Cyanogen Inc and CyanogenMod Creator Steve Kondik Part Ways (ndtv.com)

bulled writes: In the middle of a press release discussing the move of employees from Seattle to California, Cyanogen Inc notes that it has parted ways with Steve Kondik. It is unclear what this means for the future of CyanogenMod. NDTV reports: "Kondik took to the official CyanogenMod developer Google+ community recently where he voiced what he thought were the reasons behind Cyanogen's plight and blamed Kirt McMaster, Cyanogen's Co-Founder. 'I've been pretty quiet about the stuff that's been going on but I'm at least ready to tell the short version and hopefully get some input on what to do next because CM is very much affected,' wrote Kondik in a private Google+ community first reported by Android Police. According to Kondik's version, Cyanogen's turmoil is way far from being over. He claimed that Cyanogen had seen success thanks to the efforts by the community and the company. Though, this also changed how the company worked. Explaining how it all started to come down, Kondik wrote, 'Unfortunately once we started to see success, my co-founder apparently became unhappy with running the business and not owning the vision. This is when the 'bullet to the head' and other misguided media nonsense started, and the bad business deals were signed. Being second in command, all I could do was try and stop it, do damage control, and hope every day that something new didn't happen. The worst of it happened internally and it became a generally shitty place to work because of all the conflict. I think the backlash from those initial missteps convinced him that what we had needed to be destroyed. By the time I was able to stop it, I was outgunned and outnumbered by a team on the same mission.' Kondik also seemingly confirmed a report from July which claimed Cyanogen may pivot to apps. He further wrote, 'Eventually I tried to salvage it with a pivot that would have brought us closer to something that would have worked, but the new guys had other plans. With plenty of cash in the bank, the new guys tore the place down and will go and do whatever they are going to do. It's probably for the best and I wish them luck, but what I was trying to do, is over.'"

Comments

"We'll pivot into apps"

[tietokone-olmi]

Famous second-to-last words, really. Used to be "we'll pivot into mobile", back in the early aughties, and that never worked out either.

Re:"We'll pivot into apps"

[msauve]

To quote Ren & Stimpy: "Appy, appy, joy, joy!"

Still a need for what he was origally doing

[JustNiz]

I knew Cyanogenmod was doomed as soon as Microsoft bought it.

Steve Kondik needs to go back to his roots and just do better android ports for common devices again. There's still a big need for it.

Re:Still a need for what he was origally doing

[JustNiz]

Ubuntu is free to download/use yet Canonical's revenue is somewhere near $30 million/yr.

>> How do you feel justified in even suggesting it?
Beacuse this is a forum for sharing ideas, and last time I checked free speech is a thing?

Re:Still a need for what he was origally doing

[Archangel Michael]

There is a strong vision in something like CyanogenMod, and that can be leveraged into "profits" given the right view.

I personally thought the original vision of Cyanogen Inc was towards the right track. However, once they kicked OnePlus to the curb for "more" (India) they lost almost all credibility they had in going that route. No real Handset Maker would ever do business with them after that.

The rest of whatever credibility they had left over , was gone the moment they were "bought" by Microsoft and started to Bing up the joint.

I don't care what the reasons were for either of those two "missteps", they killed Cyanogen Inc.

There are two valid moves Steve can make at this point, both I've seen mentioned elsewhere. First is take CM, and put it under a 501.c.3 Umbrella, and crowd source development. The other option is to "restart" the Company, but without a douchebag running it, and focus on taking lagging older handsets and getting them patched and updated, with (preferably) the blessings of the maker (good PR for both) or without.

IMHO these are not mutually exclusive either. The latter is going to take some time to get trust rebuilt, but it would pay huge if he found someone who knew the vision and could keep the focus tight (I volunteer, but I rather doubt anyone would take me up on it). There is still a need for custom/slim ROMs out there that aren't branded Nexus/Pixel/Chrome/Whatever

Re:Still a need for what he was origally doing

[farble1670]

Steve Kondik needs to go back to his roots and just do better android ports for common devices again. There's still a big need for it.

Although I'm sure you'd love him to spend his days and nights building software for free, I suspect he needs to eat and pay his electric bill.

