Cyanogen Mod Goes Commercial To Make "Available On Everything, To Everyone" 230
The popular Cyanogen Mod distribution of the Android Open Source Project dropped a bombshell today: the founding members have formed a corporation (currently with a team of seventeen hackers) to work on the project with the founder of Boost Mobile as the CEO. Quoting the announcement: "You have probably seen the pace of development pick up drastically over the past few months. More devices supported, bigger projects such as CM Account, Privacy Guard, Voice+, a new version of Superuser, and secure messaging. We vastly improved our infrastructure. We’re doing more bug fixes, creating more features, and improving our communication. We think that the time has come for your mobile device to truly be yours again, and we want to bring that idea to everybody. ... So what does this all mean for the community? The first thing I wanted to do when I realized we were actually doing this, was tell everyone possible. But when starting a company, you have to think about the larger picture. This meant not announcing until the time was right, our house was in order and we would have something to show. I have seen open source projects come and go, some being bought out and closed, others stagnating and falling by the wayside. I don’t want to see this happen with CM."
Re:they have a girl!!!!!!! (Score:2, Informative)
You and the 4 or the 5 ppl below you are morons.
Good long term support = $$$ (Score:5, Informative)
I have installed Cyanogenmod on a couple of devices that the phone maker stopped supporting long ago. I get all the new yummy android stuff without buying a new phone.
I can see this as a large selling point for companies who want to keep their devices up to date with security patches.
CM upgrades rock (Score:5, Informative)
Let me also point out that Cyanogenmod has now built in the ability to upgrade/update by a few simple clicks on your phone's interface. It really rocks.
Re:ugh! too mainstream! (Score:5, Informative)
Bluetooth low energy [wikipedia.org] doesn't work on the Samsung Galaxy line because Samsung won't release the hardware specs on it. If you want to make use of BLE then you need to run a TouchWiz ROM. All the other standard Bluetooth seem to work just fine.
Re:Will it remain open source and free-as-in-speec (Score:5, Informative)
To answer some of my own question, this is their response in their Reddit AMA [reddit.com]:
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We are in the process of setting up a nonprofit to foster the open source side.
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There are no plans to close the source for things such as device support and work done in the community. We do need to build value for the company, and there are various things we are working on that require significant time and capital to develop- these may be proprietary but we won't pervert/close the core OS for this to happen.
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Our strength is that we have a strong open source community behind us.
The core of the project (hardware support, community contributions, etc) will always remain open source. But obviously, as a company that has financial needs, employees to pay, Cooper treats to buy, and Cyanogen-babies to feed, we will need to make careful decisions about what we open source, and what may become proprietary.