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How will the Cyanogen Inc. scandle affect Replicant?
Added by Danny. O. over 10 years ago
For those who may or may not know, Cyanogenmod seems to be going commercial. It is now being dual licensed between a proprietary license and an open source license. I wouldn't be surprised if this change makes it more difficult to fork Cyanogenmod. What do you guys make of this unexpected move?
https://plus.google.com/106978520009932034644/posts/L8FJkrcahPs for those who don't know the story.
Replies (1)
RE: How will the Cyanogen Inc. scandle affect Replicant? - Added by Paul Kocialkowski over 10 years ago
It's a little sad to see that apparently, CyanogenMod leaders thought that the best way to take their project one step further was to make it something commercial in a way that compromises the free software spirit. But is that really that surprising a decision? We all know their top priority has never been free software, and they probably felt like giving up on these principles for the sake of greed this time. In concrete terms, it probably means that CyanogenMod will have less and less of a developer-oriented system (no root access by default, CTS certification, etc), but it'll still be better than AOSP as more devices will be supported. The only solid reason to base Replicant upon CyanogenMod has always been the possibility of easily porting to new devices, the ones CyanogenMod already supports. That is an advantage that is probably not going to change anytime soon and will remain upheld by the CyanogenMod community and not by Cyanogen Inc. So I'd say that we're safe, but the system itself will probably lose interesting features that we'll surely have to bring back (no root access? come-on!).
In a nutshell, CyanogenMod is better because it supports more devices that AOSP, and Cyanogen Inc is not going to change anything about that. That part will always stay in the hands of the community, but the system itself (the common part shared across devices) will probably get poorer and poorer.
Too bad, CyanogenMod will present less and less interest over AOSP in the future (all device-specific considerations aside). Its peak of success is behind us now, we can only guess things will worsen over time. So much for pushing the project one step further.