Speaking of Cyanogen OS:
Following the Cyanogen OS 12.11 update for the OnePlus One, you may have noticed something worse than the automatic inclusion of Cortana. Now upon selecting a file without a set default application, you will see adverts for Microsoft apps and services on the “open with” menu.
I feel like a broken record player at this point, but don’t trust these guys. Selling out to Microsoft has never done anyone any good.
Quote:
Once and for all:
Cyanogen is Steve Kondik’s nickname
CyanogenMod is a community based ROM
Cyanogen OS is a business product
This change now affects business product, your long time favorite community based ROM is not touched by this change.
I am surprised they are allowed to trade under the name. Surely someone can claim the trademark here?
This isnt a Polo mints vs Polo cars.
This is ITV vs iTV (Apple TV before they got layered by the UK TV network)
The Cyanogen Inc, Cyanogen OS and CyanogenMod names all belong to the same entity. There’s no legal dispute here.
Eventually, this shit will make its way into CyanogenMod, simply because that’s where the real meat is.
No it won’t… CyanogenMod is a community run project and the community doesn’t want said shit in it. If it was ever forced in… The community would die, CyanogenMod would be no more, and it would be forked.
I don’t know that it will do that, but It may influence its direction.
It is a very bad idea to have the community branded mod so close to the corporate one, for this same reason.
This is why Red hat, wisely as it turns out, stopped selling/offering Red Hat Linux and started selling Red Hat Enterprise Linux and giving away Fedora. It just sounds better when RHEL announces something like there recent partnership with Microsoft for azure cloudy things, that people understand its not affecting Fedora.
tldr; CyanogenMod needs to be re branded to something like MagentaMod.
http://www.cyanogenmod.org/blog/microsoft-and-cm12-1-nightlies
Not trying to make a point, just adding information
Doesn’t matter. I won’t go near ANY “Cyanogen” labeled product, PERIOD. DO NOT TRUST!
I wonder how many people this actually affects
Certainly didn’t hurt Bungie.
>> Certainly didn’t hurt Bungie.
But you can’t say the same about Nokia. Nor the OLPC project (One Laptop Per Child). Microsoft’s history has always been about eating up small business ventures to bolster its own profit margins. To balance every success story there are dozens and dozens of companies that were crippled or eliminated by being bought up or even having some tenuous contracted link to Redmond.
How did OLPC sell out to MS?
Took funding from Microsoft to convert from using their Linux-based solution to using a Windows-based solution. The OLPC laptops died out soon after as they decided to focus on tablets…they’ve gone down hill since.
Ironic that they’d want anything to do with Microsoft, considering Gates had criticised the OLPC.
OLPC deciding to focus on tablets may have had nothing to do with MS or Windows, and as i understand it, it still shipped with their RedHat based OS, but for added cost, could have XP instead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child
That’s not selling out.
I didn’t say their focus on tablets was a sellout…I said they took money from Microsoft to put Windows on the OLPC laptop, and then shortly after switched focus to tablets, leaving the laptop behind.
Personally, I had planned on getting the OLPC laptop for my kids in another year or so, doing the buy-one-give-one during the holidays to teach them about giving. But since they’ve left the laptops behind, that plan is out the door. (And I’m not sold on their tablets.)
They honestly had quite a bit going for them before they took the money from Microsoft. Since then, they’ve lost a lot of credibility in the FOSS community – which was a big backer of them prior to that – and have lost a lot of momentum.
But that’s not selling out, that’s just another option. Choice is good.
My point was, which i admit I was not clear about, was that it was the switch to tablets that seemed to be their biggest issue, not talking money from MS to offer Windows. Offering Windows was neither here nor there.
That’s not selling out.
What has happened to their tablet line is almost entirely attributable to taking money from Microsoft and the current CEO’s love for Microsoft. So yeah…it’s selling out.
How? I see no correlation.
XO Laptops are still supported considering its worldwide use. Last software update is on November 2015. Considering that the spec is very much open, manufacturers can easily build one XO as they wish.
Remember the ultimate goal of OLPC is the accessibility of educations using technology by applying the principle of constructivism.
manufacturers can build XO devices, but there is anyone who actually does it? all i see is customized Androids.
Latest XO laptop (1.75 and 4 having touchscreen option) can run Android as well.
One Education, who started as OLPC offspring in Australia, is developing the Infitinity laptop looking like an interpretation of XO laptop with modular approach.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/infinity-a-computer-anyone-can-bu…
My main concert with Infinity is the ruggedness that made the original XO laptop standout,its use in harsh environment where electricity is scarce. It seems it can use Sugar but the organization is vaque on that.
Edited 2016-01-10 19:42 UTC
It’s also a far cry from what it use to be, and they are a far cry from raising the money with only two weeks to go (53%).
They use to be a very high profile and provide quite a bit. now they can’t even get $50k!
Supported versus Available are two different things.
Try going to their website. You can only give them money; you can’t buy or donate a laptop or tablet.
Checking Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child#Give_1_Get_1_prog… – it looks like they haven’t shipped any new laptops since 2012.
They’re working on new a new laptop (XO-1.75) and tablet (XO-3) since 2012. No releases.
As it was written by Acobar and other people:
Edited 2016-01-08 21:28 UTC
But Nokia is alive and well and can release Smartphones later on.
The parts/rump of nokia that MS didn’t buy and shortly after nuke will indeed be able to make smartphones shortly.
The quotes about companies who had special deals with MS are IMHO very true.
Personally, I will avoid using anything branded by or funded by the likes of MS and Google as much as possible when I retire.
The simple reason is that ‘my’ data is not for slurping and is not for advertising. I don’t buy anything from on screen or TV adverts (I skip them anyway).
