2 comments

  • crote39 minutes ago
    How did it go from &quot;He even performed a backup&#x2F;mirror of several dozen of our repositories.&quot; to &quot;He deleted part of our repository from GitHub. (..) [He published] an empty package in the cooker repository, which obsoleted all gnome and cosmic packages.&quot;?<p>I feel like there&#x27;s a few steps missing there. How does it go from &quot;a new person joins the community&quot; to &quot;he&#x27;s able to nuke everything&quot;? Sure, he might be reasonably well-known, but in the post it doesn&#x27;t sound like he was a core maintainer, or even a very active community member. Do they just randomly hand out admin access to anyone?
    • OhSoHumble18 minutes ago
      It&#x27;s hard to maintain open source software that needs infrastructure. Everyone is a volunteer and it&#x27;s not like the Mandriva project has the resources to fully vet people as well as have a high quality RBAC and access control system. This guy sounds like maintained a large project, offered to help, and Mandriva saw the Trojan horse as a way to alleviate a lot of their problems.<p>And it didn&#x27;t sound like he was able to &quot;nuke everything&quot; - it sounds like he had access to their repository infrastructure (which is reasonable given he was volunteering to host it) and then lashed out.<p>If anything, I think it&#x27;s a bigger organizational red flag that they agreed to privately host their source code on some random git forge and not a larger, more communal one. I mean, even if they didn&#x27;t want to use GitHub (did this even cost money for them) then there are other providers to choose from.<p>It just sounds like the Mandriva maintainers are trusting and good folk who may be overworked running an open source project and that led to a bad apple entering the bunch. It&#x27;s hard for me to be mad in that kind of situation.
    • throw123456789127 minutes ago
      There aren’t, they just don’t write it because it’s shameful for them. They trusted a man who brought two more people in, and they thought they were sheriffs.
  • whalesalad22 minutes ago
    TIL Mandriva&#x2F;Mandrake Linux is still around.