Daniel does not apologize for anything he says or does and refuses to acknowledge any wrongdoing. He still refuses to acknowledge that how he responded to Louis was wrong.
He hops on every thread of GrapheneOS and regularly accuses everyone of being sockpuppets and trolls. [2] He has accused me of being a Techlore and CalyxOS troll numerous times. Worst still, his community are full of psychophants that enable his abusive behavior. They refuse to see him or his outbursts as negative. They routinely collaborate to downvote comments and raid rooms to manage the narrative which I find to be underhanded.
I was an early Copperhead customer who was very disappointed that he got up and destroyed the signing keys without providing any evidence to back his claims up. When I brought up the issue to him via email, his response was to throw his previous business partner under the bus without offering any apologies for damaging my business.
I did use Android Hardening afterwards, used CopperheadOS for a bit and then moved back to LineageOS. I refuse to use any of his projects again.
I wish the best for him and hope he gets well. He's not mentally stable enough to run a project and he has a long way to go for understanding the nuance of interpersonal relationships.
I wonder what the psychophants are going to do now that he's not involved. Are they going to continue the same path? Is the project in the same precarious position as it was yesterday?
However, in his role leading a project that ostensibly wanted people to use it, he had a very offputting set of personality characteristics that worked against that goal. He was very opinionated and often condescending, frequently stating opinion as fact and being shallowly dismissive. I'm not talking about arguing with people asking that he add shiny baubles, but just generally almost annoyed the person he was talking to didn't realize the obviousness of their own stupidity in not seeing it his way.
Then, he had a gigantic victim complex where any comment that could be perceived as negative whatsoever was seen by him as some grave personal slight deliberately intended to hurt him. It wasn't sufficient for him to explain why he thought others were wrong. It was frequently accompanied by accusations of bad faith, of potential coordination with others trying to take him down, etc. It came across as hysteria. Not to mention the needless aggression with the Calyx developers, etc.
A few years ago, the IRC channel had a lot of this victimization and desperation-type content from him. It got to a point I was uncomfortable using GrapheneOS out of concern for the leadership and prospects of support.
It used to be Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD and to some extent Linus were benchmarks for "prickly" open source leaders, but I think Daniel gave them all quite a run for the money.
It's good that despite all that, Daniel managed to find some developers he could get along with and the contributor base grew beyond him. Here's to hoping the new leadership team steadies the ship and manages not to be so hostile to the community.
Edit to add: looking over the [2] link from parent, it's clear he did provide a lot of thoughtful, helpful answers as well, so I wouldn't want to downplay the great deal of good for which he's responsible. We're significantly better off that something like GrapheneOS exists.
That’s a shitty situation on your end, but he was stabbed in the back, and imo did the only morally right decision in case of a security-oriented project: pulled the plug on it as it could not be trusted anymore.
He was indeed quite paranoid, but it was not without reason — hopefully this resignation can help him recover mentally from all that.
Nonetheless, I am very grateful to him for this wonderful project, and even if you don’t use GrapheneOS directly, you definitely use many of his contributions to both the linux kernel and android!
That is easy for you to say. Harder for me to swallow losing real life dollars to accusations that haven't materalized.
Considering we all have ample evidence that Micay slings accusations without merit, how can you be so sure the Copperhead situation went down the way he says? Micay routinely accuses people of stabbing him in his back. Louis Rossman included.
Especially that copperhead os continued on living on his work..
He couldn’t have known that it would be successful alone with it.
You can't conflate CopperheadOS as GrapheneOS or vice versa because GrapheneOS has changed over the years since the split. I think the ex business partner makes this same mistake.