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Phil Wyett evidence & Debian Zizian plagiarism, modern slavery tendencies

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 19, 2025

Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.

August 18, 2025

A new Debian crisis emerged on Sunday of the Debian Day weekend with an email from Phil Wyett (kathenas). He chose the subject line Ending Debian Contribution. The snobby people insulted him and he quit.

The email only received one reply. Nobody thanked Phil for his enormous work over an extended period of years. Once again, they chewed somebody up, spat him out and abandoned him at the side of the road.

The email was sent on 17 August in the UK time zone, that is, the anniversary of the book Animal Farm. Phil is in the UK.

When Phil applied to be a Debian Developer in December 2023, he received this very positive reference from Gianfranco Costamagna (locutusofborg):

For nm.debian.org, at 2023-07-24:
I support Philip Wyett <philip.wyett@kathenas.org>'s request to become a Debian Developer, uploading.
I have worked with Philip Wyett on X and Y
for 2 years, and I consider them as having sufficient technical competence.

I don't usually advocate when I "just" sponsor less than 20 packages for a person.
I decided to gran him an exception, because:
1) he has strong motivation in keeping filezilla/libfilezilla in a good shape in Debian.
2) he is fast in acting and answer to questions/emails
3) he knows how ABI/API works, and he does "transition" the two packages successfully since
when he started working on them (its a 2 packages transition, but he knows his stuff!)
4) libfilezilla bumps ABI on each release, so being DM for him is probably painful.
5) he did work on other packages such as pingus, rednotebook.
6) I think having them as DD is a great value for Debian project.

I have personally worked with Philip Wyett <philip.wyett@kathenas.org>
(key 70A0AC45AC779EFE84F63AED724AA9B52F024C8B) for 2 years, and I know Philip Wyett
can be trusted to be a full member of Debian, and have unsupervised, unrestricted upload rights, right now.

Addendum:
For nm.debian.org, at 2024-01-22:
After the closing of the previous application, I asked Philip to do *many* Debian related things.
It turned out that the application was a little bit premature, Debian is not just
about having technical skills (and he strongly has them), but
also about helping newcomers, understanding how the community is built and how to interact each
other without loosing the objective that has to be to bring an OS to end users.
For this reason, after sponsoring a ton of packages reviewed by him on mentors.debian.org, and giving
them DM rights for the packages he maintains, I'm more confident about his ability to become
a full unsupervised DD.

In December 2024, a whole group of people all wrote positive references for Phil.

His Debian wiki profile, now deleted, included the comments:

Most of the money you see in and around Free / Open Source Software, Hardware and other projects is in the hands of large groups and self styled organisations, with little or none reaching the actually contributors/maintainer/developers of your favourite projects who actually do the core work.

Consider donating to projects and persons directly.

That must have annoyed the people who spend money without doing any work.

Quoting Phil's email from 17 August 2025:

In my opinion I have been messed about for over a year, discriminated against by one or more of the Debian Application Managers who overlooked my DD application for over 7 months whilst moving forward with other applications that were made after my own, one done in 10 days.

Looking through the history of mailing lists and the wiki (links below), we can see hundreds of messages from Phil as he works on his own packages and helps other people begin packaging with Debian. It looks like he has done more than enough work to have rights as a Debian Developer under copyright law.

The Debian Project Leader (DPL), Andreas Tille, obtained a PhD in Physics and works at the Robert Koch-Institute in Wernigerode, Germany. Surely he understands that in any publication, whether it is a scientific research paper or a piece of software, the names of all the authors/developers have to be listed with an equal status. Not including somebody's name is a close cousin of plagiarism. I've raised concerns about plagiarism in Debian before.

My next communication was from the DAMs closing my application and stating I could never apply again. The DPL has agreed with this decision.

If the Debian Account Managers were never going to respect his copyright status anyway, why did they encourage him to keep doing all this work over the years?

Their willingness to continue accepting his contributions and collaboration without giving him equal recognition reeks of exploitation. Exploitation is an element of any modern slavery prosecution. I have published a series of blogs looking at how exploitative situations arise in open source software.

There are two crucial pieces of evidence from the history of Enrico Zini, one of the Debian Account Managers:

First, in 2009, he asked Debian election candidates to each name five people they would like to censor and humiliate.

Please write a list of 5 Debian Developers you would like to kick out of the project.

Second, in 2018, Zini went to DebConf18 and gave a talk called "Multiple people" where he talks about having relationships with other men.

During the last year, I have been thinking passionately about things such as diversity, gender identity, sexual orientation, neurodiversity, and preserving identity in a group.

The last phrase, "preserving identity in a group", reveals a lot. Zini and other members of the group are screening Debian collaborators based on a very distorted worldview that only seems to tolerate the people they would be willing to sleep with.

Phil Wyett, being a former soldier and engineer, may have given the impression that he is not going to be an easy target for the social engineering culture and Code of Conduct gaslighting that has infected Debian in recent times.

Earlier this year there was significant publicity about the Zizian group. It is interesting to note that one of the Zizian victims was a border guard while Phil Wyett is a former soldier from the British Army's Royal Engineers.

US Border Patrol Agent David Maland, a US Air Force veteran, is pictured with a service dog. Phil Wyett, a British Army vet, is pictured with a regular house cat. Apart from the cat, they served their respective communities in a multitude of different ways.

Another Zizian victim was their landlord, Curtis Lind. The trial is ongoing. Mr Lind, pictured with a horse, lost one eye:

People who spend time developing software have rights under copyright law just as landlords have rights under real estate law.

The pattern of vicious attacks on authors, developers and landlords all suggest a significant disregard for the law and a sense of entitlement from people who operate in a pack, like dogs, barking at the rest of us.

Please see the chronological history of how the Debian harassment and abuse culture evolved.