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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, 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?