Daniel Micay publicly steps down from GrapheneOS
github.com
github.com
Daniel does not apologize for anything he says or does and refuses to acknowledge any wrongdoing. He still refuses to acknowledge that how he responded to Louis was wrong.
He hops on every thread of GrapheneOS and regularly accuses everyone of being sockpuppets and trolls. [2] He has accused me of being a Techlore and CalyxOS troll numerous times. Worst still, his community are full of psychophants that enable his abusive behavior. They refuse to see him or his outbursts as negative. They routinely collaborate to downvote comments and raid rooms to manage the narrative which I find to be underhanded.
I was an early Copperhead customer who was very disappointed that he got up and destroyed the signing keys without providing any evidence to back his claims up. When I brought up the issue to him via email, his response was to throw his previous business partner under the bus without offering any apologies for damaging my business.
I did use Android Hardening afterwards, used CopperheadOS for a bit and then moved back to LineageOS. I refuse to use any of his projects again.
I wish the best for him and hope he gets well. He's not mentally stable enough to run a project and he has a long way to go for understanding the nuance of interpersonal relationships.
I wonder what the psychophants are going to do now that he's not involved. Are they going to continue the same path? Is the project in the same precarious position as it was yesterday?
However, in his role leading a project that ostensibly wanted people to use it, he had a very offputting set of personality characteristics that worked against that goal. He was very opinionated and often condescending, frequently stating opinion as fact and being shallowly dismissive. I'm not talking about arguing with people asking that he add shiny baubles, but just generally almost annoyed the person he was talking to didn't realize the obviousness of their own stupidity in not seeing it his way.
Then, he had a gigantic victim complex where any comment that could be perceived as negative whatsoever was seen by him as some grave personal slight deliberately intended to hurt him. It wasn't sufficient for him to explain why he thought others were wrong. It was frequently accompanied by accusations of bad faith, of potential coordination with others trying to take him down, etc. It came across as hysteria. Not to mention the needless aggression with the Calyx developers, etc.
A few years ago, the IRC channel had a lot of this victimization and desperation-type content from him. It got to a point I was uncomfortable using GrapheneOS out of concern for the leadership and prospects of support.
It used to be Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD and to some extent Linus were benchmarks for "prickly" open source leaders, but I think Daniel gave them all quite a run for the money.
It's good that despite all that, Daniel managed to find some developers he could get along with and the contributor base grew beyond him. Here's to hoping the new leadership team steadies the ship and manages not to be so hostile to the community.
Edit to add: looking over the [2] link from parent, it's clear he did provide a lot of thoughtful, helpful answers as well, so I wouldn't want to downplay the great deal of good for which he's responsible. We're significantly better off that something like GrapheneOS exists.
That’s a shitty situation on your end, but he was stabbed in the back, and imo did the only morally right decision in case of a security-oriented project: pulled the plug on it as it could not be trusted anymore.
He was indeed quite paranoid, but it was not without reason — hopefully this resignation can help him recover mentally from all that.
Nonetheless, I am very grateful to him for this wonderful project, and even if you don’t use GrapheneOS directly, you definitely use many of his contributions to both the linux kernel and android!
That is easy for you to say. Harder for me to swallow losing real life dollars to accusations that haven't materalized.
Considering we all have ample evidence that Micay slings accusations without merit, how can you be so sure the Copperhead situation went down the way he says? Micay routinely accuses people of stabbing him in his back. Louis Rossman included.
Especially that copperhead os continued on living on his work..
He couldn’t have known that it would be successful alone with it.
You can't conflate CopperheadOS as GrapheneOS or vice versa because GrapheneOS has changed over the years since the split. I think the ex business partner makes this same mistake.
From the little I'm aware, it sounded like he was being harassed, and some of his public comments sounded like he was powering through stress.
(PSA: Bad stress is bad. No matter how strong and resourceful and outwardly cool you are, the stress is not only unpleasant, but it's also secretly taking a toll. The smart move is to keep stress low.)
I wish Micay all the best for health and happiness. I hope that he doesn't let recent stresses get him down, and that he gives himself a chance to recharge.
