Trouble at Cyanogen [LWN.net]

Cyanogen Inc. has put out a terse press release announcing the departure of founder (and CyanogenMod creator) Steve Kondik. See this rather less terse Android Police article for Kondik's view of the matter. The future of the CyanogenMod distribution seems unclear at this point; if it goes forward, it may have to do so with a different name.

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Trouble at Cyanogen

Posted Dec 1, 2016 20:16 UTC (Thu) by Thalience (subscriber, #4217) [Link] (18 responses)

Founding a company to monetize your popular FOSS project may or may not be a good idea. But allowing that company to own the project's trademarks or other IP is a terrible idea.

Trouble at Cyanogen

Posted Dec 1, 2016 20:53 UTC (Thu) by simcop2387 (subscriber, #101710) [Link] (16 responses)

The problem with that is that you're less likely to get investors to start the company and get it off the ground without that IP. So you may be in between a rock and a hard place with that.

Trouble at Cyanogen

Posted Dec 1, 2016 21:06 UTC (Thu) by lutchann (subscriber, #8872) [Link] (15 responses)

With a highly technical user base like Cyanogen presumably has, it's hard to say what the branding is worth. Enthusiasts are pretty astute about where the actual value lies. I'd be inclined to think that Mr. Kondik could fork the code under a different name and draw a substantial majority of the devotees pretty quickly.

On the other hand, the "profit potential", if there is any at this point, is likely to remain with Cyanogen Inc. There's not much to draw a hardware vendor to a nameless Android fork, even if it is based on the Cyanogen code base and headed by its original author.

Negative Value Trademarks

Posted Dec 1, 2016 21:44 UTC (Thu) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link] (14 responses)

With a highly technical user base like Cyanogen presumably has, it's hard to say what the branding is worth. Enthusiasts are pretty astute about where the actual value lies. I'd be inclined to think that Mr. Kondik could fork the code under a different name and draw a substantial majority of the devotees pretty quickly.

OMG, are you kidding me? I've been waiting for the most popular project tackling these important issues to not sound similar to "cyanide" for so f'n long it's sad. While I'm not looking to engage in debates about my sanity or paranoia as so often happens when I venture honest thoughts, I will say that I question whether or not the original name might have been chosen by people who wanted to see the project repel potential new users instead of attract them.

Negative Value Trademarks

Posted Dec 1, 2016 21:54 UTC (Thu) by clump (subscriber, #27801) [Link] (4 responses)

Cyanogen is an awful name, even worse is CyanogenMod.

Negative Value Trademarks

Posted Dec 5, 2016 18:55 UTC (Mon) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link] (3 responses)

These horrible names are the way this stuff happens in the roots of volunteer FOSS development. Somebody posts an android build and calls it cyan, someone else wants to modify it so they call it cyanogen and then it's forked again and called cyanogenmod. Most of the development coalesced around cyanogenmod and it's got some name recognition in the people that read the forums and participate in ROM development know it and there is even some general recognition within the wider public community that is tech inclined enough to flash a rom on their device. That name recognition is worth money.

But you are right, I'd like to see him refork it and give it a better name that everyone can actually pronounce.

Negative Value Trademarks

Posted Dec 5, 2016 20:45 UTC (Mon) by karkhaz (subscriber, #99844) [Link] (2 responses)

cyanogenmod-ng

Negative Value Trademarks

Posted Dec 5, 2016 22:51 UTC (Mon) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (1 responses)

cyanext

Negative Value Trademarks

Posted Dec 6, 2016 14:45 UTC (Tue) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link]

Cyrano (de Bergerac)

Negative Value Trademarks

Posted Dec 2, 2016 0:24 UTC (Fri) by BlueLightning (subscriber, #38978) [Link] (8 responses)

It's not the worst project name choice ("GIMP" and "Pentabarf" spring to mind, without casting any aspersions on the projects themselves) but I agree it wasn't the best either.

On the other hand, better a distinctive name than something generic - then at least people always know what you're talking about when you mention it.

Negative Value Trademarks

Posted Dec 2, 2016 0:43 UTC (Fri) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]

You know, for most people, those are just names which don't have any preconceived meaning (most people actually being... non-native english speakers).
I'd even suggest the following: for any name you can come up with, exists a language in which it is sexual innuendo, pejorative, an insult or somewhat offensive.

Until just now, "cyanogen" (or "gimp", can't say about pentabarf, I didn't know it) didn't ring any bell. Only because of the previous comments I actually thought about the meaning (and the cyanogen/gimp name still doesn't bother me).

Negative Value Trademarks

Posted Dec 2, 2016 9:34 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (3 responses)

> On the other hand, better a distinctive name than something generic - then at least people always know what you're talking about when you mention it.

And tada, here's the winner of the contest for the project that is the most impossible to find, not even by people who know about it and are actively looking for it: https://code.google.com/p/git-repo/

Of course don't even think about googling a common problem with it or an FAQ.

Negative Value Trademarks

Posted Dec 2, 2016 12:30 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

Well, my speciality field of work - "Pick", "UniVerse", "Information", "Reality", "English", "Retrieve", ... the list goes on ... :-) try searching for those product names :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Negative Value Trademarks

Posted Dec 2, 2016 13:07 UTC (Fri) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071) [Link] (1 responses)

Oh, you have to work with PICK. I'm sorry.

