most of the bad stuff is interpersonal drama caused by the fact that John (Decent Owner) is fully committed to TCL for app and firmware development.

some prominent community members have rewritten a lot of the front end using python and JS.

when disagreements and call outs arose between this group and the owner, well, access to the company Basecamp is controlled by the owners. there are big personalities all around.

as somebody who enjoys a bit of the popcorn but is uninvested in the outcome, it's not a big deal as a consumer of the machine. if you want to hack on the software, his personality is probably going to affect you a little more.

of course, somebody else may step in to give a different historical account.

No, and I do not even know him, but it irritates me to hear him everywhere called 'the Decent'.

He abuses the idea of open source to get free work for his commercial product. They have invested near 0 dollars into development of the tablet application.