More than a year after he started, James Donaldson is still doing everything in his power to damage / destroy GrapheneOS. He still hasn't returned the project's donations or Twitter account and spends every day spreading attacks / misinformation to harm the project and myself.
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I delegated handling intake of donations to the project since I trusted him and he ended up stealing them. He stole the entirety of the Bitcoin donations made before mid 2018. He was siphoning off money from the donations even before that. It was supposed to go to the project.
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We had co-founded a company together, with a 3rd person, and it was explicitly agreed that the company would support my open source work and provide products based on it, while I would continue to own and control the open source project. This was an important requirement for me.
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He ended up changing his mind about the arrangement and trying to seize control and ownership over the project. Even now, over a year after refusing to give in to his threats and getting pushed out, I still own half of the shares, and yet the company is a tool for him to harm me.
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This is what I get for trying to make the project sustainable by building a business model around it and delegating the non-technical work to my business partner. I won't make either mistake again. There will be no business directly tied to the project and no trust in others...
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This is a mistake IMO, because by far the most effective way to make an open source project sustainable and vibrant is to have a business tied to it in some way.
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There's not going to be any business directly tied to it. There can be businesses using it and supporting it, but none will have any trust placed in them by the project and there will be no possibility of mistaking the project as belonging to them. Lessons have been learned.
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The only way for there to be a business directly tied to it is if I permanently owned 100% of it since no one else can be trusted. I would also need to manage it. I'm not interested in doing that and I don't want people to misinterpret the project as being about making a product.