Slashdot Mirror
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."
cyanogenmod is OVER!
I have only one question: How will they make money? That pretty much determines if this is a good or a bad thing.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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!
You and the 4 or the 5 ppl below you are morons.
Crusty also seems to be on the team.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Stop this.
Girls code. Girls hack. This is not news, and contributes to an incorrect societal marginalization of people sans Y chromosome in jobs like this.
What's more, you imply a team like this would only have such a woman on their payroll as a sex object.
You would probably say, indignantly "it was just a joke, all in fun!" Joking in this way is not OK. It needs to be shut down and shunned by society, and I'm calling it out everywhere I see it.
I'm a member of the Y-chromosome club, and I condemn alen's message.
I hope they reap the benefits of all the hard work they've been putting into pushing phone technology forward.
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
I have installed Cyanogenmod on a couple of devices that the phone maker stopped supporting long ago. I get all the new yummy android stuff without buying a new phone.
I can see this as a large selling point for companies who want to keep their devices up to date with security patches.
Seems like a legit move by Boost to try and reach a niche market. I wonder what Google's stance on this might be
True. I don't usually subscribe to the "women are persecuted/abused/marginalized in IT" meme but this kind of crap gives me pause.
Let me also point out that Cyanogenmod has now built in the ability to upgrade/update by a few simple clicks on your phone's interface. It really rocks.
COBOL was designed by a woman. Spanning-tree protocol was invented by a woman. This thread is why I use a guy's name to play WoW and Halo.
AOKP[1] is based on the CM tree. I wonder if they will still have access to the code. I'm really not in the mood for more corporate interest BS on my device.
[1] http://www.androidbeat.com/2013/05/cyanogenmod-vs-aokp/
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
There is a very easy way they can make money. Via their auto update stream.
CM now supports auto update. It is a killer feature, but one they could easily charge for. IE you want to update to the latest CM over the air? Pay $10. Else, download it yourself and flash it yourself.
Another way, they could change you to download their pre-built binary images. Maybe only the images for the Nexus are free, and ones for other phones are $5 a download.
COBOL was designed by a woman.
Not exactly helping your case there.
Stop this.
Girls code. Girls hack. This is not news, and contributes to an incorrect societal marginalization of people sans Y chromosome in jobs like this.
What's more, you imply a team like this would only have such a woman on their payroll as a sex object.
You would probably say, indignantly "it was just a joke, all in fun!" Joking in this way is not OK. It needs to be shut down and shunned by society, and I'm calling it out everywhere I see it.
I'm a member of the Y-chromosome club, and I condemn alen's message.
This cannot be repeated enough.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
The only part of AOSP that is GPL is the kernel. The rest is APLv2.
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.
Joking in this way is not OK.
There is no such thing as a joke that is not OK. People like you get offended, but that's because you don't understand the power of a joke. You're not going to change the mind of actual misogynists by telling them you're offended about their beliefs. But when society makes fun of their beliefs by making a joke like that, and everyone laughs instead of seriously agreeing, that means we're moving past it. We're showing those people their arguments have been shot down so many times they're not even worth it debating anymore. We can just voice what they're parroting and everyone understand it to be a joke, because that's the only thing that opinion makes sense as.
When you take it seriously and get offended, you actually legitimize their position. Stop it.
Yeah! Let's also flog them in Times Square and have them thrown in jail too!
Or instead of being a bootlicking authoritarian who can't handle free speech, you simply dispute them with facts rather than trying to shut them out. Censorship doesn't change minds. It simply means those thoughts remain but are simply hidden away behind feigned politeness.
COBOL was designed by a woman.
Not exactly helping your case there.
Women can hate humanity just as well as men can.
Commenters on Slashdot should not be able to hide behind "Anonymous Coward" to post comments like this. This kind of comment should be a bannable offense.
It's a stupid comment posted by an idiot, but what you advocate, simply because the AC's statement offended you, is much, much worse.
If you don't like it, browse comments at > +2, leave here and go to a forum that censors, or better yet, put on your big boy/girl pants and ignore it instead of trying to control everyone else's experience on /. just because you are offended.
Indeed. I am a guy and Limor Freid is one of my heroes. And she is cute :P
Silence is a state of mime.
Only because it's obvious: the dog does PR and the clown is Management.
Girls code. Girls hack.
Yes, but does THIS girl do any of that?
Oh wait, I just saw the pic and realized she's Asian, so she probably did actually earn her place.
*Brilliant*. You have replaced sexism with racism. Well fucking done.
> There is no such thing as a joke that is not OK.
The punchline needs to bring attention to the problem and not further victimize the subject. This "joke" had no point, and was simply mocking women. That makes it not OK. Sexist jokes are ok when we are laughing at the asshole, not the victim. This "joke" suggested all a women can do is stand in a booth. If the joke were rephrased to show the idiocy of males in technology, then it'd be different. But that takes thought and actual wit, of which the original joker had none.
