I'm tired of the daily misinformation campaign and intimidation of our contributors by Copperhead.
I'm tired of spending $3000/month on legal fees to deal with their bogus lawsuit and for filing our own lawsuit against them based on their fraudulent copyright claims.
I think it's very apparently to nearly everyone what's happening other than a few people with a financial interest in believing otherwise and a small community of their close friends / supporters. I don't really understand why they attempt to escalate and create new conflicts.
It doesn't go well for them. We have a substantially larger community and we're clearly in the right so a lot more people support us. Every time they try to escalate the conflict, it goes badly for them. Then they throw a fit about having all these people that are against them.
which was apparently based on @jack hearing about GrapheneOS on a Bitcoin-related podcast and then reading about it really got to them. Their CEO made one of his usual desperate attempts at sweet talking someone in reply and ramped up his war.
Since then, they've been incredibly focused on causing harm to us any way they can on a day to day basis. Since we want to be focusing on development, not dealing with this, we've repeatedly asked for help from our community to counter these attacks so we can start ignoring it.
They're now trying to portray our community doing their best to defend us and counter their false claims as us managing thousands of sockpuppet accounts. Nope, that's not what's happening. The more they try to create conflict, the more people will support us and argue with them.
The tweet from @jack was a direct result of Copperhead attacking us and people in our community responding to it by spreading the word about GrapheneOS. In an indirect way, they got us that shout out. It certainly wasn't anything that we did. I was quite surprised about it.
I don't understand why they're so upset about it. It's not the first mention from someone prominent:
@Snowden supported my CopperheadOS project and continued supporting the real project under the new name rather than their proprietary fork of my work.
The grapheneos.org/#history section on the GrapheneOS site that the Copperhead CEO is so upset about was only added in April 2020 after 2 years of him aggressively pushing false narratives about us. I was very reluctant to talk about it on our site despite others recommending it.
We'll be making a dedicated page on the site about it with far more information, links to archived code and web pages and statements from people who were witnesses to what happened.
@cankerwort_@sethisimmons@CopperheadOS@mamushi_io@GrapheneOS They're the ones choosing to a misinformation war against GrapheneOS along with threatening/intimidating anyone who contributes to the project, even people that are underage. You say it should be settled in court but they're making daily attacks on us causing lots of harm.
@cankerwort_@sethisimmons@CopperheadOS@mamushi_io@GrapheneOS GrapheneOS not a for-profit project. We're not selling any products. We're focused on building privacy and security technology. They're focusing all their resources on causing harm to us in any way that they can, and on marketing a product simply copy pasting our codebase.
@cankerwort_@sethisimmons@CopperheadOS@mamushi_io@GrapheneOS This is primarily not a legal dispute. It's largely a personal vendetta against me by James Donaldson and now also Max. Their poorly formed lawsuit against was primarily a way to exhaust my time, energy and resources along with intimidating people to stop them from contributing.
I should go through all the invoices and figure out how much money I've spent on that in total. I'm also sure there's going to be a lot more since it's only getting started.
Most expensive month was a bit over $5000 which would be over $10000 without the 50% discount.
Thanks to all the people supporting us with donations, we're able to continue on despite these ongoing attacks on the project by Copperhead. It really detracts from development though.
You may wonder what they're trying to accomplish by waging this war against us. Each time they try escalating this conflict, they turn far more people against them than the few they trick. It doesn't seem to matter. The few people they trick fund their overall grifting operation.
This is untrue. Seth works with Copperhead and has been spreading misinformation about GrapheneOS for weeks. It's more of the same. You can see the post is promoted from the usual group of people working with Copperhead and selling phones with our code.
I don't think it's unsurprising that our community ends up countering people who spread falsehoods about us.
They continue escalating attacks on our project. People support us and make posts such as
in support of us. We'll keep asking for help with it.
In most cases, it's the same small group of people spreading these dishonest claims about GrapheneOS across platforms. Many have received free phones or money from them. Take a look at the RTs / likes. It's centered around a CopperheadOS phone reseller in the Bitcoin community.
Sending money to someone in India with PayPal: forced to treat it as a purchase with 6% merchant fee and a conversion fee. They need to confirm the payment and mark a product as shipped. Money is frozen until confirming a product was received, which cannot be done for 48 hours.
They pretty much treat anyone in India as being a scammer.
Meanwhile, simply sending the money with Bitcoin on-chain with a very low fee ends up taking about the same amount of time while having a flat fee worth about a dollar. No risk of it being held indefinitely by PayPal.
I don't even want to get into how ridiculous it is trying to send money internationally via banks rather than PayPal. It's quite unfortunate that India is cracking down on using cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is by far the best way for us to fund open source developers around the world.
@PaulBarnacle The company was started as a security consulting company and was supposed to sell contract work and support. It was not supposed to be based around my project. It was explicitly agreed upon that my open source work would remain under my control and ownership, and it did.
@PaulBarnacle The company was not starting 'using code' that I wrote. My project was not the basis for the company. The company failed to become an actual security consulting company and ended up not having anything beyond selling people phones flashed with my open source project.
@PaulBarnacle The company was supposed to have made custom variants of the open source project for vendors. None of that stuff worked out. It was a disaster from the beginning and I was getting less than 20k/year from it. I got more money from Google during those years submitting work to them.