Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Cyanogen Inc.?
CyanogenMod recently announced the formation of a for-profit company, Cyanogen Inc. This is huge for the Android custom ROM community. Personally, I’m nervous and worried. I’m concerned that taking an open-source project and turning it into a for-profit project will either kill the project or change its user base. I think fewer people are going to contribute to an open-source project if someone is making money from it (others have the same issue). I wanted to jump in and start contributing to CyanogenMod when I had more free time. Now I’m thinking about finding another open-source version of Android to contribute to. Most open source companies that make money do so by selling corporate support or value-added plugins (Red Hat, WordPress, MySQL). If CyanogenMod wants to do that they will need to branch out to the corporate market - a complete shift in their target market. CyanogenMod has always been about the community; I hope Cyanogen Inc. doesn't change.
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It will be interesting to see how Cyanogen Inc. handles the transition to a corporate entity. I also hope that their support for the Android community remains strong.
ReplyDeleteAre they keeping their code open source?
ReplyDeleteThey'll keep most of it open source but they will have some closed source value-added type binaries.
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