A fork in the road | Hacker News Reader

A fork in the road

cyanogenmod.org

99 pointsikeboy18 comments

A user claiming to be a former dev also indicates you should no longer trust OTA updates:

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5k55vo/the_dea...

>The business side couldn't figure out how to monetize an Android-based operating system. When they got a clue of how to monetize something, it didn't depend on the OS.

Any speculation on what this might be? User data?

Probably the same path as any OS nowadays: using you OS as a commodity to support a distribution of software/HWs you lock away from users.

Non standardized poorly engineered/proprietary HW and poorly documented SoC makes it impossible for an OS to survive without the support of big companies.

FOSS massively benefits nowadays the worst actors on the HW/SW markets possible. If you wait long enough you will see the heroes turn into the villains. (cf The Watchmen).

> FOSS massively benefits nowadays the worst actors on the HW/SW markets possible. If you wait long enough you will see the heroes turn into the villains. (cf The Watchmen).

This is really only true of OSS, not Free (Libre) Software, which is why that distinction is so important.

A reddit user[0] backed up all the snapshots available on archive.org[1], just in case...

[0] https://redd.it/5k5d7x

[1] https://archive.org/details/cmarchive_snapshots

I want to read the full story, including how Microsoft was involved. (yes, it was involved, use Google to search for previous news)

I have an iPhone. Can someone explain to me why you would want "nightly builds" of your phone operating system (or any other software) if you are not a developer? I guess I don't understand why Cyanogen tried to turn into a company.

I'm scared of updating my phone because I'm afraid of what will break next. As an example: for a long while using find in PDFs was broken in Safari.

Most people don't want to update nightly. What they want is to use the first build that fixes the bug that they particularly hate, or includes the new feature that they particularly want.

Otherwise, they wait for Milestone releases.

The website is really nice. I hope the transition is smooth.

So, yes, Cyanogen isn't dead. The name is just changing. Glad we finally got that straight.

Hope they learned their lesson and don't sell the name of the open source project out from under it again.

Plenty of people have had to learn that lesson on various projects, time and again. Why stop now?

Could you expand on this "selling the name" bit?

How does that work?

The CyanogenMod open-source project somewhat lended their name to the Cyanogen company.

The link explains it better.

The link is too friendly to give the juicy details. I tried to find another source with Google Search. Perhaps this link is biased, but it's easy to understand the drama: https://plus.google.com/+GuillaumeLesniak/posts/L8FJkrcahPs

You mean Cyanogenmod. Cyanogen is the company that parted ways.

...yes.

Not just the name - the biggest issue is they're losing the infrastructure, and infrastructure is expensive.

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