He needs to get with a business person that can build something around his skills. What I thought CM, Inc was supposed to be was a company that one could contract do bring up and support for your hardware, or perhaps take over support for older devices. It's not exactly exciting, but device manufacturers would fall over themselves to pay someone to take that nightmare off their hands.

He should have bailed when his CEO started that "take Android back from Google" crap.
http://gizmodo.com/cyanogen-wa...

What an idiot.

Re:Still a need for what he was origally doing

[JustNiz]

...and where did I say he needs to do it for free?

Re:Still a need for what he was origally doing

[DrXym]

Ubuntu's revenue comes from support and licensing. The free dist seeds their market, creating a community, demand, mindshare etc. These feeds back into support contracts and other revenue streams.

While the model isn't analogous for a phone firmware, I think Cyanogen Inc. could have made a go of it by taking the open source CyanogenMod and producing and supporting custom firmwares for phone manufacturers. They started doing that with the OnePlus, proving they were capable of it but almost instantly then proving how volatile they were by immediately entering into a contract dispute.

Then Cyanogen Inc made some disastrously fuckwitted statements about "destroying" Google by producing some kind of alternate services layer. They may as well have just tied scrap metal to their legs and jumped into the ocean at that point. It would have been cheaper.

Meanwhile CM has chugged along. It's working on CM 14.1 at the moment. If there is any doubt about its financing or branding I'm sure the community as a whole can just take themselves over to a new site. It might mean a month's worth of disruption but other projects did it.

Re:Still a need for what he was origally doing

[DrXym]

The easiest way to turn CM into profit is to sign some contracts with phone manufacturers or network operators and produce versions of CM under a support contract. Cyanogen Inc actually did that with the OnePlus but almost immediately fell into a dispute with them because they'd also signed some exclusivity contract with a no-name phone maker for the Indian market. This dispute ended up with OnePlus rolling their own firmware. So Cyanogen simultaneously proved they had the technical prowess to produce commercial grade firmware and absolutely no business acumen to go with it causing the whole thing to collapse. After that little disaster they declared war on Google. They lost.

Re:Still a need for what he was origally doing

[DrXym]

Exactly. Maintaining phone firmware is an enormous drain on resources and generally a pain in the ass. Cyanogen had the capacity to streamline the process and do it cheaper and better than any in-house team and still make a profit. Instead they declared they would "destroy" Google. I bet interest in their business model virtually dried up over night after that - Google putting the screws on mobos or the mobos themselves choosing not to associate with such hubris.

Re: Still a need for what he was origally doing

[therealkevinkretz]

"Free Speech" doesn't exclusively refer to the First Amendment.

Re:Still a need for what he was origally doing

[Ash-Fox]

This is exactly the type of project where "Open Source" needs to figure out a business model.

Just run it as a business and make it open source, that's all you need to be open source and have a roof over your head.

There needs to be a way for people working on a "very important project" to be able to make a living without selling into corporate interests that might otherwise change the organization's mission.

Oh, there is. You just do the open source project your spare time (a lot of people aren't willing to do that though) and do a seperate day job.

Re:Still a need for what he was origally doing

[JustNiz]

As a sidenote: If the only way you can think of for posting something is "Anonymous Coward", then I probably don't want to read it anyway...

Re:Still a need for what he was origally doing

[Wulf2k]

Yet, you did.

Re:Still a need for what he was origally doing

[JustNiz]

Thank goodness that Captain Pedantic and his faithful sidekick, Anal Boy are here to save us all from the dangers of possible misunderstandings.

Re:Still a need for what he was origally doing

[lexman098]

I knew Cyanogenmod was doomed as soon as Microsoft bought it.

Steve Kondik needs to go back to his roots and just do better android ports for common devices again. There's still a big need for it.

I knew it was doomed when Xposed for Lollipop was released. There's not a "big" need for it, and you just end up with some amateur developers compiling it for your device without the ability to really fix any major bugs.

Re:Still a need for what he was origally doing

[i.kazmi]

Are there any open source projects you have worked on personally?