I can't thank you enough Daniel for your work on AOSP and GOS, and all the other work you've done around security and privacy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4To-F6W1NT0
This is speculation of course on my part and I do not have any evidence connecting the video with the event itself.
Stepping back for a while might do him good. Maybe he can come back later, with less stress, and focus on the code instead of dealing with the public relations (his weakness, I think).
For those harassing him, just stop. Honestly, it's not even fun. For those who defend and almost enable his out bursts, also stop because you're not helping him or the project.
Thank you for your contribution. All the best, Daniel.
But the social negativity has been building for a long time. As lead developer (until today) of a prominent security-focused open source project, Daniel receives constant harassment, including from what are likely organized campaigns. I fully believe his statements that he recently got swatted, something tantamount to attempted murder. But he reacts very badly to the anonymous trolls, ascribing their actions to unrelated people. For instance, he's been fixated on Techlore (a relatively unimportant Youtuber) ever since Techlore posted a video about GrapheneOS that was mildly positive but overall critical. Daniel drew a connection between Techlore and trollish harassment he received around the same time—falsely, IMO—and ever since has consistently accused Techlore of organizing any harassment he receives. And the story repeats itself in Daniel's relationship with other groups in the privacy space (such as CalyxOS, r/privacy...). The fallout continues to expand, as any observer who expresses any nuance is accused by Daniel of toxicity, supporting harassers and harassment, etc.
I'm willing to grant some leeway to people in Daniel's situation. It's tough to handle aggressive harassment and stalking and behave correctly every time in response. But there's a limit to how much you can get wrong, and Daniel has exceeded it. He can't keep drawing false connections between unrelated people and the real harassment he's receiving. Doing so won't stop the harassment, and it's going to torpedo GrapheneOS if something isn't done.
My hope has been that someone close to him that he trusts would set up an intervention. Maybe that's what resulted in him stepping down today. I hope this will improve the community situation around GrapheneOS (whose technical reputation remains, I think, totally unscathed), and I really hope Daniel will now get the mental health relief that he needs.
Louis Rossmann (1.7m subscribers) ascribing his decision to leave GrapheneOS directly to the behaviour of Daniel Micay and stating that "he will never feel comfortable running this code on my phone as long as this person is involved in it" probably began triggering real calculations within the team as to what extent he was slowly becoming more of a liability to the project than an asset. Although, it's unlikely Louis saying that was going to affect the project in any meaningful way, this is not the kind of commentary that makes your position more tenable. I'm glad Daniel pre-empted those conversations by taking the decision to step away himself.
There is no doubt in my mind that Daniel Micay has been subjected to systematic harassment campaigns, far exceeding those of a typical open-source developer of his stature. That kind of stuff has an impact on you and as a result you behave in a less reasonable manner (i.e. more paranoid, less trusting). I just hope the dude takes a long break, gets buff and comes back stronger.
So, my question, do you have concrete proof about Micay being harassed? Screenshot, links, whatever can back up Micay's words.
Note it's very hard to find mainstream sources on this.
[1] https://piunikaweb.com/2019/02/05/the-demise-of-copperheados...
Rossmann made some of the most enthusiastic videos spreading awareness about the GrapheneOS project, and even provided funding through his work at FUTO. What does Micay have to offer to him, beside keep working on his project ?n
From @DanielMicay:
"I've stepped down as lead developer of GrapheneOS and will be replaced as a GrapheneOS Foundation director. I'll be ending my use of public social media. I'm unable to handle the escalating level of harassment including recent swatting attacks. There will be a smooth migration."
"I'm confident the project will be in good hands with the rest of the development team. I'll be training them to handle everything I used to do myself. I haven't been a particularly active developer for a while now and there will be little impact on ongoing feature development."
"One of our veteran developers will be taking over administration of the server infrastructure. Local infrastructure for official builds, signing and testing will be replicated in multiple locations and verified against each other to reduce trust in any particular location."
"I'm going to focus on recovery from everything that has transpired since 2018. I have not been doing well, particularly in the past few weeks, but there has been no break from it since 2018. The police know about the swatting situation and are preventing it happening again."
