Cyanogen Mod Goes Commercial To Make "Available On Everything, To Everyone"

The popular Cyanogen Mod distribution of the Android Open Source Project dropped a bombshell today: the founding members have formed a corporation (currently with a team of seventeen hackers) to work on the project with the founder of Boost Mobile as the CEO. Quoting the announcement: "You have probably seen the pace of development pick up drastically over the past few months. More devices supported, bigger projects such as CM Account, Privacy Guard, Voice+, a new version of Superuser, and secure messaging. We vastly improved our infrastructure. We’re doing more bug fixes, creating more features, and improving our communication. We think that the time has come for your mobile device to truly be yours again, and we want to bring that idea to everybody. ... So what does this all mean for the community? The first thing I wanted to do when I realized we were actually doing this, was tell everyone possible. But when starting a company, you have to think about the larger picture. This meant not announcing until the time was right, our house was in order and we would have something to show. I have seen open source projects come and go, some being bought out and closed, others stagnating and falling by the wayside. I don’t want to see this happen with CM."

Comments

One question

[AmiMoJo]

I have only one question: How will they make money? That pretty much determines if this is a good or a bad thing.

Re:One question

[ebrandsberg]

I suspect that smaller companies like Blu Products (http://bluproducts.com/) could end up offloading software development and support for their phones under contract. Likewise they could offer services to enterprise customers to unify the android systems that they support on the "bring your own device" plans, so as to simplify support as well. I downloaded the newest CM daily today for the HTC One, and it prompted to link to the Cyanogenmod account, and once linked, it provided services such as remote wiping, finding my phone, etc. As such, if you have one unified version of android across multiple devices, it opens the door for providing unified services to simplify enterprise management. My worry is that companies like Samsung will not like this model since it levels the playing field between them and other hardware makers (the software is the same now) and they will refuse to release hardware level drivers to enable various features. That said, it opens the door to hardware/firmware only phone releases from small companies and open the market for rapid advancement.

Turning from hack into viable business

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

At some point, hacker ideals can become very profitable. Cydia started as an alternative to the App Store and some estimates place revenues now as high as $10 million a year. More power to these guys!

Re:Good

[crashumbc]

Yup.

1. create something cool users want
2. form corporation
2a. sellout said customers

3. PROFIT !!@#!@#!@!!!

While I HOPE this doesn't happen to CM the above has proven accurate to many time to be dismissed

hold the phone

[Charliemopps]

Since the majority of supported phones didn't have their support implemented by the cyanogen mod team (They only built support for the most popular phones) how on earth can they claim the project is theirs to go public with? There were literally thousands of people that rebuilt packages and redesigned interfaces so they could get it onto other phones. I even created a release for my phone a few years ago because Cyanogen didn't support it. This seems shady to me. They were already making significant money from their apps, as was made clear when one of their team went rouge last year, why now? I guess we'll have to wait and see, but I don't think this is a good turn of events at all.