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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."
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.
* 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
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.
well, no. For better or for worse, Red Hat actually employs major contributors or otherwise supports upstream development for many desktop/server Linux distribution components. besides the kernel itself, there's glibc, systemd, gcc, and a whole bunch of other shit. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if more Red Hat-funded code in regular Android just from the kernel alone than there is Cyanogen code, and Android doesn't even use glibc or systemd!
Whereas Android is still overwhelmingly a a Google project, save for externally-developed open-source components that are shared outside of the mobile OS. Such as the kernel, to which Google is also a major contributor.
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.