About 2 years ago, me and a couple of online friends decided to write our own flavor of Linux, based off of Debian. Up to that point, I had been a regular user of Debian, but had no "accredited" programming knowledge. I was basically self taught, but not proficient at all. I did however, have fat pockets from a previous job, and basically volunteered to bankroll the entire project (Website, Domain, Server Space, plus a few ads on the forum we frequented).
This meant that I was pretty much immediately bumped to a lead developer position. I was involved with basically everything, including some of the programming. I was admin of the IRC channel, the sub-reddit, and the website as well. Me, the chief programmer, and the founder made all the decisions, but me and the chief programmer ended up really taking control of the project's direction.
Eventually, we received a Cease and Desist letter from another company that had trademarks on the name we were using (I actually framed it, and it sits on my desk at home). Considering that we weren't even close to a company at that point, most people decided to just bail, and eventually I ended up taking everything down to avoid any legal issues. We ended up releasing a single .iso before everything fell apart.
My question is, how can I represent this on a resume? I put it on my resume for this summer, along the lines of "lead developer for project, but I feel like that implies that I did more work than I actually did. I did do some work, but I was more like a leading shareholder/sys admin rather than an actual programmer. I am currently working for a huge company this summer, and during my interview, one of the interviewers expressed a lot of interest in the project. He told me that he couldn't find a trace of it online, and I had to explain to him that we were in legal troubles and I took it down. He accepted that answer, and I still think that's one of the major reasons I got the job.
How can I better represent this on my resume? I don't want to lie, but I did actually learn things from this project, and it's resume gold for the undergrad like myself.
Edit: This is what I have currently on my resume
Developer for [Redacted] Linux distribution
March 2014 to October 2014
• Lead developer for custom Linux distribution and repository
• Funded and developed [Redacted] website
• Familiarity with website design using HTML and CSS
• Proficient in Linux usage
It's actually been a long time since I updated this description, so it's even a little more vague than I though. I want to focus on the fact that I led development. Should I include the fact that I shut it down?