CyanogenMod Inc. Reorganizes, Severs Ties with Project Founder | Hacker News Reader

CyanogenMod Inc. Reorganizes, Severs Ties with Project Founder

androidpolice.com

116 pointsyareally56 comments

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.

>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.

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.

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

Proof the GPL is cancer.

This post seems to indicate that the GPL is working exactly as intended.

Cancer also works as intended: it kills the host.

Proof WordPerfect is Cancer!!

I'm an OEM, I want to put WordPerfect on my computer, WordPerfect sued me. WaaHaa.

Cancer has no such intention. Like any other organism, it competes for resources with those around it, and survives if it is effective enough at that to do so. Given that it often best characterized by the genetic mutations it has developed relative to the host (thus, it may differ from you genetically significantly more than an identical twin), I believe it is entirely fair to call it a separate organism. An 'extremely effective cancer' (as terrible as this sounds), would survive without regard to the state of the host, as Tasmanian Devil Facial Tumor Disease, which is contagious (transmissible by bite), emerged from a single original host, and has been around for quite a while.

OK and the long list of software using the GPL, including Linux, proves what?

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.

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.

>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.

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

Virus is also a pretty bad analogy. The privilege of using gpl software as part of your software is bought with trade in kind instead of cash.

You have to make that trade willingly. You can't be infected. I don't think that you have thought this through and invite you to do so.

Proof the GPL protects you from getting screwed.

1. Not all core devs were invited

2. He tried getting some GPL software relicensed as Apache under false pretenses.

But this is what confuses me. If you don't want this happening, why license your code as Apache?

If Samsung would have done this, this would have been hailed as a success of non-copyleft licenses (like when MS used BSD's network stack). Why do they have a problem when a core dev does is?

Because he lied to the developers about what he was trying to do.

> 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.

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.

Omni tried forking and didn't get too far.

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.

feels like the old warez dayz

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

They don't _open source_ their drivers.

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

Really? Where is the full Samsung blobless kernel?

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.

Yep. It's the same in the Minecraft community. Perhaps not to the degree that it once was, but for a while the Tekkit dispute was a big deal, and people like FlowerChild continue to stir the pot of controversy to this day.

The modded community has largely matured, with the vast majority of mods being open source and open to contribution these days.

Personally, I haven't heard from FlowerChild in 4+ years. Somebody did start a mod-friendly rewrite of BetterThanWolves though, built on Forge and with compatibility in mind. It's called Better With Mods.

https://github.com/BeetoGuy/BetterWithMods

AFAICT, he's still around (although I haven't checked in a while). He hasn't talked to the forge folks, though, so nobody cares.

Unless he's left the scene, we can assume that he merely continues to spread his particular brand of poison in his corner of the internet, rarely venturing into the wider community.

But yes, the modding scene is better than it was. Thanks to FTB (as well as Tekkit cleaning up their act), the modpack controversy is mostly a thing of the past. And thanks to King_Lemming, Pahimar, Azanor, SpaceToad, and the rest of the major players in the scene, closed-source mods are very nearly a thing of the past (but not quite).

Unfortunately Azanor's Thaumcraft is closed-source, so not a great example. King_Lemming (and the COFH team) have historically been closed-source as well, but they recently moved to visible source (sadly, probably due to leaving the scene).

Those are the major exceptions though. Mekanism, EnderIO, Forestry, really all the other big mods are completely open source now. There's been a big shift in attitudes on that topic.

For contrast, when I first got into modding nearly all the mods were closed-source. IC2, RedPower, Equivalent Exchange, Railcraft, and so on. Very glad to have seen this ethos shift.

Crap. I forgot that Azanor wasn't OS. I can never keep track. And you're right about COFH (although they were always notably ambivalent about people looking at their code).

But yes, that was my point. Even BC and IC2 (which, while not as prominent as they were, are still giants, with BC still being the bedrock of the modding community) are OS, IIRC (although as demonstrated by the above example, my memory isn't the best).

I mostly see mods from a user's perspective, though, because I can't actually stand Java.

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.

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

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.

It was a non-commercial open source project at first. Then they decided to go found a company and get hardware partners to have CyanogenMod phones.

The time to try it was like 3-4 years ago!

You could do a bit of research first.

CyanogenMod = Android project started by cyanogen (Steve Kondik)

Cyanogen = company started later by cyanogen (Steve Kondik) and others. The main selling idea was to provide vendors with it.

CyanogenMod project was still operating all this time.

>5. WWJBQD?

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

https://plus.google.com/+JeanBaptisteQueru/posts/jjwjobbMUY8

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?

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.

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

I don't bother with custom roms as much as I used to, I'm happy enough with root to nuke bloatware and get a systemwide ad-blocker installed.

OEM's are finally gaining a little bit of taste in the UI department and I'm not revolted with their products out of the box as much as I used to be.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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..

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)

Wow, bummer. I wondered what happened to Cyanogen, I was looking forward to their stuff.

*Cyanogen Inc.

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