hoided23984 Abdoul Rasnab definitely isn't a founder or co-founder of GrapheneOS. He claims to be one without any basis. GrapheneOS was founded in 2014. Abdoul Rasnab only showed up in 2019. He was never a developer working on GrapheneOS, was never paid by GrapheneOS for any work and was never part of our internal discussion rooms for the open source project. He made a company which he used to sell phones with GrapheneOS which is permitted by the open source license. He misrepresented his involvement in the project and his company in order to sell more devices than his competitors forking GrapheneOS. He believes he's a founder of the project because he was around when it was renamed from the Android Hardening Project to GrapheneOS and was one of several people to suggest the new name. He has inflated helping to choose the name into him being one of the creators of the project. He has never written a single line of code in GrapheneOS.
He wrongly presented himself as the creator of GrapheneOS as part of selling devices with it. He wrongly named his company after the project and claimed it was the origin of it. The reality is that he maintained an unofficial closed source fork of GrapheneOS to sell from his company. It was supposed to have a different name and it was supposed to be clear it wasn't the official open source project. He heavily misled us about what he was doing and how he was presenting his involvement. He claimed he wanted to support GrapheneOS and committed to providing a portion of the sales of devices. He didn't provide most of the money he claimed he would provide. He was using us as a way to get money by misrepresenting his involvement. These interviews he did with the media in the Netherlands took advantage of the fact that there's a language barrier and that we were a tiny project rebuilding after what happened with Copperhead. We weren't aware of what he was doing until much later. We could use help from people in the Netherlands to get these inaccurate claims debunked including by having corrections made to stories published back in 2019.
We repeatedly caught him misrepresenting his involvement in GrapheneOS and had to keep asking him to correct how he was presenting himself. We didn't realize the extent to which he was doing it. He agreed to stop misrepresenting himself as a founder or co-founder. He agreed to start calling himself a business liaison instead. However, he never actually followed through on this and continued misrepresenting himself to this day. His LinkedIn page claims he is still involved in GrapheneOS to this day as a Director and he has never been a Director of anything in GrapheneOS. He has never had any internal role in GrapheneOS and only had permission to call himself a business liaison. His permission to call himself that was fully revoked when we discovered how much he had been misrepresenting himself. He has since doubled down on calling himself a founder of the project and misrepresenting himself as being involved in it to this day despite the fact that he was only ever an external party selling phones with it using his own fork of the OS.
His basis for making these claims is the fact that he called his company and the fork of the project he made GrapheneOS without having permission to do so. Therefore, he's twisting that into him founding that company and proprietary fork of the project into him founding and creating the open source project he forked. He's conflating those things together and leveraging the fact that he was previously misrepresenting himself into continuing to do it. We're going to need to make a public post addressing this since it's unacceptable for him to be continuing to do this. We've given him many chances to stop and involved our lawyers in preparing to deal with it via legal action which cost us money.
The stuff we've had to deal with from both Copperhead, Abdoul Rasnab and many others is genuinely ridiculous. He's not going to gain anything by misrepresenting himself as a founder of GrapheneOS beyond discrediting himself.