Back in September, GPD started promoting Bazzite support on the WIN 5 product page, and in January, a GPD rep posted on Reddit claiming an “official Adaptation” of Bazzite was happening and that hardware had been sent to the team. Kyle Gospodnetich, Bazzite’s founder, immediately shot it down in the project’s Discord: “GPD lied to you sorry. We don’t officially work with anyone”.
Gospodnetich later issued a formal statement asking GPD to stop using Bazzite’s name, logos, and intellectual property, clarifying that no hardware had been received and that any collaboration claims were false. The situation escalated when it became clear GPD had been coordinating with Antheas Kapenekakis, a former Bazzite contributor who’d been removed from the project for “repeated violations of our Code of Conduct”.
In a Reddit post, GPD’s YYang explained that Antheas had reached out to them for the WIN 4 and WIN Max 2 collaborations, so continuing with the WIN 5 seemed like standard procedure. Antheas apparently mentioned “internal management issues” at Bazzite, but GPD assumed that wouldn’t affect the technical work and moved forward anyway. Three days after GPD posted about the collaboration, Bazzite’s announcement went live, denying everything.
GPD insists all their partnerships are voluntary and unpaid, and they’re “completely innocent in this matter”. The Bazzite team later confirmed GPD wasn’t at fault and that Antheas had been removed by “an overwhelming majority vote” for ongoing conduct issues. Antheas wrote their own version of events, available for your reading pleasure here, if you really enjoy open-source melodrama.
Source: Gaming on Linux
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