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Samsung Hires Steve 'Cyanogen' Kondik
Some nameless reader noted a surprising twist in the tale of Cyanogen, an android modder once cease and desisted by Google. "Samsung Mobile has hired one of the homebrew market's most notorious and successful Android hackers, Steve 'Cyanogen' Kondik, best known as the creator of the CyanogenMod for Android."
They're doing exactly what MS did with the Chevron team. Hire the talent to keep them from doing things you don't support while making it look like they're going to do something special for the community
.... and have him help them optimize their ROM images and the experience presented. Lets hope they don't hire him to help them lock down their ROMs, bootloaders, etc some more ....
Think about it, who else would be better at locking things down than the guy who defeats such locks all the time?
For the rest of the lazy ppls... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyanogenMod
Cracker? Hacker?
Do you have an idea on what CyanogenMod actually is?
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
I'm going to cautiously take this as a Good Thing(tm). Samsung makes decent enough hardware, equipped with awe-UNinspiring software, so they could certainly use the help. While we might be looking at the end of his involvement in Cyanogen, we could be looking at the beginning of the first real Android fork/distro. Meanwhile, had he let Google hire him, we never would have heard of him again - he'd have disappeared into Google's Android development team.
This is just another move on the chess board. Google bought Motorola which will invariably give Motorola the inside track on Android to some extent. Samsung realized that while their hardware has been quite good their software has been severely lacking in both quality and updates. This hire makes perfect sense, it allows them to produce higher quality software (the goal being to improve upon Google's not just dress it up pretty) with a better update policy. If they actually allow their software to be run like CM has been (and force it through the providers) then it puts LG and HTC in poor positions long term.
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
I own a lowly HTC Desire, unlocked and rooted, and I've used it with the stock HTC Sense as well as many other custom firmwares. I have also seen HTC Sense, Motorola Blur and stock Android on other phones
Cyanogen is by far the most advanced of all. If you really are interested in unlocking your phone's true potential, it's the only choice. My HTC Desire running Cyanogen is about twice faster than when running Sense, both in benchmarks and real world use. Maybe if HTC were to update their OS to 2.3.5 like Cyanogen, the performance differences would be reduced, but that hasn't happened yet AFAIK.
As the article states, tethering is enabled by default. And it also allows the user to select per app permissions, something even the stock Android will not do. And if you're adventurous, running the Nightlies guarantees the latest technology. It's actually not as dangerous as it sounds, because in almost 100 Nightlies only 2 or 3 were duds and restoring from backups took 15 minutes.
Whichever phone I purchase next, the main requirement is that Cyanogen supports it. For me it's even more important than camera resolution, screen size or storage space. I mean with a fast SD card and a few tweaks I can fit 100 apps on my HTC Desire.
Google didn't tell him to stop "hacking its products". They asked him to stop distributing their proprietary Google applications (gmail, etc), because he wasn't authorized to do so.
The only thing they wanted stopped was the inclusion of the Google Apps on cyanogenmod by default. Now the ROM comes without google apps, but you can easily download an installer that adds them back in.
They asked him in the cease and desist to remove the proprietary Google apps (Gmail, Reader, or whatever) from the package. They are available as a separate flashable zip.
As I understand it the C&D wasn't for modifying Android, it was for bundling the Google Apps in with the modified Android. (You can still get them with Cyanogenmod, but now they're a separate download.)
Steve, if you happen to read this, just one request for future Samsung kernels: Bluetooth HID and SPP. Please. You can even skip the downstream implementation for now. Just get the damn kernel-level stuff in there, so anybody with a rooted Samsung phone and stock Kondik-era kernel can take it from there and make it work later. It's the kernel that kills us dead in our tracks every single time, because rolling a custom kernel from scratch inevitably seems to mean giving up Sprint 4G, working network-accelerated GPS, or some other combination of basic hardware capabilities whose loss profoundly compromises the phone's worth and usability.
Now that Steve's with Samsung, I *might* actually consider buying an .*Epic.*Touch.*$ in 2 months if it ships with a dual-core processor and doesn't have some fatal, stupid last-minute cost-shaving hardware deficiency that ruins it just to reduce the manufacturing cost by 23 cents. The fact that Motorola might shift from Lawful Evil to Chaotic Neutral under Google definitely complicates matters a bit, since Tegra2 has Google's "Honeycomb Hometown" Advantage. Up to now, the Evo3D was a slam-dunk just because it was the most likely to end up with fully-functional Cyanogenmod. If every future Moto phone ends up being a de-facto Nexus-* and Samsung phones have Steve getting paid to make them the best-of-breed reference implementation for Cyanogen, HTC doesn't look quite as appealing.
Where's the sense in offering an open platform and then sending out cease-and-desist letters to people who modify it?
And that, my lost-carrier friend, is the existential question. Why would Google do that?
Consensus is that Google has a slightly different meaning for the word "open". They support AOSP, which means that the Android core OS is open in the more-or-less conventional sense. AOSP is, after all the beginning of awesome mod roms like Cyanogenmod. But Google's sense of openness ends where their own service software (like Maps, or Market) starts. Those are almost as closed as Office for Microsoft. That's what the C&D was about: distributing Google Apps with the Cyanogenmod package. So GApps have been unbundled from the mod rom and you download those as a separate rom from heaven-only-knows-where. But it works. Certainly having a tool like ROM Manager helps locate and install all the pieces.
I would never have spent my money and mindshare on an Android phone if the architecture and most of the culture weren't modding-friendly. I don't need a mobile phone, but if I'm buying an ultraportable computer I'm buying one I can hack around on.
Signed,
idontgno, a happy CM-7.1.0RC1-BravoC user.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Now, the app is backed up, Cyanogen installed and the app put back, as shipped by Google (as opposed to 'as shipped by the Cyanogen install')
So now everyone is, more or less, happy.