You seem to be under the impression that its advisable for someone to code 8-12 hours a day at a day job and then spend another 8-12 hours a day working on an open source project. While I have personally contributed to some open source projects back in the day and know some people who have at some point in their life done something similar, despite being someone who loves to code there is only so much coding you can handle during a 24 hour period what with the need to sleep, socialize and maybe even indulge in a useless hobby like gaming or stamp collecting or watching tv shows (all of which, mind you, are human needs). There is a reason that these days most successful open source projects aren't created/maintained as a hobby but are full time jobs.

Re:Still a need for what he was origally doing

[i.kazmi]

Not really, I have a HTC Desire HD sitting on my desk, I have tried multiple ROMs and the performance is atrocious on pretty much all of them (frequent hangs, random reboots, especially annoying if it happens during a phone call).

I also have a Samsung Galaxy S4 running Cyanogenmod 13.1 sitting on my desk and while it is still mostly functional, it has started to struggle with some of the latest apps, lacks hardware encryption and doesn't have a fingerprint scanner and I am looking at a replacement (thinking of getting an LG G5 at the moment because it seems to tick all the boxes).

Re:Still a need for what he was origally doing

[Ash-Fox]

Are there any open source projects you have worked on personally?

Yeah, my last notable project that I contributed for years to was Exodus Viewer as a hobby. Although, I have stopped contributing to that project when I started doing 100 hour work weeks in 2014 (and since left that job towards the end of 2015).

You seem to be under the impression that its advisable for someone to code 8-12 hours a day at a day job and then spend another 8-12 hours a day working on an open source project.

Nah, that's just your assumption, I'm not expecting people to work another 8-12 hours (I was typically doing 1 hour after work and 12 hours over the weekend). I could probably have done more if I wasn't spending it doing other hobbies.

There is a reason that these days most successful open source projects aren't created/maintained as a hobby but are full time jobs.

Indeed, I don't dispute that. But the issue being raised was a way for people working on a "very important project" to be able to make a living without selling into corporate interests that might otherwise change the organization's mission and I provided one that I have personally done myself.

Re:Still a need for what he was origally doing

[i.kazmi]

An hour a day or even 2-3 hours a day is not going to cut it when working on something like Cyanogenmod even if someone is maintaining only a couple of devices. It is a time consuming (and pretty expensive) endeavor that will very quickly turn into a full time job. Add to that the fact that there aren't that many people who are doing it and the situation only becomes worse (people are more interested in creating their own ROMs as opposed to working on something like Cyanogen or Paranoid or Omni etc unless there is some incentive involved).

So if working on something like CyanogenMod with a full time job is not really viable, what other options are available to developers? Most people do not want to donate money (I paid for the PHONE, why the fsck do I have to pay for a software upgrade?) so that's not a revenue stream that can be relied upon and a lot of people seem to think they're entitled to support by the devs so there are a lot of pretty rude comments if a device hasn't received an update (just visit the CyanogenMod forums sometime or just look through the comments here and witness someone complaining about how their HTC Desire HD (released 2010) is still on CM 7 (I own that phone, installed a couple Android 4 ROMs on it which resulted in a myriad of problems because of hardware not being upto snuff)) which results in bad publicity. How do developers manage the development and testing of an OS for hundreds of devices and marketing to offset bad publicity without a stable revenue stream?

Re:Still a need for what he was origally doing

[Ash-Fox]

An hour a day or even 2-3 hours a day is not going to cut it when working on something like Cyanogenmod even if someone is maintaining only a couple of devices.

I wasn't suggesting someone do it alone either. That said... With Exodus Viewer, we had to regularly merge upstream which would have significant changes all across the board. A merge would take me two weeks typically and it wasn't because I was slow, but because this a project that reaches around 100MB in source code alone for the main project (and that's ignoring project specific changes to external libraries it depends). When you're having to keep up to date with a company that hires 500+ people, it's pretty hard and that isn't even including contractors they bring on. So, I very much imagine maintaining roms isn't really that easy either considering the projects they merge between.

We just worked following a kanban and a few scrum practices that worked for our team to get work done. Your road may vary.

It is a time consuming (and pretty expensive) endeavor that will very quickly turn into a full time job.

When it came to merging, we were able to distribute work between people on the team that were better at different bits. Such as, I merged in networking changes, backend bits, our rendering expert would do merges relating to graphics engine etc.

