Relationships evidence: Tiago, Tassia, Thais, Antonio & Debian favoritism, nepotism
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
13:00 Thu, 12 Feb 2026
One of the consequences of the Debian pregnancy cluster is that the earliest children are now growing up and some of them want to participate in Debianism too. Or at the very least, they want to put Debian on their CV and use the trademark as a tool to help them take credit for the substantial work done by real developers and innovators who bootstrapped the free software ecosystem.
To see how it will work for those children, we can look at existing cases with nieces, nephews, cousins and girlfriends.
I can't imagine any other organization where we would be talking about other peoples' family members like this. In Debianism, however, people have been attacking my family for a number of years now. They publicised rumours about interns seeking a relationship with me in Google Summer of Code and Outreachy. As long as those rumours are sustained, it is only fair that I can publish information to defend the honor of my family and my former interns. In other words, it is necessary to look at every relationship in the group. That includes romantic relationships and it also includes cases where somebody's child or niece/nephew appears to be jumping the queue.
Phil Wyett recently complained that he had been waiting seven years for his Debian Developer application to be completed. He became disillusioned and stopped contributing altogether.
When one of the Debianist power couples introduces their child to Debianism, will their child be left waiting seven years in the new maintainer queue like Phil Wyett?
When travel bursaries are awarded for attending DebConf, will children, especially females, automatically receive the diversity money?
In 2024, for Ada Lovelace Day, Tassia spoke about being a Debian wife:
Most of that group became close friends; I've married one of them, ... we've had our own child and had the pleasure of introducing him to the community; we've mourned the loss of friends and healed together
March 2014: look at the schedule for the Women's MiniDebConf in Barcelona. We can see Tiago and his wife Tassia both came from Canada to Barcelona.
Bartosz Fenski realized what was happening and resigned:
To: <debian-private@lists.debian.org>
I wasn’t too active recently but with the latest activity of our leader and official support for women-mini-debconf I want to retire from the project. I don’t want to be part of this anymore. Please hereby approve my retirenment statement. See you in project where everyone will be welcome. Not only women.
Bartosz is not sexist and he is not complaining about women. Everybody knows there is a culture of nepotism and favoritism. Certain people appeared to be asking for Debian funds to go to Barcelona with their partners.
A few months after Barcelona, Tássia Camões Araújo was given the title of non-Developing Debian Developer and then immediately appointed to the team of three DebConf chairs.
Now we fast forward ten years. On 22 October 2024 there was an event Online MiniDebConf Brasil 2024. They had a session, in Portuguese, comparing online and in-person events. There is a moderator and three speakers for the session. The schedule gives their names as Paulo Santana, Antonio Terceiro, Thais Araujo, Tássia Camões Araújo.
Paulo introduces the other three participants. Using Youtube auto-translation, we see what he is saying: the three speakers are all related to each other. It is not clear if Thais is the sister, cousin or niece of Tássia. Her last name suggests she is a cousin or a niece. In fact, the word nepotism is derived from the word nephew, the male form of niece.
Remember, Tássia had previously served as one of the DebConf chairs and Antonio Terceiro was appointed to the DebConf committee in 2019. Paulo has told us that Thais Rebouças de Araujo is related to both of those people who have influence over DebConf opportunities.
Remember, in 2019, DebConf19 was held in Brazil. A large group of women from Albania and Kosovo were brought to the conference. None of the women were asked to pay for their own flights or accommodation. Everything they needed was fully paid for them. At the conference dinner, four of those women were seated at the same table as the former Debian leader Chris Lamb. A few weeks after the dinner, the Albanian woman seated closest to Lamb was awarded an Outreachy internship. Evidence: a lovestruck leader?
Between 2019 and 2022, they spread numerous rumours accusing my last Google Summer of Code intern of having a relationship with me. The woman was half my age and already married. In this video, she tells us how they tried to manipulate her.
Here are some of the examples of the Debian/Zizian mob, people I never met, spreading rumours:
and the following year it came up again:
In 2022, the misfits spent over $120,000 on legal fees to insist there had been wrongdoing, despite the woman telling us clearly I was a great mentor and she didn't want to be part of a group that behaves worse than a student union.
On 12 September 2023, Thais Rebouças de Araujo used the name Thais Rebouças in the schedule for DebConf23. Without her full name, we can not tell she is related to Tassia.
On 15 September 2023, Thaís Rebouças de Araujo, using the name Thais R. Araujo asks to join the Debian Python team and help maintain packages Robber, Delta and Pytest-executable.
She puts Debian Python on her LinkedIn profile:
Remember when Vincent Danjean joined Debian? He told debian-private (leaked):
When I did the NM process, I knew that I had to give some personal information so that my AM knew me better. I also knew that these mails will be read by FD and DAM. But I knew they will not be public even between other DD. So, I wrote some things about my personal life. I also wrote opinion on other DD (my AM ask me to react to some public claim from theses DD). I do not want that these mails become public (even between DD and even more external people) because I do not remember what I wrote exactly, I do not want to check/rewrite/filter public/private parts, ... These mails have never be intended to be read by people other than the ones that already read them.
Did anybody ask Thaís Rebouças de Araujo to provide collateral? Or was she immune from such requests because of her relationships with other members of the group?
On 7 June 2024, Thaís Rebouças de Araujo registered a business under her own name, registration number 55,442,988/0001-30 with share capital of BRL 2,500 (Source: business registry). Her subsequent conference appearances all appear to be beneficial for her business.
