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.
Conversation
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.
2
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.
1
You seem to be misunderstand what was forked. Near the end, James started trying to coerce me into handing over ownership of my project to him. He framed it as a negotiation but it was anything but that. I never signed over anything to the company and did not make it for them.
1
He didn't start claiming that the company owned it until substantially after he failed to convince me to give in to his demands. Once they'd pushed me out, they filed a fraudulent copyright claim falsely claiming that I'd assigned copyright to the company which is totally false.
1
They forked my project from GitHub and uploaded it as a new set of repositories. They added a Copperhead copyright notice to their forks to try to retroactively frame it as code that they owned. That died pretty fast, and now they just have a closed source fork of my work.
1
The company became totally based around my work because it didn't produce anything of value. It took far more of my money than I received from it. I trusted James with handling the intake of donations for my project. People were told they were donating to me. He stole most of it.
1
Replying to
I understand as I said before I had a business partner screw me over a few years ago, I'm only just getting back on feet now so I can totally understand what you must be thinking and feeling. Sorry if I came across as a bit of a twat I was just trying to understand what happened
1
Replying to
I'm in a pretty bad frame of mind particularly because I've been dealing with Copperhead making more threats to intimidate GrapheneOS contributors in the past few days.
He chose to jump in here to try to turn this link to us from into a way to push his bogus claims.
2
I do wish you all the best and please don't let him get you down, you are obviously very talented and I wish you all the best! You got a new follower too. Again sorry for any aggrovation I caused.
1
I'm sorry for misinterpreting you as someone collaborating with him. I didn't have that impression at the start, but you said some particular things that threw me off and made me think I was talking to someone in bed with them. Clearly not the case and I definitely read it wrong.
It's cool, to err is human. You seem like a nice guy, if you need anything (not sure what I could do) feel free to dm me. I really do hope you get this sorted soon.