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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 will always be forks. That's the open source way. I'm not worried.
Cyanogen Inc is turning into just another Wall Street hedge fund like Uber and Pokemon, whose main business will be in the derivatives markets. "Android applications" is irrelevant to the portfolio. Lots of weird shit happening in the markets. I wonder if if all this "capitalization" is nothing a setup for a big crash (correction, amirite?) this fall. Might be a good idea to cash out by the end of August, and then pick up some good bargains in December.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
* 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
Well I wouldn't be that certain about that. But it's certainly stupid to knife the OS development arm, which was the only thing they had which was unique, for application development which is crowded with competition from everyone and their dog.
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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.
136 employees before layoffs? Amazon could absorb that in a DAY and not even blink. I'm not exaggerating.
Maybe so, but I don't care much about Amazon firing or hiring 30 people, because they don't produce/polish my mobile operating system. Granted, I'm sure someone will successfully fork CyanogenMod if Cyanogen kills it, but I kind of like it as it is, since it actually works fairly well.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
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.
I hope CyanogenMod continues. Combined with Nova Launcher and some other apps, it makes a very stable, decent platform for day to day use, and a phone upgrade (assuming it has an unlockable bootloader) doesn't mean a UI change.
The alternatives are "meh". At best, I there are people in the XDA forums who are top tier ROM chefs, making something custom that helps a device work quite well, but this can vary on device and how popular (or not) it might be. Most likely it might be a factory ROM, rooted, and debloated, but I'd rather have something built right from the ground up.
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.
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.
Indeed. They have gone and killed what made them unique to now compete in the cheap-trash mass-market. Corporate suicide at its best.
What will be interesting to see is whether Cyanogen Mod survives. The fired OS-group should start their own company and carry on. Maybe try Patreon financing or something like it.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Well I wouldn't be that certain about that. But it's certainly stupid to knife the OS development arm, which was the only thing they had which was unique, for application development which is crowded with competition from everyone and their dog.
Let's go around in circles, though: What made their OS development arm unique was their apps, that were designed not to work with AOSP like a well-designed app would. Meanwhile, AOKP and SOKP are supporting more devices between them than Cyanogenmod, so what do they actually have to offer other than their apps? Conclusion, stick with the apps.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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