> They do one thing: make as secure a phone OS as they can. That’s it. If you’re expecting them to do anything in a friendly way, it ain’t gonna happen, that’s not who they are or what they do.

These things are not mutually exclusive:

You can make a great technical product while being friendly. You can make a great technical product while not being friendly.

You can make a compromised or flawed technical product while being friendly. You can make a compromised or flawed technical product while being unfriendly.

This comes up pretty often in other HN threads, unrelated to Graphene. There's this weird personality type who insists that they aren't legally obligated to be friendly or nice or pleasant, therefore it's fine for them to be unfriendly or jerks or unpleasant.

Well thats not true. There is little time to be friendly when they have to defend themselves so much. That doesnt mean they dont want to be.

It's not just about being friendly. If they have a bubble around them of employees, true believers, and people just afraid of speaking out that chills free expression of criticism, the truth has trouble getting out, which hurts trust.

Still a user though.

It's not about friendliness, it's about trust. Everybody else on this thread understood this.

There's many examples of people being unfriendly and still coming across as someone of character, Linus Torvalds comes to mind.

If they were doing that one thing, they would not have posted this. It's fine not to market to consumers, but this raises additional concerns about the founder's judgement. Someone else claimed that they deleted update signing keys for copperhead devices. That's seriously concerning if true; possibly bad enough to switch away from grapheneOS.

I’d prefer that the people behind an OS I’m using on important devices be stable, for hopefully obvious reasons.

> Sometimes they aren't even factually correct and get a bit upset about it when called out.

Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47248521

Micay was distressed due to ongoing circumstances. Rossmann choice to publicly blast what was supposed to be a private discussion, lied to his own viewers, twisted what was happening, etc. Also note Rossmann has an identity verified kiwifarms account.

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They provide plenty of evidence, all the time.

I don't. My very vague recollection is that I was alarmed and either deleted it or blocked them. So it either no longer exists, but even if it does I have zero interest in digging it out. I'm always anonymous on social media like HN and Mastodon, but who knows what one can discover if they're the kind of unhinged person who will dedicate enough time to doxing someone...

None of this is accurate. Community backlash was not what forced them to step down. The attacks, including attempted murder, was what led them to handing the lead dev position to a trusted project member.

None of their behavior is unhinged, thats a horrible thing to say.

And no, it has not been quiet for years, attacks have still been ongoing.

i think a lot of attention is rightly attributed to like, i dunno say tiktok/ig "influencing" and how that can send people who gain a lot of notoriety off the deep end. it absolutely has. but so do software projects.

not enough people talk about how software projects also offer up a similar kind of atmosphere: you're suddenly hyperconnected with a whole bunch of humans you don't know and are receiving feedback from people outside of your immediate community. "hackers" for all the interesting ways they've contributed to computer science over the decades also have branches spawned from the original chronically-online, highly-opinionated and sort of antisocial and poorly adjusted sects of civilization. being the face of a project is like pouring rocket fuel on whatever predispositions you might have, and on more than one occasion we've seen people go from occasionally unhinged person to seriously unhinged.

this comes with a lot of bad outcomes for quite a few people, primarily it always has some serious amplification qualities to egos and narcissism. and for genuinely good and kind people who are just trying to share their value/contributions and are suddenly jettisoned into spotlights, we often see them suddenly step back and discontinue work on a project entirely.

we often see these departures and think solely "must be burn out" and don't put much more thought into what that means. but we don't do enough to frame how software projects just elevate people into a position that most people don't do a good job in mentally and socially, and how it deteriorates the pieces of them that make them feel like they're valuable members of a community/tribe. some have luck making their project communities their tribe, but that's obviously a risky step to take. for many who have a successful project, sometimes it starts as the most validation they've ever received and then they don't know how to reconcile with the exponentially-widened audience when negative reception starts pouring in.

daniel micay is just one of like.. many in these sorts of projects i've seen who are simply unfit for the role. for many reasons, i don't think he's a pleasant person at all. i don't have any answers here. i also see this in homebrew scenes for gaming, it's like my least-favorite human petri dish of software development enjoyers. lot of oddball developers in that space and quite a lot of incredibly dramatic fallouts and theatrics that seem to come with the anonymous nature of not tacking your real name / identity to a project, and a consuming audience that has zero idea what goes into development so the negative feedback/demands that come in are in their own way unhinged.

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Its not broad criticism, its attacks that use criticism as a false excuse. Defending themselves neutrally and objectively is not unhinged.