In short, you need more contributors under the model I was talking about. But, the first thing you need to do to make any project like this work is to accept the reality and then to bend reality to your will by putting effort into making it work.

Add to that the fact that there aren't that many people who are doing it

That's really a common issue really anywhere.

people are more interested in creating their own ROMs as opposed to working on something like Cyanogen or Paranoid or Omni etc unless there is some incentive involved

I think that's healthy, it allows exploring other things honestly.

So if working on something like CyanogenMod with a full time job is not really viable, what other options are available to developers?

If general users think it's important enough, you could probably get a patreon to fund developing it full time. But my experience in such things shows me a lot of users are willing to use a product, but not even1% of them are interested in contributing towards it.

Most people do not want to donate money

I've been down this road. Mac users complaining I don't have a mac client, but then upset when I ask for money to buy the Mac needed to develop, test and compile on and that's just asking for money irregularly to meet certain vocal user interests.

a lot of people seem to think they're entitled to support by the devs so there are a lot of pretty rude comments if a device hasn't received an update

That kind of community response is part of the reason why I don't want to take on projects like that anymore.

How do developers manage the development and testing of an OS for hundreds of devices and marketing to offset bad publicity without a stable revenue stream?

With Exodus Viewer, we had automation running through our continious integration environment using (and thanks to following test driven development, our tests were pretty wholesome) that would spin up and do automated testing for each significant commit on a variety of virtual machine that had every variation of operating system and supported configuration we were looking at. This took away from needing many testers, the few testers we had used exploratory testing methodology to better use their time. I was running the automated testing from two servers in my apartment.

If I'm going to apply this to a mobile ROM project... In one of my previous work

Re:Still a need for what he was origally doing

[DrXym]

Mobo - mobile operator.

Re:Still a need for what he was origally doing

[farble1670]

...and where did I say he needs to do it for free?

You didn't. I just observed that when he did it before it was for no pay, and you didn't (and I can't think of) anyway he's going to get paid unless it's via a proper business relationship with the device manufacturer.

Re:Still a need for what he was origally doing

[Wulf2k]

No need to thank me, citizen.

I'm just one man, doing his part.

CyanogenMod is the only hope for some devices...

[mlts]

I know for some devices, CM is the only way the device will ever see security patches and updates. I hope this doesn't mean that this project dies, just because it is so useful, especially for owners of devices that are not big hits (the HTC A9 comes to mind.)

Re:CyanogenMod is the only hope for some devices..

[JustNiz]

He needs to re-start the project under his guidance only and keep it independent. No big corporate interests involved.
Obviously he cant call the new project Cyanogenmod anymore, partly because it isn't, and also because Microsoft or some other corporate entity owns that name now.

...Extinguish

[TheFakeTimCook]

Yep, the old formula is still working.

Good Job, Microsoft!

Re:...Extinguish

[Jesus_666]

Microsoft had nothing to do with this beyond picking up the pieces. Cyanogen Inc.'s penchant for spectacularly bad business decisions (such as offering an unrestricted worldwide license to one company while simultaneously offering an exclusive license for the Indian market to another) doomed the company from the beginning. And PR moves like "We'll kill Google by releasing a product based on one of Google's products." didn't help either.

A shame, really. Affordable handsets with known-good CM compatibility, no crapware and actual, real updates would've been a nice thing. But due to Cyanogen's leadership being farcically inept that just wasn't possible.

Re:CyanogenMod is the only hope for some devices..

[Yvan256]

Kondikmod?

Fork it

[DrXym]

It wouldn't be the first time that a community decamped from a project by forking it and picking off from a new website.

Re:Fork it

[chihowa]

I'll just leave this here, in case you think that the word "cyanogen" was made up just recently by this phone OS project: cyanogen.

The android project is in fact named after an extremely toxic compound (or generally a class of compounds) that contains the cyanide moiety. The "cyan" part of cyanide is just a historical curiosity based on it's original synthesis (from Prussian Blue).

Re:Fork it

[chihowa]

it's

D'oh!

Re:Fork it

[rectalfeeding]

Thanks. I wasn't very aware of that history, nor the wikipedia snippet I'll post below when I made the comment, but I feel somewhat vindicated even though someone downmodded my already karmatically unenhanced comment. Jerk.