I maintained a 1991-deveoped Plain English application for a while. Yes, written in 1991 with a toolset from a company that went out of business in 1983 as far as I can tell. Running in Microsoft Xenix kernel personality on SCO OpenServer in a qemu instance on a Linux server. That was fun.

Negative Value Trademarks

Posted Dec 2, 2016 22:28 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Pick itself is great (I'm very anti - first-normal-form as plenty of people here will attest :-)

But I feel your pain with all the emulation layers ... Dunno which version you're referring to, though. I started using INFORMATION in 1985 and it was a lovely, well-designed system. The modern versions are great, too, though in attempting to be compatible with all the ancient variants out there, they can be a pain.

When IBM sold off their Pick assets (acquired as part of Informix), it shrank their DB2 division by a third! And those Pick assets were growing by over 10% per annum. I don't know the latest figures from the new owner, Rocket Software, though.

They should have just ported your system to a newer variant - it wouldn't have been that hard. Unless, of course, it was a turnkey system where the vendor had disappeared - too many Pick sites have disappeared because the vendors haven't looked after the customers properly :-( Or, quite commonly, nobody ever noticed the Pick system because it "just worked", until it didn't because nobody'd bothered to maintain it.

Cheers,
Wol

Negative Value Trademarks

Posted Dec 7, 2016 3:32 UTC (Wed) by Garak (guest, #99377) [Link] (2 responses)

It's not the worst project name choice ("GIMP" ...

I agree that GIMP gives CyanogenMod a run for its money. In my mind the ranking is based also on fundamental importance to the infrastructure of a basically free and open society that FOSS has generally depended on and often overtly supported. Here, GIMP was about the important task of 'doctoring' images. CyanogenMod, relating to the important task of providing total user control to ordinary mobile phone users, I think ranks higher (today).

My other most notable favorite is Dan Farmer's "SATAN", later rebranded or reimplemented as "SAINT", and subsequently my much preferred branding- MetaSploit. However the tactical damage that the SATAN branding did to the field of ethical computer security scanning, and the evolution of governmental policy driven by public perception, can't be understated IMHO.

Another from my mental cache is "Devil's Pie", now thankfully the functionality can be marketed more widely under the sensible branding 'wmctrl'.

Personally I won't give up until I have a distro as generically useful as fedora/debian which has every last bit of visible branding stripped. I'm content to leave it to future generations to strip out the names of all the contributors and authors as well. (see ReiserFS...). I'm old enough to realize that in order to basically function in society I have no choice but to use software collectively written by thousands of people, many of whom I estimate I probably would overall like less than Hans Reiser if I really got to know them. My solution isn't to figure out the bad apples and root them out, it's to get rid of all the ego wholesale. I actually think there are synergistic tactical advantages against orwellian authoritarian governments and other equally bad machiavellian power players as well (I opted not to comment in the current maintainerless debian thread, however the overlap should be clear enough)

Negative Value Trademarks

Posted Dec 7, 2016 23:25 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> My solution isn't to figure out the bad apples and root them out, it's to get rid of all the ego wholesale.

And destroy the whole driving force behind open source software ...

If you're happy using faceless nameless products like Windows, then fine. When it goes wrong, you rail against a faceless corporation that knows nothing and cares even less about the product it's launched and abandoned, and all it wants is for you to pay for an upgrade that's probably even less suitable than the broken product you're cursing.

Me - I want a product where, if it breaks, I can find someone who knows about it and can fix it. And what better way than to have EGOs saying "this is my code, I'm proud of it", that I can find and say "whoops - it's broke" to.

At the end of the day, I *don't* want to live in a faceless world. I'm *proud* to put my name against my work. Okay, some of it may be rubbish, but I hope most of it is decent. And if people can help me improve, so much the better.

At the end of the day, the nym "Wol" has value. Some people think I'm clever, other people think I'm stupid. Some people think I say very wise things, other people think I shoot my mouth off. Other nyms have similar value - for example someone I think is brilliant in his field, but very narrow-minded and probably can't be trusted outside it (no names no pack drill :-)

At the end of the day, you get far better service from a person you can get to know and trust, than you can from a faceless organisation where you're lucky to speak to the same person twice ...

(And that's way too many evenings, but hey ho :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Negative Value Trademarks

Posted Dec 8, 2016 1:15 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

I'd encourage you to submit patches to Debian to strip branding out where you see it and then patches to the desktop-base package to re-add that branding. Debian wants to make it easier for new derivatives to switch to their own branding.

Trouble at Cyanogen

Posted Dec 4, 2016 20:01 UTC (Sun) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

> But allowing that company to own the project's trademarks or other IP is a terrible idea.

I really have to disagree with that completely.

The problem, I think, is that a lot of programmers really are clueless when it comes to dealing with business side of things and they make bad decisions on how to structure their business that comes around and bites them later when there is a inevitable dispute.

There are ways to deal proactively with this sort of stuff if you want to avoid one of your partners selling the IP out from under you or having one guy just be able to seize control of the website and trademarks if he decides he doesn't like you anymore.

Trouble at Cyanogen

Posted Dec 4, 2016 22:00 UTC (Sun) by AngryChris (subscriber, #74783) [Link]

So the new guy in charge thinks making everyone come into the office every day is the game changer that will turn the company's misfortunes around. That sure worked out well for Marissa Mayer. This Lior Tal guy sounds like a real winner. What a disaster for the company he is.