
CyanogenMod Inc. Reorganizes, Severs Ties with Project Founder - yareally
http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/12/01/steve-kondik-blames-kirt-mcmaster-for-cyanogen-incs-failure-cyanogenmod-to-reorganize-and-regroup/
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samfisher83
Steve Kondik Comments:

Boo hoo, right? I fucked up and got fucked over. It's the Silicon Valley way
isn't it? First world problems in the extreme? It hurts, a lot. I lost a lot
of friends, and I'm truely sorry to everyone I let down. I wish I had made
different choices and trusted different people (especially one in particular
early on), but all I care about now is figuring out what to do next.

This guy pretty much made that rom initially kind of sad what happened to him.

~~~
tw04
>kind of sad what happened to him.

Not really. When he decided to go commercial, he burned a LOT of people. He
basically got what was coming to him.

~~~
samfisher83
Is it wrong he wanted to make a little of all the hard work he put into it? He
hired a bunch of the community folks that helped with development.

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baobrain
May I direct you to this [0] G+ post from the dev who made focal? What Kondik
did was not just "make a little of all the hard work he put into it."

He also blames the cofounder for _everything_ that went wrong. Not his own
incompetence or community pushback, just the cofounder.

[0][https://plus.google.com/+GuillaumeLesniak/posts/L8FJkrcahPs](https://plus.google.com/+GuillaumeLesniak/posts/L8FJkrcahPs)

~~~
vuanotinn
Proof the GPL is cancer.

~~~
michaelmrose
How is the GPL cancer? Regarding your own software if you don't like the mix
of rights and responsibilities it provides don't use it. Your dislike hardly
means it isn't a good fit for others.

Regarding others software it gives you the right to use their software with no
cost providing you are equally free with the fruits of your own labor.
Obviously you might not agree with this but what I don't understand is why you
have such a caustic attitude.

What people commonly seem to believe is that the gpl magically sticks other
software because you included gpl code. What actually happens is that you
can't legally take other peoples code without following the license. Try this
with proprietary software sometime. You will be sued to extinction. If one of
your employees includes gpl code in your product you will likely be
respectfully asked to either gpl the other code or remove the gpl code and be
given ample time to do either.

You are 100% able to replace the code you never had a right to and move on the
gpl doesn't and can't magically adhere to your code thus calling it "cancer"
is silly.

~~~
hota_mazi
Calling it cancer is probably going too far. I think a more apt analogy is
that it's a virus. A very contagious one.

Whether you agree with what that virus is propagating or not is a separate
discussion.

My personal experience working in this industry for 30 years is that the GPL
(and even some of its derivatives) has been pretty much universally banned in
every single company I've worked at or know of.

~~~
dispose13432
>Calling it cancer is probably going too far. I think a more apt analogy is
that it's a virus. A very contagious one.

No more contagious than the license you're probably imposing on your clients.

~~~
hota_mazi
Er... what? I don't have clients, I don't have a license. What are you talking
about?

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wyldfire
> 2\. The main IP is the brand and trademarks. I don't know if I can get it
> back without a fight, and I'm tired of fighting. We will likely need to fork
> and rebrand, which might not be a bad thing. Would you support it?

Yes, if CM offers something "less libre" and son-of-CM continues the legacy of
CM with AOSP. Other high-profile projects like this have survived
rebranding/forks. It's not clear to me all the stuff this long saga includes
but I get some bits and pieces from the comments. I am not terribly concerned
about whatever business missteps took place at CM Inc.

~~~
hbosch
Agree. CM went down a very strange path, in my personal opinion, and kind of
left it's community stranded in the pursuit of monetization. Regardless on
your feelings of the split between them (and I do not intend on derailing this
thread) io.js forked from Node and had modest success on their own, before
folding back into Node. I suspect CM Classic could have a same amount of
success, since the Android ROM community values product quality and integrity
much more over brand name.

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vuanotinn
Looks like all Android-related projects, big or small, high profile or low
profile, suffer from the same problem the iOS jailbreak community has:
everybody with power or a voice in the community is either a whiny bitch or a
brat.

Technical/legal stuff aside, all problems with projects related to the Android
OS are all the same: immaturity, lack of responsibility, selfishness, etc.

~~~
nas
The Android open source community is deeply unhealthy, IMHO. Compare the pile
of shit that is XDA vs a well run open source project. Most of the stuff
posted there has no way to verify the source code, binaries download from
sketchy sites, no issue tracker. If you have the stomach to wade through the
cesspool of XDA threads, you will find the majorly of posters parroting cargo
cult ideas (e.g. wiping battery stats to improve battery life). This is not
the way to advance technology.

Personally, I think Google is a lot to blame. They really don't care if
Android is an open source platform and they don't foster an open source
community building on it. So we have basically a mod scene that hacks binaries
and passes around dirty hacks that break on every new release. I don't think
the work done by the modders end up going back into the official source repo.
So much waste of developer time for no long-term progress.

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NoGravitas
The biggest problem I see is (and there may be other biggies, but this is the
one that has bitten me), is that device support in Android kernels never gets
upstreamed to Linux. Not necessarily due to GPL violations, but because even
though the device source tree is published, there's no one willing to shepherd
the changes upstream (and many vendor changes are low quality, so it would be
a lot of work). Typically even a Nexus device is stuck on the specific kernel
version that it was released with.

Google is a little better on the kernel side, but in other ways, AOSP is even
worse. There's lots of good stuff done in Cyanogen and OmniROM, for example,
but there's no way to get stuff into upstream AOSP. Google just pitches
something over the wall once a year and ROM developers have to rebase or re-
implement their ROM features.