CyanogenMod grew in popularity, and a community of developers, called the CyanogenMod Team (and informally "Team Douche"[17])

So yes, I'll double down on my original comment that naming your product after a poison, or your development team after a term with sexist and/or derogatory connotations, might have clearly displayed an intent to repel a majority of potential users instead of attract them. What a disservice those branding choices did for the wider public's general ability to obtain viable alternatives to the open source android mobile phone OS.

FIrst Maemo/Meego and then Cyanogen?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I had my way we could have great flagship phones and tablets running real linux with real root and normal mainline linux programs and x11, like we had with the Maemo Linux N900 for example.
But that tool Elop cried burning platform and then burned the successful and growing Nokia Linux phones line for WinCE phones.
Now I can get a Nexus tablet to work as well as android can but thanks to CYanogenmod without Google if I instead install the F-droid repos and sandbox any other dl'd apk apps I have to have. But with this I ask, why can we not have nice things?
When is the mythical mainstreamed Linux/Android kernel coming so I can at least have crappy Linux bin drivers for a few years on flagship hardware? Can I also get a real OTG microUSB port, a MicroSD card slot, big swappable battery, and a hardware KB? I am happy to trade awesome for a $h!tty skinny snap&crack screen phone.

Re:FIrst Maemo/Meego and then Cyanogen?

[cheesybagel]

I still remember when I ran Linux/X11 on a Pentium with 16 MB of RAM. Paltry specs compared with a modern smartphone. Yet X11 is considered "heavy" for some reason. Feh.

Re:FIrst Maemo/Meego and then Cyanogen?

[rickb928]

I remember when the cursor in X11 would lag pathetically.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

Re:FIrst Maemo/Meego and then Cyanogen?

[silentcoder]

UbuntuPhone was supposed to be that - and the dock-and-become-a-PC idea is brilliant.

Too bad the actual product ended up being so utterly inferior to everything else on the market. Great design, horrible execution.

Re:FIrst Maemo/Meego and then Cyanogen?

[cheesybagel]

I guess your graphics card didn't have hardware cursor support. I had a an S3 968 with VRAM.

Re:CyanogenMod is the only hope for some devices..

[ArhcAngel]

Magentamod is the obvious choice.

Re:Android fans will just compile themselves...not

[r1348]

Sure, tell it to all those who bought an Omnia 7...

Re:Android fans will just compile themselves...not

[EEPROMS]

hold your horses there sparky, Apple and Microsoft do have updates but both have has issues with updating older hardware. In Apples case many of the updates would make the phone perform like crap as the hardware was too old. I have a Nexus 6 that is 3 years old and I am running Android 7 with no issues or hacks needed. The issue is for all mobile devices after approx 3 years the software starts to exceed the ability of the device itself. So you end up shoehorning a size 13 software foot into a size 9 hardware shoe. Neither Apple or Microsoft offer the option to build a custom rom to fit your now out dated device so android devices is as good as it gets especially if you want to hang on to the hardware for a long period of time.

Re:CyanogenMod is the only hope for some devices..

[NotAPK]

He will probably find, sadly, a rash of contractual obligations prohibiting him from doing any such thing. What, you thought Microsoft paid good money [no amount available] for a ***name*** ??? Get real, their legal team would have done a total number of the entire operation. Fuck those guys.

Re:Android fans will just compile themselves...not

[blahbooboo]

hold your horses there sparky, Apple and Microsoft do have updates but both have has issues with updating older hardware. In Apples case many of the updates would make the phone perform like crap as the hardware was too old. I have a Nexus 6 that is 3 years old and I am running Android 7 with no issues or hacks needed. The issue is for all mobile devices after approx 3 years the software starts to exceed the ability of the device itself. So you end up shoehorning a size 13 software foot into a size 9 hardware shoe. Neither Apple or Microsoft offer the option to build a custom rom to fit your now out dated device so android devices is as good as it gets especially if you want to hang on to the hardware for a long period of time.

Actually Apple supports their devices a heck of a lot longer than Android has done so far... iphone 5 i own, still getting updates, iPad 2 got updates 2011-2016. Name an Android phone still getting updates from 2012?

