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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.
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
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.
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.
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