14 DAY TRIAL // Popcorn Time has lost many of its core developers after rumors of a looming Hollywood lawsuit and internal arguments about control and money have divided the team.
In this article we're talking about the Popcorn Time (PT) fork distributed through popcorntime.io, the most popular PT variant at the moment, after the original Popcorn Time was shut down and open sourced this spring.
According to reports coming out of Popcorn Time offices via TorrentFreak, the PT development team has split into two camps over the recent weekend, one around the main PT developers Wally and phnz, and another group around KsaRedFx.
KsaRedFx's group eventually lost the dispute and he was forced out of Popcorn Time's Slack channel and GitHub account. Other more vocal developers, yet less important, were also punished the same way, and others left on their own.
At one point, the group wanted to create their own fork of Popcorn Time, but the plan was dropped, and rumors have it that most gave up working on any type of PT-related project altogether.
Everybody starts panicking at the rumor of a Hollywood lawsuit
The quarrel started after (unconfirmed) rumors of an upcoming Hollywood lawsuit appeared inside the Popcorn Time team. From here, discussions evolved to the VPN.ht service, which is integrated by default with Popcorn Time.
KsaRedFx wanted the VPN removed, mainly because it was a commercialized tool that had no place in Popcorn Time, and also served as a target for future lawsuits.
The Wally and phnz group heard these discussions, and felt betrayed that they were not carried out in an open format. From here things escalated, KsaRedFx was banned, and other, more smaller developers left.
Following the attention brought to the VPN.ht service, phnz, which founded VPN.ht alognside Wally, also presented his resignation from the Popcorn Time project.