Cyanogen Inc and CyanogenMod Creator Steve Kondik Part Ways (ndtv.com) 75
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.'"
"We'll pivot into apps" (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Still a need for what he was origally doing (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
CyanogenMod is the only hope for some devices... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.)
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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.
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Kondikmod?
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What would you do for a Kondikmod?
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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.)
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Sounds like they've got bigger problems than the forked name and the color of their new logo though...
Indeed.
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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 [cyngn.com]] for a ***name*** ??? Get real, their legal team would have done a total number of the entire operation. Fuck those guys.
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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... [slashdot.org]
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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
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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?
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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...
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Yet, you did.
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Thank goodness that Captain Pedantic and his faithful sidekick, Anal Boy are here to save us all from the dangers of possible misunderstandings.
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No need to thank me, citizen.
I'm just one man, doing his part.
Re: Still a need for what he was origally doing (Score:2)
"Free Speech" doesn't exclusively refer to the First Amendment.
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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 pr
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This is exactly the type of project where "Open Source" needs to figure out a business model. 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.
There are plenty of examples of software that "needs" to be supported without being owned by a corporate interest. OpenSSL comes to mind (and they are now getting support from the Core Infrastructure Foundation, which is
Re:Still a need for what he was origally doing (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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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 per
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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 t
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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
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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
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...and where did I say he needs to do it for free?
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...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.
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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.
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Sure, tell it to all those who bought an Omnia 7...
Re:Android fans will just compile themselves...not (Score:4, Insightful)
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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?
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
...Extinguish (Score:5, Insightful)
Good Job, Microsoft!
Re:...Extinguish (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Fork it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Fork it (Score:4, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org].
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).
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it's
D'oh!
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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 co
FIrst Maemo/Meego and then Cyanogen? (Score:1)
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. B
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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.
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I remember when the cursor in X11 would lag pathetically.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
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I guess your graphics card didn't have hardware cursor support. I had a an S3 968 with VRAM.
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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.
Not surprising (Score:1)
FORK FORK FORK!!!!!! (Score:3)
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.
Cyanogen OS vs CyanogenMod (Score:2)
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