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Comment by aaomidi | Hacker News Reader

This CEO is absolutely toxic. He's coming here, insulting everyone who disagrees with him and is essentially trying to attack the CTO as a person.

Hopefully this will get forked and the CEO will learn a lesson of respect and self control.

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The CC-BY-NC-SA license it is under makes forking it less desirable. In particular the noncommercial-only use for forks. You might think "great, we don't want to sell it anyways!" but (and IANAL..) I think this affects using this product in any commercial capacity, such as running it on a company device, or using it for 'business' (calling clients from the device, etc). That's my understanding at least, and would like to be corrected if I am wrong.

When CopperheadOS (the company) dies, then their product is doomed to be a novelty thing that most folks cannot use due to their selection of license.

Fair enough

Has the code always been licensed CC-BY-NC-SA or is that a recent change?

It wasn't at first. The change happened over a year ago.

I think if nothing else, this whole thing is a lesson in why non-free/non-OSI licenses are a bad idea.

I never saw a single instance of him insulting anyone or attacking the character of the CTO. The closest was him lamenting that the dispute made it's way to HN. Which I wouldn't call an illegitimate gripe.

Unfortunately they're deleted now.

He didn't defend his points when people disagreed with him and just said "you don't understand". That's a shorthand way of calling someone stupid when you haven't even tried to explain.

At this point I forgot what he said about the CTO but some of them were pretty insulting.

I read most before they were deleted. Still can't remember any of them directly insulting the CTO at all. I can see how you can interpret "you don't understand" that way but I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Text is a horrible means of communication as it removes any tone to the words and allows it to be interpreted how ever the reader so pleases.

Here is a link to the comments [1] from the OP. Don't see a single one from the CEO that I would interpret as insulting. There are however countless others from 3rd party posters that were way more easily interpretable as hostile in nature.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17241694

I may have jumped the gun a bit. Although I still think coming on here when the CTO isn't able to defend themselves is a little like trying to get people to do mobjustice in a way.

But you're right. I'm sorry.

The CEO wasn't the one who posted the original link.

> He didn't defend his points when people disagreed with him and just said "you don't understand".

That seems considerably less toxic than trying to convince strangers on a public internet forum about exactly why your coworker is in the wrong.

Also, from my own memory and the archived comments, I don't see any insulting ones, unless you think that a lack of immediate deference to the person who is most prolific at typing 'git commit' is an insult. (Perhaps you like another commenter have confused the CEO and others commenting here?)

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