Re:CyanogenMod is the only hope for some devices..

[Anonymous Coward]

What would you do for a Kondikmod?

Re:Android fans will just compile themselves...not

[farble1670]

Apple supports their devices a heck of a lot longer than Android has done so far

Actually, there's no company called "Android" so that comment doesn't even make sense.

Re:Android fans will just compile themselves...not

[blahbooboo]

Your reply is just avoiding the discussion by nitpicking. You're a smart person, you get what i was saying. How about contribute to the discussion next time instead?

Re:Android fans will just compile themselves...not

[Zak3056]

Apple supports their devices a heck of a lot longer than Android has done so far

Actually, there's no company called "Android" so that comment doesn't even make sense.

Substitute "all OEMs producing hardware running Android" and it's still true. We're about to move from being a 100% Android shop to a 100% IOS shop, and that's one of the main reasons.

The Android philosophy is 100% superior to Apple ("Whatever meets your needs" vs "Walled Garden") but the execution has been piss poor.

Not surprising

[OneHundredAndTen]

Microsoft laid its foul paws on this company, which is, as a consequence, doomed. Consider yourself middle-fingered, Microsoft.

Re:CyanogenMod is the only hope for some devices..

[JustNiz]

No of course not. They want to embrace, extend, extinguish as usual.
Apparently Microsoft's share holders are still pushing for Microsoft to do their own mobile.

https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...

FORK FORK FORK!!!!!!

[ninthbit]

For fucks sake, fork that bitch ,call it C-Mod or OpenCyan and get that bitch fixed. No one cares what the trademark branding crap.

Re:CyanogenMod is the only hope for some devices..

[gweihir]

The color "magenta" is protected in Germany as a trademark for Deutsche Telekom. (Yes, these fuckers need to die, but the have government backing and money.)

Re:CyanogenMod is the only hope for some devices..

[TheRaven64]

Unfortunately, it's not so great at that. I have an HTC Desire (Bravo in the USA) that still works and I'd like to reuse as a SIP client. Unfortunately, it only runs CM 7.2. That would be fine if it were a patched version, but the latest nightly build was 2013 and that's so old that it doesn't contain an up-to-date certificate list or an SSL client library that supports modern versions of the TLS protocol, meaning that you can't use it for anything network connected.

Sure, the device is pretty old, but it has a 1GHz CPU, 512MB of RAM, and up to 32GB of flash on the SD card: that's ample for a lot of uses (it wasn't so long ago that I was using a desktop less powerful!) and throwing it away seems horribly wasteful. It was launched in 2010 and the last release (not nightly) from CM was 2012. That's less long-term support than Apple gives for iOS devices and Google gives for Nexus devices. Unfortunately, there's not much money to be made in supporting hardware that the manufacturers consider to be obsolete.

Re:CyanogenMod is the only hope for some devices..

[gweihir]

Sounds like they've got bigger problems than the forked name and the color of their new logo though...

Indeed.

Cyanogen OS vs CyanogenMod

[Dynamoo]

Cyanogen OS isn't quite the same thing as CyanogenMod. The OS is a commercial product that manufacturers can buy for your smartphone product (e.g. OnePlus One, Wileyfox). It's a rather nice Android offering, but Cyanogen Inc borked it.. especially their relationship with OnePlus.

As for CyanogenMod.. well, /. readers probably know what that is. Not always the most stable of offerings, but most Android devices (and even HP's WebOS ones) can run it which is a big plus. The Android world is a better place for CyanogenMod and to be honest it should have been a better place with Cyanogen OS. But I'm not really sure that one organisation should try to do both..

Re:Android fans will just compile themselves...not

[farble1670]

Your reply is just avoiding the discussion by nitpicking. You're a smart person, you get what i was saying. How about contribute to the discussion next time instead?

You are right. The fact that there are actually tens (hundreds) of companies building unique hardware that runs Android has nothing at all to do with the complexity of pushing updates to those devices.

How about you look deeper than the last "ANDROID IS FRAGMENTED" headline you read from some shitty online click bait source?

You're a smart person

Actually, I thought you might be able to parse the sarcasm to see what I was getting at. I was wrong.