CyanogenMod, which was the base of most custom Android ROMs at one point. After taking venture funding, incompetent business majors crashed and burned the project trying to commercialize it. It was then forked and LineageOS was born.

[–] Lemminary@lemmy.world 19 points 1 month ago (7 children)

My big question is, why not fork the original first and commercialize that instead. So much forking around the wrong ways! /s

[–] bitwolf@lemmy.one 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

iirc CyanogenMod was trademarked so the creator no longer had rights.

Its kind of sad, but I'm sure the author knew what they were getting into

[–] Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The funny thing is the whole commercialization process started with one of the future partners messaging the project lead out of the blue on LinkedIn. I don't know about you, but taking ideas from a random LinkedIn user doesn't strike me as good business sense.

Then again, getting something out of your years of unpaid volunteer work must be incredibly tempting, given how many open source projects have sold out over the years. At least it was to form an actual legitimate company this time, unlike when SuperSU (the Android root solution before Magisk came along) sold themselves to a scummy foreign ad company. That one still ranks as the all time top WTF sale.

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