Name one decent off contract phone for less than [$250].
The Nexus 4. It may be a little old now, but it's still decent. $199.
Wow, look who takes themselves too seriously. Honestly, the ones that take the greatest offense are the ones that are the most insecure and put their entire lives into proving a point. Joking this way IS ok, because it's a joke. Like your coding skills and your self-righteous indignation.
"If the joke were rephrased to show the idiocy of males in technology, then it'd be different." Oh you mean like all the jokes about men being unable to take care of babies, or children? Jokes about men being "nerds" and "dorks"? About being "commitment-phobes"? Jokes about men not "manning up"? Jokes about men being socially or fashionably inept? Jokes about men buying fast cars because of their small penises? Jokes about men being domestic buffoons in the family? Or how about all the feminist jokes about "all men" being rapists or abusers or oppressors? It seems to me that men have been taking jokes for a long long time. Equally, it seems to me that it is YOU who cannot take a joke which must make it really hard for you to live with yourself.
To answer some of my own question, this is their response in their Reddit AMA:
----
We are in the process of setting up a nonprofit to foster the open source side.
----
There are no plans to close the source for things such as device support and work done in the community. We do need to build value for the company, and there are various things we are working on that require significant time and capital to develop- these may be proprietary but we won't pervert/close the core OS for this to happen.
----
Our strength is that we have a strong open source community behind us.
The core of the project (hardware support, community contributions, etc) will always remain open source. But obviously, as a company that has financial needs, employees to pay, Cooper treats to buy, and Cyanogen-babies to feed, we will need to make careful decisions about what we open source, and what may become proprietary.
With this move, they are now beholden to shareholders (i.e. the Venture Capitalists) and profit is the #1 priority, despite the flowery, rainbow-colored unicorn fantasy they are promoting.
I'd bet dollars to donuts that CM is going to become payware and possibly even supported by ads integrated directly into the O/S, with underlying information snooping software that gives them your private info so they can sell it to marketing firms.
So, no, I don't like it one bit.
Protip: replying with adhominem attacks doesn't do much for your position. In fact it re-verifies to me that the whole feminist house of cards is driven by instinct driven emotion instead of fact and reason...from both genders.
It takes two to tango. Every step of the way, from first meet to old age... or 10th year anniversary divorce court date. As long as the neocon white knights and liberal manginas are still willing to 'man up' by continuing to shield women from reality, they will never be equal in mens' eyes...yes even guys like you who still think women need special legal protections at mens' expense. Guys like you are a big part of what holds back true equity. You're just too wrapped up in your own pride to see it.
You close with another fallacy. I never said women aren't people or that they don't deserve rights. I made what is called a general statement, which implies exceptions. Your wife may or may not be one, but knowing nothing else, I know which side to bet on as a sane default. It's guys like you that elevate them to deity status and then shun any who dare question it, calling them losers. Questioning feminism is not misogyny, no matter what the European Union says. You're welcome to play the lottery... You might even win, but the jury's still out, and until the laws are changed to something more equitable, will be out until the day you divorce, or one of you drops dead. Good luck.
Women can hate humanity just as well as men can.
I see you've met the ex?
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
This ladies and gentlemen is the misandrist version of 'slut shaming'. When you want to 'slut shame' a woman, you talk about how she will bang anyone. When you want to 'slut shame' a man, you talk about how he can't get any. It the other side of the same coin.
Personally I think it's because the mixture of sleaze and puritanism in the USA has fucked up so many people in the head. Men expect a pure example of one of the three of Virgin/Mother/Whore instead of a real girl and who knows what the American women expect because many are conditioned to play roles instead of being real girls. I could go on but you may want to look at other Western nations without so high a divorce rate to get an idea of where things are going wrong - the quick answer is less of an expectation of perfection (your "men are appliances that must fit her 'lifestyle.'" is part of a problem more widespread in the US than some other places but how common is it really?).
In my workplace I could probably find a dozen. I suggest you talk to more people. I've met crazy girls too, but I've also even met lesbian feminists that don't come close to the universal crazy girl you are pretending is widespread. I suppose I'd better point out that I'm a straight male before people assume I'm having no problems communicating with women due to being one.
Hollywood is poison with a lot of that stuff (eg. the "True Lies" movie about the stalker becoming the white knight) but reality doesn't quite match Hollywood, even if Hollywood is a major source of fucking with people's heads. It's producing a sick society. Going apeshit over an exposed nipple at the superbowl then fining the woman and not the man who pulled her top off was wierd - apart from the penalty it's the sort of stuff the Taliban would do.