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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Cyanogen Inc., the company built around the CyanogenMod open source Android OS ROM project, declined a acquisition offer by Google two years ago as it sought a $1 billion valuation. Now, the company has shut down its namesake open source development project and all its related services. Defiant CyanogenMod developers have now seized the project and relaunched it under the name LineageOS.
On December 23, a Cyanogen Inc. spokesperson posted a notice on the company's blog:
As part of the ongoing consolidation of Cyanogen, all services and Cyanogen-supported nightly builds will be discontinued no later than 12/31/16. The open source project and source code will remain available for anyone who wants to build CyanogenMod personally.
The move came just a week after the CyanogenMod development community released the final versions of CyanogenMod 13.0 and on the heels of the departure of Cyanogen Inc. co-founder and the founder of the development project itself, Steve "cyanogen" Kondik. The shutdown is essentially a death sentence for the CyanogenMod project, since the project's infrastructure was supported by the services being shut down.
[...] The LineageOS project has been set up on GitHub, and members of the team have created a placeholder project website at lineageos.org. As soon as it was clear that the fork had been launched, Cyanogen Inc. shut down all of CyanogenMod's infrastructure.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Saturday December 31 2016, @05:51AM
Who could have guessed that open source peeps would have a problem swapping Google as their information overlord for Microsoft. Everyone is just shocked to learn there wasn't a gusher of fame and money in that deal.
NOT.
Everybody thinks they can monetize Open Source. To date Red Hat has sorta managed, Moz Corp still lives... barely and that is about the whole list of efforts that didn't end in sudden pain or a very tiny shoestring effort barely employing a couple of peeps.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31 2016, @06:23AM
Everybody thinks they can monetize Open Source.
Everybody wants to be a zucking billionaire, but the truth is RMS wanted coders to be poor, and RMS wanted coders to work retail jobs to survive, just like he wrote in the Manifesto.
RMS is succeeding. It's your own fault for not reading the Manifesto.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31 2016, @09:56AM
not that Stallman wanted everyone to be poor, but that he realized the average programmer and the average clerk produced about the same level of productivity and financial work as far as the company is concerned. As programming became commoditized to the same level as other white collar work, of course the standard of pay went down to the level of other standardized labor. The only reason it paid so well before was because of the high barrier of entry to learn it initially, in education, software and equipment costs. Now that almost anybody can do it (as evidenced by years of questionable development) the price for 'average' programmers has gone down, and specialist/elite programmers pay has normalized to 'whatever a company requiring bespoke services is willing to pay.' Stallman always assumed the payment for code would be either an artisan endeavor (paid once for your work) or an ongoing affair (maintaining your work, ex any of the many types of maintenance engineer jobs in the meatspace realm.)
The era of the special snowflake programmer isn't over, but the barrier to entry to that sort of company or that level of pay, as can be expected any time technology leaps forward, has increased once again. If you have neither the intellect/foresight to understand where that is, or what trends are leading there, then you cannot profit from it, just like all the 'good enough' programmers who lost out during the first and second bubble bursts when financing technology was reevaluated on either it's actual merits, or its reassessed level of hype.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31 2016, @10:23AM
Oh no, don't tell the special snowflakes at webappernews [ycombinator.com] that their bubble will burst! They might give up on their precious side projects, and then how will we ever live without privacy-invading overdesigned webapps full of popunder malware ads?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by aristarchus on Saturday December 31 2016, @06:27AM
jmorris, you have committed one of the two classic blunders! The first is never get involved in a land war in Asia! The second, only slightly less known, is never try to monetize free software on the basis of property rights! This would have been obvious to anyone with half a brain? But like SCO, we suspect that some people do not have brains, because they are paid not to. These attacks will continue, until it becomes obvious that the digital age has changed the playing field entirely. It used to be the owners who controlled: they had the capital, they created the jobs. And now, it is the coders who control, they are the jobs, they destroy the jobs, Jobs is dead. Welcome to the post-scarcity economy, where rent-seeking behavior with be rewarded with death. Copyright is over. Capitalism is dead. jmorris is a dummy. Money will soon no longer matter.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31 2016, @06:36AM
Proposal to end internet advertising and proprietary software. Facebook becomes an agency of the United States federal government. All persons pay the Facebook Tax. GitHub becomes a subsidiary of Facebook. All software development happens on GitHub and is funded by the Facebook Tax. Under penalty of a trumping.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Saturday December 31 2016, @06:53AM
Chose the form of the Destroyer! Deus ex Machina has an entirely new definition, and the libertarians could be, well, not wrong.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday December 31 2016, @07:02AM
You're awfully optimistic about this. As far as I can tell, at the rate things are going, rentseeking will indeed be rewarded with death, but everyone else will have died first.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Saturday December 31 2016, @09:07AM
That's sounds very unlikely, since everyone else will be eager to have a chat with the rentseekers once things get bad enough.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Sunday January 01 2017, @04:17AM
The rentseekers are making it a point to set things up such that by the time "things get bad enough" everyone not on their team will be dead or worse, that's my point.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31 2016, @07:53PM
It's disappointing how many people who visit tech-oriented sites don't know the origin of FOSS.
