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https://lwn.net/Articles/786593/

An April Fools joke that went sour seems to be at least the proximate cause for a rather large upheaval in the Devuan community. For much of April 1 (or March 31 depending on time zone), the Devuan web site looked like it had been taken over by attackers, which was worrisome to many, but it was all a prank. The joke was clever, way over the top, unprofessional, or some combination of those, depending on who is describing it, but the incident and the threads on the devuan-dev mailing list have led to rancor, resignations, calls for resignations, and more.

Quick summary:

- Nicosia (a core dev) posted to the mailing list saying Devuan was compromised.
- Nicosia kept up the joke for some time.
- Nicosia admitted it was a prank later.
- Mike Bird suggested legal action against Nicosia and auditing/rebuilding the affected servers.
- Nicosia stepped down on April 11.
- Roio (a core dev) accused CenturionDan (a core dev) of causing Nicosia to step down.
- Reurich (a core dev) commented on the divide between people who want to use Devuan professionally and people who use Devuan for fun.
- Roio objected to Reurich.
- Reurich considered stepping down.

Some facts (?) gathered from the comments:

- Many core devs were unaware of the joke. They thought the compromise was real, as everyone but Nicosia was blocked from logging in to the affected server. They worked to shut down their infrastructure and isolate it from the supposedly compromised machine.
- The Devuan continuous integration server is apparently still down.

Related: Devuan Site Possibly Hacked

Original Submission