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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!
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 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.
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.
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
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
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.
COBOL was designed by a woman.
Not exactly helping your case there.
Women can hate humanity just as well as men can.
> 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.
"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:
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We are in the process of setting up a nonprofit to foster the open source side.
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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.
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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.