Statement regarding attempted distribution sabotage
Statement regarding attempted distribution sabotage
Announcements and Communications
In recent days, our distribution has experienced several disruptions that we need to inform our community about to maintain full transparency.
Davide Beatrici, known for his work on the instant messaging app Mumble, joined our distribution some time ago. The team had no hesitation in trusting him; after all, he was such a well-known figure that we didn’t expect anything bad. Although Davide didn’t make many contributions to the system, he offered to migrate our repository infrastructure from GitHub to his private instance, OneDev. He even performed a backup/mirror of several dozen of our repositories. Some of the team had mixed feelings, as we didn’t want to place our repository in the private hands of one person, we preferred a publicly available infrastructure like GitHub currently has.
Two other people joined the distribution along with Davide. And that’s where the problem began. After a while, one of them began to behave in abusive ways towards certain users and members of the distribution. Some people left the distribution because of this behavior. We didn’t know about every incident immediately, as many of these hateful behaviors occurred in PMs. However, the series didn’t end there, and when another person was attacked in our chat and on GitHub, I decided to take action and kicked the attacker out of the chat.
I didn’t ban him, just kicked him out of one of the chat (specifically, the matrix chat for the OpenMandriva-Cooker channel). We didn’t forbid him from further collaboration and didn’t impose a ban on him. Although, in retrospect, I personally regret not reacting sooner, as these steps should have been taken when some people left the distribution because of him - for which I apologize to everyone affected by this aggressive behavior
This triggered a cascade of events. In protest, two people left the distribution, including Davide, a friend of the attacker.
No longer seeing any point in maintaining a mirror to Davide’s private infrastructure, I decided to sever the connection (at least some of the mirrors that were in the packages of which I am maintainer).
This infuriated Davide so much that, abusing of the administrative privileges he still had, he sabotaged the distribution today in the early morning hours.
He deleted part of our repository from GitHub—things we’d been working on for many years, and I myself had been working on for a decade (specifying that the decade will end in September 2026). Davide also decided to publish an empty package in the cooker repository, which obsoleted all gnome and cosmic packages, which could have damaged the systems of people using gnome or cosmic.
Zrzut ekranu z 2026-07-08 17-05-03885×365 64.2 KB
We are currently working to restore the deleted repositories and restore the functionality of the obsolete packages.
We are writing this to be transparent with the community and to warn the open source community about Davide Beatrici (known for his work on the Mumble project, among other things) so they don’t repeat our mistakes.
We understand that Davide’s actions were unacceptable and shameful, and that we could have pursued legal action because Davide’s actions constituted a criminal offense, but we have decided not to do so.
We performed a full system audit and, aside from the removed packages, we found no other violations.
Flame wars I get. . .
But this? Holy Crap . . .
I’ve seen some craziness happen in the Coffee Break section in this forum if that has to do with anything.
Well, crap. I’m glad there was no permanent damage.
Would be wise to reserve the right to take legal action, should this not end here.
First, THANK YOU to you and all who contribute to this, my favorite distribution! This notification literally found me as I’m working on a Rock machine and compiling on a Cooker machine. This type of thing is what I always fear and hope never happens in a project, but you and the team have handled it the best way possible with class and transparency. Thank you again!
I propose that all crazies please redirect their outrage at me. Mostly because as an old retired over the road truck driver, I am acclimated to road rage, brake checks, drunk driving, false accusations, warehouse rage, and police pointing lots of guns at me because of false accusations, more than anyone else I see on this forum. Last year I had one crazy call me stupid. I suffered zero damages. Not sure what happened to the individual. Have not seen or heard anything since then.
It’s sad how some people disrespect the hard work and dedication of others. At least I’m glad the consequences aren’t more serious, and I’m sorry for the time they’ll lose putting everything back in place. I disagree with not taking legal action against this person. People need to be held accountable for their actions. Only through examples will we make the free software movement be respected as it should be. But that’s my opinion, and I respect your decision. I wish you success. Everything will be alright; there are many responsible, admirable, and dedicated people working hard on this project.
Anything needing human input for free is always challenging. For many years I was one of the admins and major contributors for what was (then) one of the most viewed and respected freeware sites on the web namely Gizmos Freeware. In reality I spent more time placating spats between contributors and moderating abusive posts in the forum than I did producing content. We were already struggling to attract new contributors before Gizmo (Ian Richards) retired and eventually the inevitable happened and the site closed. It still riles me when I see reports like this one here because having issues is one thing but sabotaging the work of others is a whole different ball game. Ive also found from experience its little use expecting such people to show remorse because all they think of is themselves. Sadly too many people who offer to contribute are empire builders with their own agenda and in a world where voluntary contributions are hard to come by its often difficult to weed them out before damage gets done.
because having issues is one thing but sabotaging the work of others is a whole different ball game
Prexactly [cit. @WilsonPhillips ]
I hope that this was just some kind of misunderstanding or just mistake. Current times are flooded with overriding emotions in all kind of public topics. It would be better to separate emotions from discussions and even more from from code, tools, infrastructure.
I agree that a public infrastructure should be a default approach also with distributed management when it comes to open projects. But on the other side we have seen open projects ripped from a public, or even an author, slice by slice by some desperate entities - from this perspective a private infrastructure in trusted hands may be a safer way.
I trust that this great OM project will stay out of that and possible future crisises without a scratch.
Wow. Very petty and unexpected coming from him. big cheers for catching the package thing early
I will say that it is nice to see some people show up that we have not seen in a long time. Welcome!
is other team admins repos warned ?
see davidebeatrici (Davide Beatrici) / Repositories · GitHub
davidebeatrici (Davide Beatrici) / Repositories · GitHub
Just noticing that almost everything he is working on is a fork.
Davide sounds vaccinated and homosexual.
Please let’s keep this serious topic clean.
Please
