Skip Navigation

GrapheneOS: Another contributor attacked & banned by Daniel Micay

25 comments
  • Jonathan Corbet from LWN also got accused of various things on Fediverse for writing an article on GrapheneOS recently.

  • Hello everyone, I want to preface this by disclosing that I am part of the GrapheneOS team. My account is not freshly created by the way, since that seems to be such a hot topic here. We asked our community for help with dealing with this mess since the self proclaimed open-source "enthusiast", who is supposedly so eager to help, has gone out of his way to spread this literally all over the internet in order to harm an...open-source project. Here on Lemmy, Mastodon, Reddit, LinkedIn...even Facebook and elsewhere. That's where the "suspicious" new accounts come from. That said, yes you can go ahead and verify they are in fact members of the community. And you can verify mine too if you wish, on the GrapheneOS forum, our reddit, discord, matrix, github. I don't know what else I could tell you on this front honestly.

    Now this person filed a duplicate feature request on the issue tracker regarding 3-button navigation. We closed it and provided an explanation on why it’s not wanted, primarily because 3-button navigation is really just a legacy mode and only kept around for compatibility reasons. Any feature that aims to provide a quicker way to force kill apps should be done in a way that’s not specific to it, but can be applied to all navigation modes. I hope this makes sense until here.

    About a year later some people picked up on this feature request and started discussing it further. We have a rule where if you want to express your support for something you should react to it with a thumbs up emoji. That’s because each mention and reply sends an e-mail notification to multiple developers. We opted to delete the issue in order to stop the noise. In hindsight yeah that was a mistake, since apparently there are individuals around who are just waiting for an opportunity to act in bad faith as seen here.

    This person kept insisting on it and continued to file more issues regarding this matter, even going as far as cloning our repository and continuing the spam there. We repeatedly asked them to stop and take it to dms instead but they didn't do either of these things. Now what they did do is dig this up over a year after our last interaction with them and make a mountain out of a molehill.

    There you go, that's the gist of it.

  • Your blogpost is highly inaccurate and a heavy misportrayal of the events that occured. The title is completely wrong already. You did not get banned from GrapheneOS. GrapheneOS is a free and open source operating system, you can’t be banned from using it and the developers would also not wish to do so. You were instead banned from the OS issue tracker on GitHub because of spam and inapprioriate behavior. You were also blocked by multiple GrapheneOS developers on GitHub, not solely Daniel Micay, for continuing to mention them and sending notifications their way even via other repositories than the official GrapheneOS issue tracker. Also, you are not a contributor at all. You have never contributed to GrapheneOS, not a single line of code. Unless you will call issue tracker spam a contribution, but that’s a very big stretch.

    Now, as to what actually happened. You wanted GrapheneOS to implement a certain feature, they did not deem it desirable. Instead of accepting this, you kept spamming the issue tracker. The issue got deleted because it caused too much spam from other accounts as well who kept saying they also wanted the feature instead of following the rules of the issue tracker that you should upvote a post if you agree. After getting banned, you forked the issue tracker and started pinging a bunch of GrapheneOS developers. This behavior is insanely inapprioriate in the FOSS world. GrapheneOS is free, yet you act insanely entitled, as if the GrapheneOS developers owe you anything. They also clearly explained to you on multiple occasions why the feature you proposed is undiserable.

    If you disagree, the solution in open source is to fork GrapheneOS and make your own changes to the source code instead of endlessly complaining to the developers of the original project, who can’t be forced to follow your opinion. They had every right to ban you because you kept making a scene out of something minor like a non-accepted feature request. Many feature requests get rejected, yet you make this whole drama about it and continue to do so.

    On top of all that, you link misinformation and harassment about the GrapheneOS project in your blog post. The videos you link from content creator containg bullying and fabrications about the project and the founder. They are also entirely unrelated to how they dealt with your issue on the issue tracker.

25 comments