Culture of silence: Ubisoft harassment convictions, Mozilla, Sylvestre Ledru & Debian make no comment
In an earlier blog, I provided an English translation of the accusations against the Ubisoft executives. This is serious stuff.
In the summer of 2017, people discovered the head of the Albanian group, who was also a Mozilla Tech Speaker, had a 16-year-old girlfriend. He was 24 at the time.
In October 2017, I sent a protected whistleblower complaint to Mozilla.
Here is the internal complaint about the harassment. The date is 12 October 2017 so the misfits publishing alternative statements about harassment are lying. I have redacted the section that identifies underage victims.
The next internal email from Larissa Shapiro at Mozilla admits that kids are at risk.
Emma Irwin from Mozilla admits this is a serious matter and asks me to speak to Marta, Mozilla's HR investigator.
It was around this time that I confided in some of the women that I had a family connection with the choir of Cardinal George Pell and that I was watching these matters very carefully.
On 18 January 2018, at the peak of the scandals involving the Albanian female whisteblowers, Sylvestre Ledru, who is employed by Mozilla, sent a private email to Chris Lamb, Nicolas Dandrimont and I telling us that he was resigning as an administrator in Google Summer of Code.
On my side, I would appreciate being removed from this list and delegation. While I love Debian, my responsibilities at Mozilla are growing and I don't have the bandwidth for outreach/gsoc
On 27 August 2018 I sent a public message to the mailing list where I also resigned from future mentoring in the program.
Who wants to be part of the admin team in 2019? Personally, I am going to step back from that role with GSoC and I want to make that clear now so other people can step forward well before registration opens in January.
People have now spent seven years complaining. They never paid us anything for the work we did recruiting and mentoring the interns for Google. They squeal like stuck pigs after we resign.
In December 2018, the late Cardinal Pell was convicted of abuse and the rogue Debianists immediately began spreading rumors about my family and I.
A few weeks later, on 12 February 2019, Sylvestre Ledru used his blog at Mozilla to announce a collaboration between Ubisoft and Mozilla using the Ubisoft Clever-Commit artificial intelligence. An excerpt:
Making the Building of Firefox Faster for You with Clever-Commit from Ubisoft
Firefox fights for people online: for control and choice, for privacy, for safety. ... No other tech company has people’s back like we do.
... Mozilla just partnered with Ubisoft to start using Clever-Commit, an Artificial Intelligence coding assistant developed by Ubisoft La Forge ...
...
... Ultimately, the integration of Clever-Commit into the full Firefox developer workflow could help catch up to 3 to 4 out of 5 bugs ...
...
Mozilla will contribute to the development of Clever-Commit by providing programming language expertise in Rust, C++ and Javascript, as well as expertise in C++ code analysis and analysis of bug tracking systems.
It looks like a very close relationship between the developers at Mozilla and Ubisoft. Sylvestre is one of the Mozilla developers based in Paris, which is also the headquarters of Ubisoft.
Around the same time, Mozilla censored my blog from the Planet Mozilla blog syndication service. Is this because they don't want the Mozilla community to know what women told me in 2017 and 2018?
Look at the Mozilla Manifesto. It says that Mozilla is against censorship. Why did they censor my blog immediately before the evidence about harassment was published?
2. The internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible.
...
8. Transparent community-based processes promote participation, accountability and trust.
The franceinfo report about harssment describes the culture in our industry with quotes from the audit of Ubisoft culture:
"humiliations were commonplace"
"any resistance was immediately broken"
The fellowship had elected me as a representative in 2017 and somebody at Mozilla didn't want me to share evidence about harassment (real harassment).
Ubisoft employees began to speak up about harassment (real harassment) in summer 2020 ( Wikipedia report). French newspaper Libération started an investigation, eventually running a series of reports.
In 2023, Mozilla created and promoted a petition against the French government's browser censorship (SREN) legislation. Five years after censoring the blog of the person elected by the Fellowship, Mozilla declared:
Sign our petition to stop France from forcing browsers like Mozilla's Firefox to censor websites
In the summer of 2025, three senior Ubisoft executives were convicted and punished for harassment (real harassment).
Nobody from Mozilla or Debian has ever made any public Statement on Ubisoft.
Whether we are talking about censorship or talking about harassment, the message is clear: do as we say, not as we do
Why did they attack my family when my father died but they maintain the culture of silence for the Ubisoft scandals?
Here is a photo of Sylvestre Ledru, Paul Tagliamonte and I in the offices of Google during the Google Summer of Code mentor summit 2013.
Please see the chronological history of how the Debian harassment and abuse culture evolved.