Why is it that the people who scream the loudest about “safety” are always the least safe people in the room?

Meet Jeremy Bicha.

If you use Linux, you’ve used something he touched. If you use Ubuntu, he helped pick what gets installed. If you’ve used GNOME, you’ve seen his name in commit logs. If you’re a Wayland user, you’ve probably heard him yelling at someone.

You probably didn’t know he’s a convicted sexual predator. Not "he said, she said." Not a gray-zone HR complaint. Not an edgy tweet from 2007. A documented conviction. State- listed. He sexually abused his younger sisters. He’s listed on the Florida sexual predator registry. He works in open source. He is employed by Canonical. And nobody said anything.

Community Values

The open source world has become obsessed with speech-policing and reputational enforcement. Every major project has a code of conduct. Every contributor has a brand to protect. The new culture isn’t about whether your code works, it’s whether you’re “safe,” “inclusive,” and “aligned with community values.”

Richard Stallman wasn’t safe.

He made a comment in 2019 about the Epstein case that offended a mailing list full of ideologues. The short version: MIT was under fire for accepting donations from Epstein. Marvin Minsky, a now-deceased AI researcher, was named in a court filing by Virginia Giuffre as someone Epstein had trafficked her to. Stallman piped in with the social grace of a C compiler and argued that if Minsky didn’t know she was being coerced, it wasn’t really sexual assault. He said she may have “appeared entirely willing.” His concern was the legal semantics. That’s how his mind works.

It was tone-deaf. It was dumb. It was autistic. It was not rape apology. It was not an endorsement of Epstein. And it was certainly not worse than what Jeremy Bicha did. But Stallman resigned. From MIT. From the Free Software Foundation, the organization he created. Because that’s what happens when you violate the social contract. No charges. No victims. Just an unpopular idea. That was enough.

And Jeremy Bicha?

He stays.

The Brendan Eich Precedent

If you think tech culture is inconsistent about who gets canceled, consider Brendan Eich. Eich was the creator of JavaScript and briefly CEO of Mozilla. In 2008, he donated $1,000 to support California’s Proposition 8, a ballot initiative to ban same-sex marriage. That’s it. No harassment. No misconduct at work. No abuse.

Fast forward to 2014: Eich was forced to resign under intense pressure from Mozilla staff and the public. The reason? His political donation was “harmful” to the inclusive workplace Mozilla wanted to build. His technical contributions meant nothing. His intentions meant nothing.

Compare that to Jeremy Bicha, a convicted sexual predator who abused children. Bicha keeps his job, keeps contributing to critical open source projects, and faces zero public accountability.

This is the reality: your social opinions get you fired. Your crimes get you a free pass.

The Crime

Let’s not sugarcoat this. Bicha pled no contest in 2010 to charges of sexual battery of a child under 12. His own younger sisters were the victims. A judge entered a conviction in 2013. In 2025, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement finally listed him publicly in their predator database. Not “offender.” Predator. That classification requires a pattern of abuse or force. It is not assigned lightly.

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It is now a matter of public record. But the people who have been working with him for a decade don’t seem interested in acknowledging it. Canonical, the company that runs Ubuntu, has said nothing. GNOME, which promotes inclusivity above all else, has said nothing.

No blog posts. No press releases. No removal of access. No comment.

Their Standard, Not Yours

What makes this even more disgusting is that these people have spent years telling you that your behavior, your jokes, your opinions, and your social awkwardness make you dangerous. They have built a culture where disagreement is harm, and where being uncomfortable is the same thing as being unsafe.

They talk about “creating safe spaces” while handing root access to a convicted pedophile. They tell you that contributors must be “respectful” while turning a blind eye to a man who raped children. They canceled Stallman for a malformed opinion. They fired Brendan Eich for a donation. They blacklisted meritocracy itself as a tool of white supremacy.

But Bicha? He's fine. He is a professional, apparently.

What this goes to show is that these company standards and disciplines are never about ethics. This is and was always about ideology. Say the right things, hate the right people, and there is no sin that can’t be ignored.

The Wayland War

If you’ve ever watched Jeremy Bicha operate online, this won’t surprise you.

When X11 developers forked the project to work on a modernization called XLibre, Bicha lashed out. He accused the project of harboring fascists. He vandalized their documentation. He declared the fork unsafe.

Not buggy, just unsafe.

His beef wasn’t about performance. It was ideological. People who disagreed with him were, in his eyes, threats to the community. This is the pattern: invent danger, call people names, and hide behind "safety." And all the while, he was the danger.

He positioned himself as a gatekeeper. He helped chase out people who weren’t properly sanitized. And now we know who he really was the entire time.

This Is Who They Are

This isn’t a one-off. It’s not a glitch. It’s the system functioning exactly as designed.

These institutions--Canonical, GNOME, freedesktop.org--they don’t want safety. They want control. They don’t care if a predator is building your desktop, as long as you don’t say slurs on IRC. They don’t care about your daughter, they care about your politics.

They’ve trained an entire generation of developers to care more about posture than product. They protect the right monsters and exile the wrong weirdos. Because the weirdos say things that upset donors. The monsters know how to shut up and file merge requests.

Final Review

Richard Stallman: Made a controversial comment about Epstein. Fired.

Brendan Eich: Made a political donation opposing gay marriage. Fired.

Jeremy Bicha: Convicted child rapist. Still employed and contributing.

This is open source now. These are your ethics committees. These are your moderation teams. These are your community maintainers. It’s not about what you build. It’s about who you serve.

Bicha was convenient for the powers that be. So he remained, and dissent was silenced.

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