~~~
dispose13432
The problem is that Linux's kernel interface isn't stable, so a module written
for one kernel release won't work on another, and (AFAIK) they don't do major-
minor releases (like PHP,Apache) where, say, the 4.0 kernel is stable and will
stay stable for a few years. Rather, 4.1 could introduce braking changes as
far as modules go.

And, unlike PCs, most phones don't have standard hardware, so someone kernel
modules tend to be closed source and don't have "basic" mode.

As a result, to upgrade to a new Android release someone has to backport all
new (kernel) features to old kernels.

~~~
dmm
If you upstream your drivers then the people who change interfaces also fix
the modules that use those interfaces.

The problem is SoC manufacturers that don't want to put in the work to
upstream drivers.

~~~
dispose13432
>The problem is SoC manufacturers that don't want to put in the work to
upstream drivers.

They don't _open source_ their drivers.

~~~
NoGravitas
Many (most?) of them do open source their drivers. But even then, no one is
willing to do the work to upstream them.

~~~
yareally
They sometimes release the driver blobs so you don't have to rip them off the
device, but rarely have I heard of drivers being open sourced outside of a few
scattered instances.

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cr0sh
Here I was all this time (several years) thinking CyanogenMod was a product by
(Android) hackers for (Android) hackers. Now, I find out it's a product by a
company...?

WTF?

I've never used it (and the following is just me talking from my nether
regions), but I've always kept it "in my back pocket" as something someday to
try out. Why? Because in my mind, it was "non-corporate" \- made for the love
of the platform, not for money.

Maybe that's the problem. Maybe where things went wrong was when they tried to
monetize stuff. Stop doing that - everything isn't about money.

Or at least, it shouldn't be. More often than not, especially in projects like
these, money can corrupt and screw up the whole project.

So fork it. Get back to the community, back to the roots. Quit trying to
become "the rich guy" \- and go back to being "the hacker dude bring cool 5h!7
to the community". Don't even think about the money. If its really worth
something, the money will magically appear. Even if it doesn't, what does it
matter? It's about the love of the platform, right?

RIGHT?

So fork it. The community will follow, and not look back at what once was, but
will look forward to what can be.

~~~
ozten
It is both a company ([https://cyngn.com/](https://cyngn.com/)) and a open
source community
([https://www.cyanogenmod.org/](https://www.cyanogenmod.org/)).

~~~
cr0sh
I guess I just never knew about the "company" part. I should probably review
the history of the project, how it started, whether it started "corporate"
with an open-source community (nothing wrong with that), or if it was
originally a community effort started by somebody(s) then morphed into a
company too...? I'm not expecting an answer from you or anyone - it's my
responsibility to do the research of course.

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rer0tsaz
>5\. WWJBQD?

This refers to Jean-Baptiste ‘JBQ’ Quéru, who responded: put users first.

[https://plus.google.com/+JeanBaptisteQueru/posts/jjwjobbMUY8](https://plus.google.com/+JeanBaptisteQueru/posts/jjwjobbMUY8)

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fghjllpours
Is this the end of custom ROMs?

Between Xposed and a "better" standard android, a lot of the "big" custom ROMs
have bit the dust. Aokp, paranoid, slim, omni is moribund, and now CM?

~~~
pachydermic
The only feature from CM that I miss is the ability to hold the volume up
button to skip to the next track (as a global option, not just a per-app
thing). Everything else that they did so well has pretty much been added to
stock android.

~~~
fghjllpours
And the fact that they support old phones, and their privacy guard is better
than stock android

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shepardrtc
Internally, Cyanogen has been a shitshow for the past few years. They had
management that kept screwing up, and they treated their people pretty poorly.
All the good employees saw the writing on the wall and have already left.

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betterOffDead
CyanogenMod's logo/mascot/whatever is beyond retarded looking.

Some stupid, almost-impish little Napster-type cartoon character? It's non-
facial expression is, somehow, even more annoying in its tepid
inoffensiveness, than if it were to emote as some puckish, edgy dork.

I spent hours unlocking some bootloader on my $600 phone so that I could look
like a Linkin Park fan, who's into Saturday morning cartoons?

I don't remember CyanogenMod looking quite so cheesey in 2011.

ClockworkMod's logo was an example of faux 1337 w4r3zd00d chic done well.

CyanogenMod looks like ass, and I won't be caught dead with it.

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kilroy123
That's a bummer they couldn't make things work. I used CyanogenMod before they
turned into a company on some older Andriod phones.

The community did make a great ROM and I was hoping they would shake things
up. Hopefully, force manufacturers from releasing such bloated horrible custom
versions of Android.

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TwoNineA
I guess they weren't able to put the bullet into Google's head.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Pretty impossible goal while using Google's software as your business
platform. You can't beat Google at Google's own operating system.

~~~
dispose13432
It wasn't about Google, it was about the way they did business that was so bad
that no one could rely on them.

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fredgrott
You know he might have an option..partner with MS to bring an Android OS fork
that has MS Services..and we would get patent coverage to boot as enticement
to OEMs..

~~~
sangnoir
No need to rehash Cynogen Inc's strategy - they already partnered with
Microsoft and bundle Office, MS Camera and default to Bing. Which was _well-
received_ by the community known for flashing new ROMs onto their phones /s.

And don't get me started about the OEM amateur hour: they inked a deal with
OnePlus and shipped as the out-of-the-box OS for the OPO. A lot of people in
India bought the phone - win-win-win, right? Then the strategic geniuses
signed another agreement with an Indian phone manufacturer with an
_exclusivity_ clause that prevented further OTA updates to the OPO phones
already in user's hands on the subcontinent.

Never mind dissing their upstream ("Cyanogen is putting a bullet to Google's
head" \- Cyanogen Inc CEO)

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this-dang-guy
Wow, bummer. I wondered what happened to Cyanogen, I was looking forward to
their stuff.

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mohanmcgeek
*Cyanogen Inc.

