Followers of PiunikaWeb may remember that we published an article yesterday about the ‘demise’ of CopperheadOS and possible alternatives.

The term ‘demise’ is intentionally kept under quotes, as CopperheadOS is not actually dead. The company, Copperhead Limited, is still selling the privacy focused OS bundled with second generation Google Pixel phones.

James Donaldson, CEO of Copperhead Limited, posted a quick (and surprising) tweet after the original story got published.

https://twitter.com/_copperj/status/1092802986336813056

The author (@AndItsTito) wanted to include Daniel Micay (the lead developer of CopperheadOS, who was fired by Donaldson) in the conversation, while explaining the reasons to call the fork ‘dead’.

Donaldson tried to defend the company by comparing it with other Android OEMs and their update strategy.

https://twitter.com/_copperj/status/1092818920539590661

Daniel jumped in and explained why the current CopperheadOS lineup is affected by not upgrading to Android 9 Pie and related SoC/platform specific patches.

Daniel even made a serious accusation against his former company. Copperhead Limited allegedly sold Nexus 9 tablets to Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), though the devices already reached EOL status then.

As per James Donaldson, he and Daniel Micay are currently engaged in a legal battle due to the damages done towards the company and their customers by Micay’s actions. As a consequence, the former blocked Daniel on Twitter and hence couldn’t see and/or respond to his messages yesterday.

https://twitter.com/_copperj/status/1092818770790412288

https://twitter.com/_copperj/status/1092819388967931904

https://twitter.com/_copperj/status/1092820533287227400

https://twitter.com/_copperj/status/1092821792517959685

Meanwhile, Daniel expressed that RattlesnakeOS or #!os should not be called true forks, as “They do useful work, but it’s not the same thing.”

He also talked about his Hardened Android Open Source Project:

Daniel was kind enough to point out a technical mistake in our article. We wrongly assumed that the current hardened_malloc was still based on OpenBSD’s implementation.

James suggested that we should have contacted them before coming up with the article. As a result, today we have reached out to both James and Daniel individually to gather further info.

For flashaholic readers, Daniel pushed February security update yesterday.

TL;DR: Fasten your seatbelts! It is really not ‘dead’. Please follow the Twitter conversation for latest updates as the discussion is still ongoing.

PiunikaWeb is a unique initiative that mainly focuses on investigative journalism. This means we do a lot of hard work to come up with news stories that are either ‘exclusive,’ ‘breaking,’ or ‘curated’ in nature. Perhaps that’s the reason our work has been picked by the likes of Forbes, Foxnews, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, Engadget, The Verge, Macrumors, and more. Do take a tour of our website to get a feel of our work. And if you like what we do, stay connected with us on Twitter (@PiunikaWeb) and other social media channels to receive timely updates on stories we publish.

Tags

Kingshuk De
896 Posts

I came from a mixed background of Statistics and Computer Science. My research domains included embedded computer systems, mobile computing and delay tolerant networks in post-disaster scenarios. Apart from tinkering with gadgets or building hackintosh, I like to hop on various subreddits and forums like MyDigitalLife and XDA.

Next article View Article

[April 10: Official acknowledgement for recommended videos bug] YouTube Library tab broken and sidebar missing, users say

This story is being continuously updated…. New updates are being added at the bottom….. Original story (from 2019) follows: Incoming are reports related to two separate YouTube-related issues. The...
Apr 10, 2020 0 Min Read