WHAT IS COPPERHEAD OS?
CopperheadOS is a mobile operating system for smartphones, based on the Android mobile platform. It adds privacy and security features to the official releases of the Android Open Source Project by Google. CopperheadOS is developed by Copperhead, a Canadian information security company. It is licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0, although its source code is not available for public download.
WHEN HAS IT EMERGED?
Project inception and initial releases
The CopperheadOS project was started in 2014 by Copperhead, an information security company based in Toronto, Canada. The company was founded in the same year by James Donaldson, the CEO, and Daniel Micay, the CTO and lead developer, and initially served clients in the Canadian legal and intelligence industries. Copperhead announced the development of CopperheadOS in April 2015. According to the announcement, the operating system was designed to be a "secure-by-default version of Android" aimed at privacy-conscious users. At first, CopperheadOS was licensed under the GNU General Public License, and the project's code was located on GitHub. Copperhead contributed several of their bug fixes and improvements developed for CopperheadOS to the Android Open Source Project, the main project for Android development by Google. In August 2015, Copperhead released the first alpha version of CopperheadOS. In May 2016, Copperhead launched an online store where the Nexus 5X could be purchased directly with CopperheadOS pre-loaded. The Nexus 6P was made available for purchase from the store in July of the same year.
License change and departure of Daniel Micay
From October 2016, for versions of CopperheadOS based on Android 7.0 Nougat, Copperhead changed the CopperheadOS license to the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike (BY-NC-SA) license. According to Donaldson, this was to prevent other companies from using the CopperheadOS code without paying Copperhead for licensing, to keep the project sustainable. Copperhead began selling Google Pixel phones pre-loaded with CopperheadOS in March 2017, in addition to their lineup of Nexus phones. For Pixel phones, users could either buy a phone from the Copperhead store with CopperheadOS pre-loaded or send their phone to Copperhead for the operating system to be installed on it. This was done to prevent violations of CopperheadOS's non-commercial license; Copperhead competitors had been selling Nexus phones with CopperheadOS installed without obtaining a commercial license, and Copperhead wanted to avoid this issue with the Pixel.
The issue came to a head in November of the same year when Copperhead briefly shut down the update server for Nexus devices to stop the continued license violations. The company restored the update server after two days. Copperhead released an alpha version of CopperheadOS for the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL in January 2018. Official releases for the Pixel 2 and 2 XL were marked as "for internal use” and could not be downloaded from the Copperhead website without authentication. This maintained the status quo of only Nexus releases being available for public download. Disagreements between the two founders over business policy became increasingly heated over the first few months of 2018 and led to Donaldson firing Micay in June of that year.
May responded by posting his dismissal notice on Reddit, and by deleting the cryptographic keys necessary to release updates for the project. Micay said that he considered "the company and infrastructure to be compromised", and that he would "prevent [Donaldson] from harming any users". Copperhead failed to provide CopperheadOS updates for several months afterwards. Micay continued the development of the open-source parts of CopperheadOS as the Android Hardening project, which was later rebranded as GrapheneOS. According to Donaldson, as of February 2019, he and Micay were in a legal dispute over the incident.
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