When I registered a business in April 2021, the rogue Debianists immediately started attacking my family and spreading rumours. Remember when they attacked Dr Norbert Preining at Christmas 2018? This was the "Call for experiences of Norbert Preining" thread:
On 18 July 2024, the GNOME misfits open a topic in their Discourse forum spreading defamation about Sonny Piers. Over 21,200 people have looked at it so far:
On 28 July 2024, Tássia Camões Araújo and Thaís Rebouças de Araujo give a talk together. Once again, in the schedule, we only see the name Thais Rebouças so we don't get any hint they are related. In the beginning of the talk, each of them introduces the other to the audience. They do not mention the family connection.
DebConf101: forget merit, its all about who you know
On 22 October 2024 there was an event Online MiniDebConf Brasil 2024, as described earlier, where they revealed many of these people are related to each other.
On 14 July 2025, at DebConf25 in France, Tássia Camões Araújo and Thaís Rebouças de Araujo repeat the same talk from the previous year, DebConf 101. Therefore, it looks like Tássia Camões Araújo and Thaís Rebouças de Araujo both got funding for a trip to France.
In December 2025 Thaís Rebouças de Araujo graduated. The plan worked and an employer has hired her even before graduating. She is now at a company called Place Tecnologia e Inovacao S.A:
What we see here is quite tragic for everybody else in the history of Debian and free software. Tássia Camões Araújo is the wife of Tiago so they both get to travel together. It is not clear if they asked for and received Debian funds on every trip. Now Thaís Rebouças de Araujo has arrived, she has given a talk with her aunt(?) and she has had at least three long distance trips from Brazil, visiting India in 2023, South Korea in 2024 and France in 2025.
Remember, Abraham Raji did a lot of work organising DebConf23 in India. Volunteers were asked to contribute their own money to the cost of the day trip. Raji chose not to pay and he was left out of the paid kayak excursion, he was left alone to swim unsupervised and he drowned, an avoidable death.
The cost of the flights for Tássia Camões Araújo's niece to come from Brazil to India for DebConf23 is more than the cost of providing a free day trip for everybody.
Bringing somebody's niece from Brazil to India was considered a more important expense than keeping the group together and safe during the day trip.
For better or worse, this looks like the situation the Catholic church was trying to avoid when they decided it was better for priests to be celibate.
In a local community organization, for example, an amateur sporting club, it is quite normal to have multiple people from the same families participating because they are all living in the same district.
Debianists have claimed to be a merit-based organization. The Debian Social Contract promises transparency. People working remotely can't easily tell when money is given to somebody's girlfriend or niece. In this case, like many others, the woman is using different permutations of her name. Some women have been using aliases. People who look at the conference schedule or watch it online are kept in the dark about many of these relationships.
Applicants for the Outreachy internships were asked to spend time doing unpaid coding tasks to compete on merit. How do those women feel when they see somebody's niece was given travel and speaking opportunities at every conference?
Every other applicant for funding is expected to share the public links to their work. Here are the links we found for Thaís Rebouças de Araujo:
- contributors.debian.org - Thais-ra@salsa
- LinkedIn - Thaís Rebouças de Araujo
- salsa.debian.org - thais-ra
- salsa.debian.org - thais-ra-guest
- Github
- Gitlab
It is interesting to compare the contributions of Thaís Rebouças de Araujo to people of the same age in the glory days of Debian volunteering. People like Shaya Potter, Joel "Espy" Klecker and Chris Rutter. The early leaks of debian-private include a lot of evidence about how people used to join and contribute spontaneously before money arrived and spoiled the community.
In most organisations, I can't imagine people would ever be pushed to write blogs and emails documenting conflicts of interest like this. At the time when my father died, the Debian/Zizian mob started their obsession with attacking my family and spreading rumours that I was having a relationship with an intern in Google Summer of Code. They even tried to trick the intern to make a complaint about me. She refused and she didn't want to be associated with these people who use women to start rumours.
The snobby set use the Debian trademark and donations to denounce and rub out people who have done decades of real open source development work. Then the same cyberbullies use the trademark, the money, speaking opportunities and whatever else to help their romantic partners, children and nieces/nephews to build a public profile for themselves.
The hypocrisy is extraordinary. Thousands of dollars of diversity funds were spent taking Thaís Rebouças de Araujo and other personal friends to conferences so they can put Debian on their CV and get an advantage in the job market. Yet people who do enormous amounts of real work like Dr Norbert Preining, Sonny Piers, Richard Stallman and I have all been subject to vicious and dishonest attacks on our reputations. Then these imposters come in and take our place. When the imposters appear on a stage at DebConf or when they call themselves a Debian Developer, they are taking credit for the work that everybody else has done in the past. They are standing on the shoulders of giants.
They are shaming and humiliating real developers for making the slightest mistakes with woke language and pronouns and then they put somebody's niece up on a pedastal and pretend she is the next Linus Torvalds.
In the talk at DebConf23, the camera pans around the room. We can see the room is nearly empty. Many talks were nearly empty. All the interesting people like Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds and I are subject to censorship. People don't expect anybody to say anything interesting so they don't bother going to DebConf.
Joel "Espy" Klecker's favorite expression is timeless. R.I.P. Espy (1979-2000).
Please see more about the Debian pregnancy cluster.
Please see the chronological history of how the Debian harassment and abuse culture evolved. █