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Cyanogen Inc. Reportedly Fires OS Development Arm, Switches To Apps (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Android Police is reporting that the Android software company Cyanogen Inc. will be laying off 20 percent of its workforce, and will transition from OS development to applications. The Android Police report says "roughly 30 out of the 136 people Cyanogen Inc. employs" are being cut, and that the layoffs "most heavily impact the open source arm" of the company. Android Police goes on to say that CyanogenMod development by Cyanogen Inc "may be eliminated entirely." Ars Technica notes the differences between each "Cyanogen" branding. Specifically, CyanogenMod is a "free, open source, OS heavily based on Android and compatible with hundreds of devices," while Cyanogen Inc. is "a for-profit company that aims to sell Cyanogen OS to OEMs." It appears that many of the core CyanogenMod developers will no longer be paid to work on CyanogenMod, though the community is still free to develop the software." Android Police details the firing process in their report: "Layoffs reportedly came after a long executive retreat for the company's leaders and were conducted with no advanced notice. Employees who were not let go were told not to show up to work today. Those who did show up were the unlucky ones: they had generic human resources meetings rather ominously added to their calendars last night. So, everyone who arrived at Cyanogen Inc. in Seattle this morning did so to lose their job (aside from those conducting the layoffs)." Early last year, Microsoft invested in a roughly $70 million round of equity financing for the then-startup Cyanogen Inc. Not too long before that, Google tried to acquire Cyanogen Inc., but the company turned down Google's offer to seek funding from investors and major tech companies at a valuation of around $1 billion. Cyanogen Inc. CEO Kirt McMaster once said the company was "attempting to take Android away from Google" and that it was "putting a bullet through Google's head."
UPDATE 7/25/16: Cyanogen CEO and cofounder Kirt McMaster took to Twitter to dispel some of the rumors, tweeting: "Cyanogen NOT pivoting to apps. We are an OS company and our mission of creating an OPEN ANDROID stands. FALSE reporting was outstanding."
UPDATE 7/25/16: Cyanogen CEO and cofounder Kirt McMaster took to Twitter to dispel some of the rumors, tweeting: "Cyanogen NOT pivoting to apps. We are an OS company and our mission of creating an OPEN ANDROID stands. FALSE reporting was outstanding."
There is zero money to be made in Android applications. What a disaster.
... there will always be forks. That's the open source way. I'm not worried.
All the smart/talented employees they kept will be looking for new jobs now.
I happen to still be employed by Cyanogen, Inc and work on the OS side so take the rumors with a grain of salt.
Employees will know more after Tuesday.
For once, he'd be on topic.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
NSA back alley bribe shit
Perhaps the executives and HR department should have been fired. That would have been a far better decision.
* People were fed up with carrier-crap on their phones
* People were fed up with Google-crap on their phones
* CyanogenMod offered a crap-free phone OS
The "Cyanogen Inc" outfit tried to cash on the popularity of CyanogenMod. But they turned around, sold out, and baked their own crap into the OS. https://techcrunch.com/2016/01... Yes, MS Cortana. If I wanted a smartphone run by MS, I'd buy an MS smartphone already. This was a major betrayal of why people use CyanogenMod. And "Cyanogen Inc" is paying the price.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Sorry, fellow AC. You forgot to mention Micro$haft!
(It's funny because of the '$', lmao5318008)
Viva la boobie milk!
Overreact much, chickenshit anonymous poster? This is indeed a big deal and makes me very nervous about the fate of CyanogenMod (whose releases I use on some of my own Android devices), but it is far from a sign that open source software is a "disaster." This is bad, and I don't like it, but it is not a harbinger of doom for the greater open source community, which has a lot more to offer than one family of Android distros.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
should have taken google's offer and ran. idiots. absolutely nothing for them to want now, they were willing to pay a billion fucking dollars to kill the project...... your company is worth a sack of moldy bread now.
Crippling mental illness :(
Cyanogen Inc and its CyanogenMod project is basically the RedHat and Fedora of the Android ROM world. While losing CyanogenMod, in the worst case scenario, is going to be a loss and an annoyance in the short term, other ROM projects will take their place.
Speaking of alternatives, wasn't OmniROM supposed to be an alternative to CyanogenMod? I have had a good experience with older OmniROM ROMs, but their list of supported hardware is very short. Hope it gets better with time.
Slashdot Canned Response #31: "So... you're about 14 years old, right?"
--someone with mod points
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
TTIP has measures against 'anticompetitive" products such as open source software, freeware, homegrown vegetables and so on. Anything that could even remotely be an obstacle to Big Money making profits is outright banned and criminalized. You'll find out when it's signed before the end of the year. It's best for those people to be laid off now than being incarcerated later. Find another job, folks, and remember not to antagonize the masters.
I don't know. CyanogenMod was actually doing pretty well before MS came along. Seems more like "Oprah's" money poisoned the well.
Bullshit, Linux 1.2 ran quite well on my 486DX4/100 and supported all hardware. FreeBSD 2.2.8 ran nice on my K6/233. Even with basic 3D support. FreeBSD 4 ran great on my Athlon/600 with Adaptec 2940 (with a even bigger pile of SCSI drives, a Bernoulli and an Exabyte tape drive), Radeon 9200, 3COM PCI NIC and various other goodies.
