Slashdot Mirror
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."
.... 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 don't think Steve Kondik is the type that would stop supporting what he started. Plus there are a bunch of other devs that also work on it. Samsung gave 5 of the CyanogenMod devs free Galaxy S2 phones and only asked that they make CyanogenMod work on it. Hiring Steve may allow for Samsung to ship their phones already running CyanogenMod. That gives them 1up on other vendors, hardware that officially supports CyanogenMod.
There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary and those who don't.
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.
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.)