-Senn died on our wedding day. It was discussed like a copy-cat suicide but there was no official report about those deaths either.
Remember the words from Abraham Raji himself:
Everything in Debian is transparent, all forms of official communication are a matter of public record, the amount of unresolved bugs, every step taken by debian as an organization, everything is in the open! I appreciate that from my distribution. There is no room for underhand corporate deals, no unfair treatment behind private mails and everything can be reviewed by the public.
Does Sruthi Chandran spend more time in debian-private (leaked) and WhatsApp groups than the public communication channels that Debian is supposed to be using?
Sruthi Chandran's platform tells us she wants to put diversity ahead of traditional goals like freedom and security. She has been very vague about this. As a consequence, more evidence is going to be published during the voting period to prove that Debian "diversity" means some men who did the real work are not being given credit while some large sums of money were assigned to the wives and girlfriends of cabal members.
I've never stated whether people should vote for Sruthi Chandran or not. Looking at the tone of the discussion, I feel people are coming to realise the way the outside world views candidates like this is not the same way that people view it from inside the bubble.
Consider the irony: they spent all that money in arguments about leaks that are "tarnishing" the trademark. The implication of these arguments about tarnishing is that the way the outside world views Debianism does matter. Can anybody see the risk that Sruthi Chandran and a lop-sided diversity crusade could do far more to tarnish the trademark than any leaks that have appeared up to this moment?
Debian may not die exactly the same way that CentOS died. At some point, as with CentOS, we will go past the point of no return. Maybe we already did. Will people have the courage to ask questions before that threshold is crossed or will they continue acting as if nothing is wrong even long after the life support system has been unplugged from the corpse?
Remember, Debianists gave over $120,000 in kill money to racist Swiss lawyerists to attack my family but they didn't pay Abraham Raji anything for the work he did helping organise DebConf23. When Raji joined the other developers on the day trip, they asked him to contribute some of his own money, he was left behind to swim alone and he drowned. Yet the lawyerists were given $120,000.
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. █