they "inherited" the codebase as if they are anointed its successor or something.
That is exactly the case in a sense. As with any fork the community has a choice which to support. In doing so the community annoints the successor. Would be the same with Bitcoin/Bitcoin-XT, etc., etc.
ok tin hat time....
why does smooth care so much about VNL and John-Conner
time will tell if this is true or not...
Smooth, or maybe someone who is paying him is looking greedily at the VNL code, and wants to do to VNL what Monero did to Bytecoin.
hey guys "smooth whispers to his army of cronies, lets just keep yelling scam at John-Conner, all the while we can get a our own coin built by copying his code, when we are ready lets tell everyone we did it, we arent scammers, we are honest great devs.
afterwards they will pump up their own coin and rob a bunch of people while moving on to the next project that they can scam...
Smooth actually cares about VNL because he wants its code for himself.
as I said tin hat time,
but I will ROFL if this happens because we all know John-Conner has the right stuff to keep VNL pumping out updates, and outdoing the competition.