They have not kept around most of the privacy and security features from my legacy work and have not done anything significant of their own. I recommend comparing their release notes (copperhead.co/android/docs/u) vs. the open source project they forked (grapheneos.org/releases#chang).
Conversation
SeedVault is an open source project too: github.com/stevesoltys/se. They've implied that they've contributed to it, but that isn't the case. They rely on a bunch of open source projects not just without giving anything back to them but while actively trying to harm the developers.
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I also recommend looking at github.com/CopperheadOS. They stopped publishing their code before 2020, but look at what they had at the time and extrapolate based on their release notes. You can see it's a fork of my legacy fork and that they declared ownership over it post-fork.
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It was always an independent project and I developed it using my personal email. Each of my commits is attributed to danielmicay@gmail.com. Any time I took code from a project like OpenBSD, the commit message is explicit about it and copyright headers are carried over.
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They re-applied my commits to new repositories as part of creating a new product based on my work, so it is possible that they tampered with the commits. I can also show historical archives of the work over the years. It is solely attributed to me as the author and owner of it.
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I have never been an employee of Copperhead. There was never any employment agreement or any salary determined. They retroactively claimed that I was paid a salary in 2018 after they had split from my project. They did not do that for the 2017 tax filings or earlier though.
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I never had any specific contract with them to do work. I was the co-founder the company (founded in late 2015) and I still own half of it. I was paid out business income from the company. I never assigned any copyright to them. There was no copyright or licensing agreement.
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There was no NDA. There were 2 formal legal agreements that I made with Copperhead: agreeing to be one of the co-founders of the company and then dividing the shares 50-50. We each paid the same amount of money for our shares. It was a clear and explicit purchase of the shares.
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It was explicitly agreed upon that the project was open source and contributors to the project including myself would always own their own code. It was explicit that there was no copyright assignment. These were clear conditions from me for their support of my work.
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These things were stated publicly. It was also communicated that donations to the project were going to the project, not the company, and yet the company ended up taking the donations. James regularly stated to me that they were mine to do as I wished. I have logs of the chats.
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I have years of logs proving the donations were being made to the project and that the people working on the project including myself owned their work.
2017-02-15 14:11:03 dnj strcat: tbh I don't question what you do with donations
2017-02-15 14:11:05 dnj strcat: it's your money