As a result of a conflict with the leader of the OpenMandriva project, developer Davide Beatrice (Davide Beatrici), who had access to the repositories with administrator rights, committed sabotage, which led to damage to the development infrastructure and disruption the performance of some users’ systems. Beatrice deleted part of the GitHub repositories in which the development of OpenMandriva components was carried out, and also committed malicious actions in the Cooker repository, in which the development of an unstable branch of the distribution is underway. In particular, he published an empty package that deprecated all GNOME and Cosmic packages, which could disrupt the functionality of users’ systems using the desktop environment data.
It is noted that the OpenMandriva development team audited Beatrice’s activity and did not identify other malicious actions besides the above. Currently, work is underway to restore deleted repositories and return functionality to packages that have been rendered obsolete. Beatrice’s actions were a reaction to the removal of his friend from the developer chat, who was distinguished by toxic behavior, due to which several participants had previously left the project.
Davide Beatrice is known as one of the main developers of the Mumble voice communication application, and the OpenMandriva team had no reason not to trust him. Beatrice’s contribution to the development of OpenMandriva was not great, but he took the initiative to transfer the development infrastructure from GitHub to his server with the OneDev platform. The initiative was received ambiguously, since some of the developers were against transferring the repositories to a system controlled by one participant, and the matter did not progress beyond the creation of mirrors on OneDev.
Together with Beatrice, two of his acquaintances joined the project, one of whom after some time began to behave toxically towards other developers and users, some of whom then left the project. Toxic behavior was not immediately noticed, as it mostly manifested itself in personal correspondence. After attacks on one of the participants in the matrix chat and in discussions on GitHub, the project leader removed the abuser from the chat.
The removal caused discontent among two participants, including Beatrice, who left the project in protest. Seeing no point in maintaining mirrors in Beatrice’s infrastructure, it was decided to disable access for them, which angered Beatrice so much that he abused his remaining administrator rights and descended into sabotage.