Cyanogen has joined the dark side:
http://www.engadget.com/2014/12/18/m...anogen-yureka/

So Cyanogen sort of forked off from Android (AOSP) due to a vast community effort in a bid to standardize, stabilize and bring in features.

They gained a lot of momentum, and became some sort of organization.

But they waged war on the community when they tried to make their own recovery (ClockWorkMod) mandatory. Obviously they lost, because it isn't mandatory and TWRP is more popular. And PhilZ (CWM spin-off).

But all this was beginning to go south at around the time of Android 4.1.
Builds were pushed into Stable Release, despite being buggy. Longtime supported devices were getting left alone. And devices that were used to show CM's prowess were the devices with unlocked bootloaders, documentation and sources... ie the most easiest to MOD.

So it was no surprise that CM was passed by the likes of ParanoidAndroid, AOKP, VillainMOD (and lately Omni ROM) in terms of community effort and updates.

Then they announced that CyanogenMod group were going commercial as a legitimate business. Cyanogen Inc was to usher a new era for Android, by having a community developer group enter into the mainstream (a la Jolla).

All seemed butterflies and rainbows until Focal was pulled out. This was shocking news, but not so much for those keeping track of things. A dev that I personally know, Xplodwild, pulled it out when the CM founders told him NOT to license Focal with GPL and that something other than open-source was preffered. This upset him so much to abandon Cyanogen, and I agree with him 100%.

It seemed like the founders had let greed go to their head, and were eager to get rich from CM. The problem was that, it was a community effort so most (if not all) the funding then should go to the devs.... devs who do this as a hobby and not a job (and much prefer Thanks, Recognition, and maybe some new hardware to test builds on.... rather than money).

Then they announced the Oppo N1 and things looked to be turning around. But CM (stable) builds were either not coming along or were rushed, worse than before. It was a mystery why a much younger dev-group known as Omni was able to release a 4.4 ROM more than a month before CM released 4.3 for it. And remember the N1's official stock rom is CM, they hold the documentation/sources/drivers etc.

So Cyanogen Inc was looking really incompetent at this stage.

But an off-shoot of Oppo happened, its called OPO... aka OnePlus One.
They signed a contract to sell the device with CyanogenMod support worldwide, excluding China. All was going well for the 1+1, since the production issues were resolved, they announced their expansion. Great news for OPO, great news for CM, great news for open-source....right??

Well, apparently CM was in secret talks with a local Indian smartphone company called Micromax.
And when OPO announced that they had bought and were opening a retail outlet to sell the device in India, that's when Micromax made demands.

Somewhere in that time frame, C Inc, agreed to be sponsored by Micromax and provide CyanogenMod for their devices in India...EXCLUSIVELY. After these rumours floated around, Cyanogen went on record to say CM support will still come to 1+1 devices in India. And again another once/twice.

The the cat got out of the bag.

C Inc sent OnePlus a two sentence long email, telling them they will no longer be supported by CMod.
And shortly after, Micromax went to the courts and had an injunction against OnePlus to stop the OnePlus One from shipping into India.

So far, Micromax has won and the injunction stands = no OnePlus devices in India (and say bye bye to that retail you just bought). Currently OnePlus is preparing to take Cyanogen to court in California.

So not only did CM try to force the community into their ecosystem, bully devs into shady deals, failed compared to other open-source competition, tried their hand at corporate profit.... but also backstabbed the company that helped them rise into the mainstream.

Way to make an impression on the open-source community (and other oems) Cyanogen.
And thanks for giving "open-source" a bad name!

Oh, and Micromax just announced their first EXCLUSIVE device with Cyanogen support... the Yureka.
The funny part is, its not even a Micromax device, it is a Coolpad F2 just rebadged. Why is this funny? Well just recently it was found that Coolpad had installed backdoors into their devices, and labelled them as Google Play Services processes... ILLEGAL (!).


...
As of this moment, I personally won't be using CM's Trebuchet Launcher, CWM recovery, Cyanogen ROM or buy a Micromax device.

My alternatives are Apex Launcher, TWRP recovery, any oem that's responsible, any other custom rom (VillainMOD, PAC ROM, FlymeOS, MIUI, OmniROM, AOKP, PA).