He is also posting the same to his Mastadon
"To clarify what was said above, I am stepping down as a GrapheneOS Foundation director, not just lead developer. I won't have any leadership role in the GrapheneOS project. I plan on being entirely uninvolved but it'll take time to transfer everything that I do to other people."
Building upon this, I will further quote your " I believe Rossmann grew fustrated with Micay at some point and then decided to bait him into a reaction so he could take him out of context to.. i dont know get back at him? Its not very clear to me exactly why he would do this."
How is it a bait when Rossmann privately tried to clear up the misunderstanding about GOS and Micay's situation with Micay in private, which did not pan out 8 months ago. He asked Micay to stop contacting him about his "Informative, but unfortunate comment" on Techlore's video, even offering a fresh start for Micay to give his perspective. Instead, the latter doubled down on accusations that Rossmann was supporting harassing campaign against him. Please keep in mind that this was around 8 months ago. Then Micay contacts him out of the blue in a few days ago, threatening to "ban him and expose him publicly", but this is somehow Rossmann baiting him ?
Maybe you could share with us some missing information that shows how Micay was baited ?
Tom Spark video is hardly fair, as it omits a lot of important information that better shows Rossmann's perspective, just like your comment seems to be doing. His comment section in my opinion is a handcrafted echo chamber that supports Micay, as I left a few comments that addresses the weak point in Tom's analysis, but they have yet to appear in public. Meanwhile, comments that echo his perspetive, which were also left after my comment were left through, and one was even pinned.
In any case, have a nice day.
Daniel accomplished a lot and I am thankful for it. I am also very happy about his decision to step down because it hopefully prevents splitting the community.
Absolutely the right call. Wishing him all the best.
Side note: Maybe a community split would've led to builds for more devices, which I would like. While of course you can't guarantee perfect security, you can be pretty sure it'll be better than the alternatives. I'm also surprised that the Play Services sandboxing hasn't been ported to other mainstream Android distributions yet.
Hope the dude finds some peace.
I'm in his (extremely long) black list, but I really admire the project and use GrapheneOS. And I would prefer to keep the drama if that helps the quality to be high.
Whatever's happening now seems to work, in that it results in the best we've got for privacy-respecting phones. Obviously Daniel's communication style isn't what most people would like, but we all have our difficulties in life.
I wish him and the project well.
He just bans you from all their chats, github projects, etc.
Other people got banned just for being in CalyxOS chat.
To his credit he is definitely serious about any constructive criticism. I've been unhappy about lack of NLP and they've added an awesome NLP support mechanism into GOS. After that I switched to GOS completely.
After his rants I told him that as an asperger I suspect that he might be on the spectrum and it might help to dig into that direction. I'm quiet surprised that now he identifies himself as an autist. That might be just a coincidence though.
If he is lonely I would advice him to get a dog and a partner.
My first interaction with him was asking about how to backup all data on GrapheneOS (including secure/restricted data). He flat out called me an idiot, said that it "defeats the point of grapheneos", and refused to help. Most of the help formats that he is available on are full of responses very similar to this from him. Hardly by any stretch of the imagination professional conduct.
I do love GrapheneOS and I'm sure managing it as he does/did is quite stressful. I don't have any Ill will towards him, just concern for him and the project. I think stepping down and getting away from social media will be a great move for both him and the project. He clearly wants some much needed time to recover and destress. Frankly, his public behavior was the biggest liability for the project but him stepping down is a good sign that at the very least he is making moves to start recovering.
Given the way he's described certain interactions he's had with others, I take everything he says with a grain of salt. But then again, swatting is a pretty clear cut thing. So I dunno.
have they done anything legally wrong? Have they hurt anyone (besides feelings) You people are really something. This isn't grade school anymore, we are all adults here. Emotion doesn't translate through text, so stop being so sensitive and trying to tone police everyone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CopperheadOS#License_change_an...
(And by the way, I'm saying this as someone who had a lot of apprehension installing Graphene because I was afraid another Copperhead was going to happen.)