OpenMandriva Reports Alleged Sabotage Attempt by Former Contributor

The OpenMandriva Linux project says it faced an attempted act of internal sabotage after a dispute between contributors.

The alleged OpenMandriva sabotage involved deleted GitHub repositories and changes to development packages. Project maintainers say those actions could have disrupted users’ systems.

The team is now restoring the affected resources. It is also auditing its infrastructure for other unauthorized changes.

OpenMandriva Sabotage Claims Follow Internal Dispute

OpenMandriva is an independent, community-run Linux distribution. It was forked from Mandriva Linux in 2012.

The distribution builds most of its components with the LLVM/Clang toolchain. Most other Linux distributions use GCC instead.

Long-time developer and maintainer AngryPenguin discussed the incident on the project’s forum.

According to the post, the dispute began with abusive behavior toward some users and project members. Several people reportedly left the project as a result.

The team claims that Davide Beatrici later deleted part of a repository maintained for almost a decade.

Beatrici is the lead developer of the Mumble voice chat application. He was also described as a friend of the contributor involved in the earlier dispute.

Administrative Access Enabled the Changes

According to OpenMandriva, Beatrici still had administrative privileges.

He had previously helped migrate and mirror project repositories to a private OneDev instance. That work gave him access to important development resources.

The team says Beatrici deleted repositories and published an empty package in the Cooker development branch.

The package marked the GNOME and COSMIC desktop environment packages as obsolete. OpenMandriva says this could have damaged affected development systems.

The project is restoring the deleted repositories and packages. It is also carrying out a full system audit.

Beatrici Denies Sabotage Allegations

Beatrici has rejected claims that his actions amounted to sabotage.

In a statement to The Lunduke Journal, he said he never intended to harm OpenMandriva or its users.

He confirmed that he deleted the GNOME and COSMIC repositories from GitHub. He also removed the related Cooker packages.

In addition, he published a package that marked them as obsolete.

However, Beatrici said the goal was not to damage the distribution. He linked his actions to disagreements over the project’s direction.

Disagreement Focused on Desktop Environments

Beatrici said some members opposed OpenMandriva’s focus on KDE and LXQt.

He also accused other contributors of neglecting security and maintaining an untidy Git history.

According to Beatrici, project members removed the .onedev-buildspec.yml file from several repositories. He said they made those changes without consulting him.

OpenMandriva has described his actions differently. The project maintains that they represented an unauthorized and destructive intervention.

OpenMandriva Will Not Pursue Legal Action

OpenMandriva says the alleged actions could constitute a criminal offense. However, the team does not plan to pursue legal action against the former contributor.

Instead, it will focus on restoring the affected infrastructure and checking for further damage.

The OpenMandriva sabotage dispute also highlights the risks of leaving former contributors with administrative access to critical project systems.