Cyanogen services shutting down by the end of year 2016
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| Cyanogen Inc. shutting down |
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.CyanogenMod which started a revolution in custom Android OS development lead to formation of Cyanogen Inc. which was aimed at shipping CM out of the box as well as extending the availability of the CM ROMs and initially it was able to do so very successfully. The Cyanogen OS at one time was shipping out of the box in over a dozen of devices including Zuk, YU, OnePlus and many more. This success lead Kirt McMaster, CEO of Cyanogen to claim that in few years span they intend to take Android 'away' from Google. A very bold claim for anyone to make. The company at time refused a buyout offer of $1.2 billion from the Google. However all of this has now come crashing down due to the internal conflict between the number #1 and number #2 of the company. Both of them with their own vision of the company finally lead to public fall out between Steve Kodnik and McMaster last month when Kodnik parted its' way from Cyanogen and released a public statement as below:
Now what?
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.
We started the Inc with the intent to bring CM to more people and ship on devices out of the box. I hired everyone I knew, including a lot of community folks, moved everyone to Seattle and we got to work. We got the project in order after years of technical debt, and started to have some successes with our first devices. We also had a lot of supporters and next steps to get where we needed to be. We were able to raise a lot more money thanks to the good work done by the community and the company, but money always changes things.
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. We essentially stopped shipping after awhile because there ended up being two sides, split between the original vision and this new amorphous blob that nobody could figure out let alone build. 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.
Boo hoo, right? I fucked up and got fucked over. It's the Silicon Valley way isn't it? First world problems in the extreme? It hurts, a lot. I lost a lot of friends, and I'm truely sorry to everyone I let down. I wish I had made different choices and trusted different people (especially one in particular early on), but all I care about now is figuring out what to do next.
A big part of "next" is CM. It costs a lot of money to keep the servers running at this scale, and I figure we have about two months to GTFO. There are also IP issues. And the haters are getting to be too much to handle. On the other hand, it's been a huge part of my life for 8 years now and I don't want to let go of it.
A few questions for the community first..
1. Should we keep going? Is it worth it? I'm sure I can crowdfund the project, especially if we did something like "Darkside" and really revitalized it. I'm not sure of the endgame yet, though.
2. The main IP is the brand and trademarks. I don't know if I can get it back without a fight, and I'm tired of fighting. We will likely need to fork and rebrand, which might not be a bad thing. Would you support it?
3. If we reboot, what should we do differently?
4. The rest of the ROM community seems to be highly dependent on us, but simultaneously wants us dead. How on earth do you fix this?
5. WWJBQD?The above post courtesy of AndroidPolice.com makes the situation of internal conflict abundantly clear that this was bound to happen sooner or later.
Thanks for listening :(
What this means as s Cyanogen user is that there will be no update nightlies or otherwise after 31st December. CyanogenMod which is now mostly community oriented program will continue to work however even they've raised concern about the future given that CM was dependent on Cyanogen for servers, framework etc. There is no word as of yet what future holds for the Cyanogen. For now we can just wait for the situation to unfold.
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