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Mobile OS outfit Cyanogen has made further sackings and parted ways with founder Steve Kondik.
A post by CEO Lior Tal says the company is closing its Seattle office and consolidating a single Palo Alto abode.
"The purpose of the change is to improve the communication and performance of the team which will now operate under one roof," Tal writes. "This consolidation effort will allow us to build in greater efficiencies and reduce restrictions in our product development lifecycle. Understandably some are unable to follow their role and relocate. We appreciate and value all of the amazing work these individuals have provided to the growth and success of Cyanogen."
Folks who work in Seattle will be offered the chance to make the move south.
Tal also says "With these changes, Cyanogen has separated ties with Steve Kondik, allowing him to continue to forge his path as he sees fit. We wish him the best of luck in his next venture."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @08:58PM
The commercialization of Cyanogen basically killed it for anything I was interested in. I also remember reading a comment on the green site or a linked article's comments section by someone who had been a contributor to Cyanogen in the early days and was responsible for one of the major features touted it in explaining how the CM guys including Kondik claimed the features for themselves and forgot about all the other contributors who helped make it a success while commercializing it for their own benefit, rather than that of the community. The result of it was a lot of previously enthusiastic talent throwing in the towel on android development or CM development, leading to it falling behind. Combined with the majority of developers only developing for fancy higher-end phones and ignoring the (at the time) still 'insecure' low end phones, many of which could have been fully imaged, firmware'd, and supported without signed bootloaders, kernels, or other firmware, and you get an ecosystem which became toxic to itself and its users, leaving us with the morass of proprietary and insecure android cellphones we have today.
Finding a way to fund open source projects is important, but going the for-profit route, unless you draft a corporate charter and only crowdsource investment, to keep control and vision on 'making great open source software, monetized only as much that I can live modestly and produce.' Doing otherwise results in a loss of vision, a focus on next quarter profits or earnings, and a slowly dwindling supporter base as you stop providing what the 'customer' wants, and instead decide you know what the customer needs.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Nerdfest on Wednesday December 07 2016, @09:44PM
I don't mind fair commercialization, especially if it's for supporting the servers, paying the lead devs maybe, that sort of thing. Jumping in bed with Microsoft is a completely different matter though.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday December 07 2016, @10:12PM
> stop providing what the 'customer' wants, and instead decide you know what the customer needs
Nobody ever got fired for thinking like Apple.
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Thursday December 08 2016, @01:30AM
Rather an ironic statement, considering how the chemical they named themselves after [wikipedia.org] is in fact extremely poisonous and flammable. It will very quickly reduce to cyanide
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Alphatool on Thursday December 08 2016, @06:16AM
I don't think that it was the commercialization that killed Cyanogen, rather it was management stuff ups. There have been plenty of examples of open source projects successfully commercializing, and I think that Cyanogen had a good chance of success if they had focused on pushing their openness, flexibility and continuous updates, i.e. once you get a phone running Cyanogen it will be kept up to date basically forever without any need for manufacturer involvement. Instead they focused on custom features like themes that were never much use and entered into insane exclusivity deals [medianama.com]. After that there was no chance that phone manufacturers would ever choose to work with them again, killing any chance of selling Cyanogen as a product. Without something to sell the final demise of Cyanogen is just a formality.