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Comment by octosphere | Hacker News Reader

Have you looked into CopperheadOS[1]? I would like to hear your thoughts on it. They even have a store where you can buy Pixel phones flashed with CopperheadOS. They're a bit pricey though ($1000+). I personally would rather flash it myself to save some money.

[1] https://copperhead.co

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CopperheadOS is a very questionable choice these days. The author lost control of the company and was booted by the business tool.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CopperheadOS/comments/8qdnn3/goodby...

Anything new on that front that you have heard? I remember the meltdown but haven't heard anything since. Looks like the business guy is just continuing to sell what they had and then no updates ever. Once people get sick of that, maybe the company just goes away?

No clue. As I understand it, the author destroyed the signing keys, so updates aren't even possible. A fresh build with new signing keys would need to be flashed out of band.

The original author stated his intent to fork and resume the project under a new name and with a new device set, but probably still the Pixel line.

Didn't the license prevent forks?

I think he claims he owns the copyright; if that's true, the license doesn't apply to him.

That's a bold claim when he was being paid a salary to work on it.

Was he? His claim is: "I have never had any employment agreement, copyright agreement, licensing agreement, NDA or even work contracts with Copperhead. There was a mutual understanding that I owned the code I was writing."

Work for hire doctrine says he has aa very poor argument.

Work for hire is a statutorily defined term (17 U.S.C. § 101), so a work for hire is not created merely because parties to an agreement state that the work is a work for hire. It is an exception to the general rule that the person who actually creates a work is the legally recognized author of that work. According to copyright law in the United States and certain other copyright jurisdictions, if a work is "made for hire", the employer—not the employee—is considered the legal author.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire

I can't think of a context where a judge looks at a salaried CTO commiting code to repositories with the same name as the company, in inarguably the core domain of the company, and shipped in the name of the company by said CTO, with nothing written down to the contrary and goes "oh yeah, that's totally his code, not the company's".

I think Daniel's in the process of learning that verbal agreements don't mean anything when the shit hits the fan. IMO that's what he gets for switching to a non copyleft license.

I made an alternative to CopperheadOS after it fell apart for those interested: https://github.com/dan-v/rattlesnakeos-stack. Rather than providing random binaries of an OS to install on your phone, I've gone the route of creating a cross platform tool, rattlesnakeos-stack, that provisions all of the AWS infrastructure needed to continuously build your own personal RattlesnakeOS, with your own signing keys, and your own OTA updates. It uses AWS Lambda to provision EC2 Spot Instances that build RattlesnakeOS and upload artifacts to S3. Resulting OS builds are configured to receive over the air updates from this environment.

That's very cool! It's a shame that I'm unlikely to own a Pixel device any time soon, but for those who do this looks really interesting.

Copperhead is a great idea! Biggest issues I had with it when I was looking at it was, lack of recent up to date hardware. The Pixel was a great phone but it's getting to be a pretty old phone, the pixel 3 will be out soon. Second and much bigger issue is the lack of apps because SO many Android apps require the google play services and if you enable that you lose the vast majority of the privacy benefits you gain from Copperhead and fdroid. If you don't use apps or just a few that support fdroid, then Copperhead might be a great choice.

"The Pixel was a great phone but it's getting to be a pretty old phone"

How so? I just upgraded to a Pixel 2 XL from a phone much older than the pixel, a Nexus 6. I would not have even upgraded so soon if I didnt up with one too many crack on my screen when it gave up.

> SO many Android apps require the google play services

It depends on definition of 'require'. Almost all apps 'require' it in app manifest file. But very many of them actually works perfectly fine with an absense of Google Play Services on device.

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