It really wasn't until purposely locked down 802.11 and mutant locked down 3D accelerators that we even NEEDED commercial backing. And it wasn't until commercial backing that people felt the need that a timesharing/server/developer/power-user OS needed to be palatable for millennial retards thus killing the appeal for most people who made it awesome to begin with. GNOME3, KDE4, SystemD..... all abominations and very un-unix-like. And..... it's still not the year of the linux desktop for grandma no matter how much you try to integrate the worst of Windows and MacOS into a bloated buggy shitshow.
All this work over decades to replicate what UNIX users didn't want.... and then Google slaps a Java stack with a crippled poke-and-drool UI on top of the Linux kernel over a few years and it's in everyone's pocket. And desktop Linux sucks more than it ever did. Even MS wanted a piece of the Android pie, their piece just capitulated however.
You mean like windows phone 7, 7.8, 8, 8,1, 10? Yeah, closed source does much better in dumping software indeed.
I don't know. CyanogenMod was actually doing pretty well before MS came along. Seems more like "Oprah's" money poisoned the well.
This is hardly a surprise, no company properly survives partnering with Microsoft. Lists of past Microsoft partners were passed around when Nokia did it (there was a much more extensive one but I can't find it)
I think this is not only because Microsoft is incompetent or bad, it's probably not even mainly because they set out to destroy their partners. It is because Microsoft is, and always has been a slightly corrupt and amoral organisation. If you wanted a partner to develop your business you would find anybody else. When you see a company choosing to partner with Microsoft it either shows that somebody is trying to cash out before the business goes bad (like Linkedin I think) there's someone really criminally corrupt in charge (probably the Nokia case?) or that the people in charge haven't been following up on the history and haven't done their due diligence (almost certainly the case of parts of Nokia's board). Any one of these things is a bad sign for the future of a company.
I would really like to see a Hercules card do 8-bit color. That would be legendary. The only way that's happening is if you drop acid, wait an hour and stare at the screen.
You know slashdot is finished when this comment gets rated 'troll'. I feel you, ogdenk. Could not have said it better..
Wow, just wow.
An open source project shows some signs of problems and the MS zealots jump all over it.
If only we went off just as much when a closed source program that people use goes down the tubes.
I know i bit the troll but seriously, this is the bullshit the people actually swallow now days?
Nice knowing you.
Too bad you drank the Microsoft Cool Aid.
[Free and] Open Source is what allows a project to survive a corporate purge like this. If it was closed and proprietary when they shut things down and fired everybody that would be the end of the road. But in this case the beat goes on.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
Raise your hand if you didn't see this coming. Frankly, I'm shocked that people stayed with Cyanogen, Inc. after Microsoft got involved. Once Microsoft puts money into your company, it's time to start looking for a new job while you still have one.
Microsoft has always been the kiss of death, and it still surprises me when people don't see the writing on the wall.
It is completely absurd that they were valued at $1 billion. There is no way they would ever be worth that much.
I think you are very unfair to include KDE4 in that list. Yes, it was bad at 4.0 but that is ancient history now. Many years ago it surpassed KDE3 in every possible way and it works in pretty much the same way, just better. If KDE4 isn't "unix-like" I don't know what is. It does not deserve to be compared to Gnome and Systemd.
Companies that create open source software without legitimate businesses to offset the losses, are doomed to failure.
So true. When customers pay for a product, a small percentage of that is used to pay employees' salaries. In the case of open source software, a small percentage of $0 is still $0, because open source customers typically don't pay for software.
Nothing about GNOME3, KDE4, SystemD, etc prevents Linux from being packaged as the unix-like server of your wet dreams. But those things do help make it a viable desktop system. Of course, they also make it too much of a moving target to be a wildly successful desktop system, but hey... the desktop is changing and losing relevance. Android and ChromeOS are certainly relevant in what seems to be rising to replace the traditional desktop.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Another company destroyed by Microsoft's putrid touch. Who would have thought.
Bullshit, Linux 1.2 ran quite well on my 486DX4/100 and supported all hardware.
That is what I'd like to see ideally with stock android and all tablets. Give me the easy ability to at least try to put on whatever OS I want, and if it doesn't work, the ability to at least put back what was on there. I haven't actually used CyanogenMod, though I have looked at it a few times. Replacing an OS is usually more complicated on a generic android tablet than a PC and it does not have to be. It should be no more complicated than burning a usb flash drive and rebooting and maybe a few prompts. Security wise you could then just have it display the date the system was last flashed by the user, and that it was a user loaded OS at boot.
Instead we have this crap like Apple, Amazon and others sell that tries to lock you into their ecosystem. Perhaps we do need basic right to service and repair laws? I read awhile back that farmers could not even fix their own tractors.
