Earlier this week I had an opportunity to speak with James Donaldson, Founder and CEO of Copperhead, the Canadian cybersecurity firm that created Copperhead OS.
Copperhead OS is a privacy and security-focused operating system with its roots in the Android Open Source Program. While the operating system I currently run on my phone Linneage OS simply offers a break from Google's unethical ecosystem that harvests all of your data, Copperhead OS takes it all further, offering a hardened, secure full-stack that gives the user the equivalent of military grade hardware.
I've run Copperhead OS on my Nexus 6P in the past. It ran well, was stable, and could run most of the Android software I threw at it. Naturally, if you have a privacy phone, you don't want to load up a bunch of spyware, so F-Droid became the repository of choice for getting apps.
Last summer I hadn't seen updates in a while and I investigated to see what was going on with Copperhead. I stumbled across Reddit pages outlining what sounded like a horrible situation. With my own entrepreneurial history, I can tell you that the land of startups is packed full of egos and the events James describes in the interview really aren't that unusual for any startup, but there were some vulnerabilities based on how the keys were kept that were exploited by the exiting party.
In my discussion with James Donaldson, I hear that the company is making a comeback soon and that there may be opportunities for digital, privacy-minded entrepreneurs in this emerging ecosystem. Please check out the interview and excuse my extremely unprofessional repetition of "...um ... and...", but enjoy hearing what James is up to.
I looked around Reddit for Copperhead OS information today and discovered something new. I'm not one to spend time on that platform and I'm not really interested in personalities and politics in this space, so long as people have privacy at the heart of their efforts. However, I found out that the previous partner/developer Daniel Micay is moving forward with a fork of CopperheadOS called GrapheneOS. It appears that there is still bad blood between the two individuals, which is unfortunate.