They aren't aware of Stallman's malfunctioning printer [google.com] which was not easily field-correctable because its manufacturer would only provide a closed-source proprietary device driver.
In Stallman's vision, folks produce stuff that can NOT be duplicated at zero cost and, to supported those (hardware) products, they provide software which is open and can be parsed/modified/repaired/improved.
In the just world of Stallman's plan, folks would make money through manufacturing and support (actual work--not rent-seeking).
jmorris is a dummy
While I think we all know that, it's good to see it spelled out every now and then.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31 2016, @06:56AM
Moz Corp makes shitloads of money and is currently feeding from the bloated corpse of Yahoo. Even with their mismanagement of money they can last forever. They may even be able to leech off Google again and burn money on more useless projects.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31 2016, @11:05AM
Are you implying replacing variables named "master" and "slave" are not valuable projects worth thousands of dollars?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31 2016, @11:21AM
Mozilla is on Death's Door, even if they don't realize it yet. The only *REAL* question is whether the community will have enough sense to either pick it up and support it until an alternative is made, or start throwing serious effort into analyzing Chromium source code and fixing it to either be private by default, or have the hooks necessary for addon efforts to provide the same level of privacy as Firefox+extensions was capable of.
Given the fact that Chrome is almost the whole browser market at this point the latter might stand better odds of remaining compatible, but the former would be better for ensuring diversity in the ecosystem (even if the modified chromium browser diverged enough to avoid many of the chrome based browser exploits.)
(Score: 5, Informative) by Ayn Anonymous on Saturday December 31 2016, @09:47AM
Why the fuck is the Microsoft deal not mentioned in the article ?
https://www.wired.com/2015/04/microsoft-google-cyanogen/ [wired.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by Ayn Anonymous on Saturday December 31 2016, @09:54AM
Palo Alto, CA. — April 16, 2015 — Cyanogen Inc. and Microsoft Corp. announced a partnership to integrate popular Microsoft services across the Cyanogen Operating System
https://cyngn.com/press/cyanogen-announces-strategic-partnership-with-microsoft [cyngn.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31 2016, @10:46AM
Ewww
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 01 2017, @03:44AM
So it took $70 million from Microsoft two years ago and still went under?
There must've been incredible mismanagement, or possibly worse.
See, this is why we need professional journalists. I bet there's a big story here and it has nothing to do with turning down Google.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31 2016, @12:20PM
All free software exclusively, all the time. [replicant.us]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 31 2016, @03:17PM
Unless I read the compatibility charts wrong, no supported hardware is completely supported. FOSS only but your phone won't function to make calls.
(Score: 5, Funny) by wonkey_monkey on Saturday December 31 2016, @12:27PM
LineageOS
Yikes. Why not called it GeezerOS or CrinolineMod?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Sunday January 01 2017, @12:32PM
It looks like the OmniROM [omnirom.org] folks were right in going their own way, when Cyanogen went commercial. Perhaps LineageOS can now merge resources with them.