Now Google can hire those android developer for much cheaper price
I think what he is talking about is how KDE has lost it's way. KDE3 had a very solid foundational philosophy based on everything is a file. That no matter what you accessed or how you accessed it or where it was in the end all you are accessing is a file. So from the user perspective you just needed a browser to access textFiles-documents-websites-media-NFS-SMB-SSH.. you name it. You could split the app into non overlapping windows ad infinitum and copy and paste from anything to anything as if there were no such things as different access or format types. That was goal. If you wanted to open that file with another tool it was right there in the left-click drop down menu or could be selected from the full list of applications available without having to search for the file from the application menu or application file browser.
KDE4 s-canned that whole schema instead creating a just-like-everyone-else file browser and web browser (pushing konqueror to the background with no more development) and focusing instead on little desktop gizmos that never really took off. And while I admit the KDE activities thing is pretty cool it doesn't make up for the fact that it takes longer for the desktop to load than it does for the rest of the OS. KDE has really just become a big just-another-desktop..
once more into the breach
Hmm, a new Slackware version was released a couple weeks ago, so you can still use Linux the Olde Skoole way.
Always replaced stock android with their when i got a new device. Get rid of the fluff and get control back.
Thank you for a voice of sanity and reason.
Historically the responses to reality is nothing but a shitshow. Slashdot didn't used to be like this. Now the youngsters think the shitshow is the new normal and rail against restoring sanity.
A decade later and my Linux desktop is just now beginning to be as good as it was a decade and a half ago - only still less stable. Systemd is a train wreck.
Should I start looking for a new distro on my Linux Mint partitions before the inevitable happens?
My past 3 or 4 phones have all been Google Nexus phones which I have unlocked and rooted. With each and every phone I've looked into installing CyanogenMod to get around the minor hassle of flashing roms and re-rooting every time Google release an update. Every single time I've installed CyanogenMod on a Nexus device, I've been incredibly disappointed. Not a single "stable" release for the Nexus 4 or 5 were in fact stable, with issues like the phone powering off after 5 minutes of inactivity and the phones heating up. When I mention this on the forums, I'm told to install the latest nightly release which I was not interested in doing because I avoiding installing new updates constantly was the initial reason why I looked into CyanogenMod in the first place.
Why would anyone offer or invest serious money into what was/is just a re-skin of android ?
You needed a rooted device for cm,so anything cm could do,it
could be achieved in other ways...
All cm did was to give more settings and options but the same end result could be achieved using other roms and apps/modules..
I eventually tried cm for 6 months on a nexus 7 lte,and still couldn't see what all the fuss was about...
Although, they won't be able to rely upon Cyanogen's company development any more, only the community work or forks.
OxygenOS could be the best fork now, although it benefited from Cyanogen's now fired dev team.
>> So, everyone who arrived at Cyanogen Inc. in Seattle this morning did so to lose their job (aside from those conducting the layoffs).
Once the paperwork clears and the dust settles, the ones who conducted the layoffs will themselves be subject to layoffs. WHY? They're not needed anymore. They performed the job they were needed for and now they are excess baggage. No need to hire more people for a while either.
Came in and worked them. Too bad they are dead meat anyway.
Just buy the cheapest possible Android for phone only and turn your phone into a FreeBSD device.
http://www.freebsd.org/where.html
arm packages available, way better than Android.
Yep and even half of the text editors out there will need 750MB of dependencies and install 90% of the crap you installed slackware to get away from anyway. An application shouldn't require installing most of a bloated desktop environment just to function. At most they should require a small GUI widget library and do everything else with standard OS functions and functionality provided by standard X11 libraries/extensions.
Unless you just want to run 20 year old software written in proper UNIX fashion, there's no realistic way to avoid the insanity. The shitshow has also made portability between mainstream Linux distros to different UNIX variants a complete nightmare.
So, just bought the Wileyfox Storm handset, which 'prides' itself on running Cyanogen OS. Was hoping to keep it current for 2 or 3 years. Guess it's stuck with what it's got right now then. Anything you want killing, just get me to buy it first.
It's amazing how many butthurt 15-25 year olds can't come to grips with the fact that they've destroyed something great and attempt to mod truth as trolling.
Funny; I feel the same way about most 0-40 year olds and the Internet.
CyanogenMod only had one notable OEM win: OnePlus. And then they left the fold to do their own OS. So it's not surprising that Cyanogen has concluded that there isn't any business there. But it's bad news for people with older phones that aren't getting updates from their makers.
No, CyanogenMod was actually doing pretty well before a majority of Android devices started showing up on the scenes locked down like Fort Knox. Most if not all devices sold in the United States are locked down by the carriers with locked bootloaders and no way to get root because the carriers want to control everything (Verizon being the worst of them all).
In addition to the MDA-with-graphics Hercules Graphics Card (HGC), Hercules also made a CGA clone called the Hercules Color Card designed to coexist with the HGC. I don't know if it's compatible enough to run the 8088 MPH demo. This was followed by a 16-of-64-color card comparable to EGA, called the Hercules InColor Card. But you're correct that no well-known Hercules card could do 256 explicit colors.
You needed a screen?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Overreact much, chickenshit anonymous poster?
Wow, a tough guy on slashdot. You don't see that every day.
exactly. big fan of KDE prior to 4. despite them always breaking things with every .0 release and not fixing em for ages. konqueror/dolphin was the last straw.
Its still shiny but they lost theor way