The OpenMandriva Linux project says it was hit by an internal sabotage attempt. A contributor with admin access deleted GitHub repositories and pushed an empty package that could have broken users’ systems.
According to a forum post from longtime maintainer AngryPenguin, the trouble started after a contributor’s abusive behavior drove some people away. Then Davide Beatrici — lead developer of the Mumble chat app and a friend of the attacker — deleted part of a repository the team had been working on for nearly a decade. Beatrici had admin privileges because he’d helped migrate project repos to his private OneDev instance.
He also published an empty package in the Cooker repository that obsoleted packages for the Gnome and Cosmic desktop environments. The team is now restoring what was deleted and running a full system audit.
Beatrici disputes the sabotage label. In a statement to The Lunduke Journal, he said his goal wasn’t to harm the distro or its users. He claims he was triggered by project members who didn’t agree with OpenMandriva’s focus on KDE and LXQt, and who deleted a build config file from repos without asking him first.
“This was by no means a ‘sabotage,'” Beatrici said. “I’m not the kind of person to do something like that.” He says he carefully deleted only Cosmic and GNOME repos and packages.
The OpenMandriva team says Beatrici’s actions could be criminal but they’ve decided not to pursue legal action. The project is working on recovery.
OpenMandriva is a community-run Linux distro, forked from Mandriva in 2012. It’s known for building most components with LLVM/Clang instead of the usual GCC toolchain.