Nokia may release soon smartphones, but they will have to start almost from zero: they don’t have the manufacturing capabilities any more, they don’t have the designers and engineers any more (all those moved to Microsoft) and the only thing left, the brand name, was trashed in the last years.
Look at their post-Microsoft N1 tablet, is manufactured by Foxconn and apparently sold only in China. Can you buy one? Would you? Expect their new smartphones to follow a similar path.
Novell killed themselves. Netware before version 4 was awesome, then it all went downhill. The management tools were fragmented and buggy, hardware drivers got more and more limited (we had to turn of 3 cores on our last Netware box because it abended once a week, and that was the fix that a Novell Engineer came up with. By the time they switched to a linux based strategy, it was all over.
Netware offered nothing over Win NT, which was the client Netware was built to work with. Unix and Linux shops didn’t need it, and neither did Mac shops. Win NT stole Netware’s lunch money.
You are missing a very important aspect about business asymmetrical partnership: limited resources. Novell, Nokia and the others had a short supply on money, with falling income, and a rush to put good products out. They diverted their efforts to fix the problems they had on their own products to work on something they thought would cover their back by MS. Didn’t happen and we all know how it ended. To them it was like try to catch the pot with gold on the end of the rainbow. They ran out of energy before anything good could be accomplished.
Microsoft with all the power they had, could sustain the expense to have a multiple strategy on place, and many people think the main goals were never ever on the relationships, these were like plan Z to them, the main benefits been to compromise the capability to sort out flaws on rival’s products. If “Z” fail, hurrah, one less competitor.
Really a masterful strategy, if you ask me, even though I see it as unethical.
The Nokia board is the only one to blame, by giving Elop the target to get a big bonus if he managed to sell the company.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/terokuittinen/2013/09/24/nokia-admits-g…
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/stephen-elop-to-get-25-5m-for-selli…
As for the rest, once upon a time I used to think badly of Microsoft, until I had the opportunity to see how many Fortune 500 corporations work.
They are all alike.
And it is also interesting to see how the blame is always in the corporations and not on the guys that sell out.
Edited 2016-01-11 09:14 UTC
moondevil,
Why would that make it any less wrong? Granted that’s what happens when we are desensitized.
How do you know? Don’t you think they would have made more money being on all 4 platforms instead of 1? I have never bought a halo game. If it comes out fully on Gog I will buy it.
Thom, I’d love to see a post that explains what your perspective is on political posts like these. Specifically with what you want to see companies, which by definition (within capitalism) must generate income.
What is it you want from a company? Clearly companies that pursue enough profit or marketshare to stick around are a problem for you, but what then is the alternative for which you would advocate? I don’t feel we see a lot of expression about alternatives in these kinds of posts.
Or maybe it’s capitalism you have an issue with, which is totally understandable. As it is, your posts come off as critical of any large business that must produce revenue (maybe specifically, when they change course and don’t declare they’ve done so honestly, as maybe is the case with CyanogenMod, maybe), and generally critical of capitalism too, or at least of how it works, though some other posts seem in favor of capitalism. That might indicate a misunderstanding of what capitalism actually is.
Sometimes the intent of posts like these can come off wrong because it’s text and I’m not a writer, and it’s somewhat of a criticism of an individual’s activities, which is personal in nature, so I’ll just declare my intent. I intend to provoke interesting thought and conversation about these topics.
Well that isn’t a surprise, because you sound like a broken record at this point.
Yeah, this.
Why so much hate for MS? Big companies?
And sorry, MS has been good for many people.
*Buzzed post-work rant*
At some point in the last 8 years I’m convinced that the actual engineering talent that came up with Windows 2000-to-Windows 7 either retired or were fired to make room for a bunch of stupid Metro loving asshole yes-men.
Microsoft has always had questionable ethics in business, but from around 2006-2011 they cranked out well engineered products consistently. Then all the sudden the mobile first assholes took over.
It’s the only thing that explains the drastic downward trajectory MS engineering, design and QA has taken since the launch of Windows 8.
But it’s not just a MS problem: pretty much everything across the board started sucking at the same time: Gnome3, systemd, Unity, the realization Obama was a fraud, etc.
It reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend about Super Metroid the other day (after briefly discussing it on OSNews comments): Super Metroid was the height of game design in 1994, along with Castlevania a year or two later on the SNES.
And then 3d gaming came out…
99% of it was horrible. For every Super Mario 64, you had a Floating Runner and Bubsy 3d. Only a decade after the shift did things start to not suck over all anymore.
Hopefully in another 5 years I won’t be completely disgusted with the victory of the Mobile-First-Flatten-Everything-Build-For-The-Lowest-Common-Denominato r Brigade.
I actually yearn for the days when MS were flamboyantly Evil(tm) but were relevant because they had a knack for creating completely usable products. Now it’s reversed.
Correction: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is a Playstation game.
Axiom Verge is at least as good as those games. 🙂
How is this any different than Apple offering Apple services or vanilla Android offering Google services to open a file? Apple owns iOS, Google owns Android, Microsoft owns a controlling interest in Cyanogen OS. None of those are open source operating systems; they are closed source commercial OSes that understandably show off their respective parent company’s technologies.
I mean, I get it: We’re all supposed to hop aboard the Microsoft Hate Train. I just can’t muster up the willpower to do so when the justification is duplicated on any of the big three. Where is the hate for Apple and Google doing the exact same thing that Microsoft does?
Here:
http://www.osnews.com/story/29003/Apple_pushes_iPhone_6s_pop-up_ads…
http://www.osnews.com/story/28650/The_genius_of_Google_Play_Service…
Edited 2016-01-09 08:01 UTC
Well, to be pedantic that second link doesn’t address the issue in this discussion (and I remember that one because I joined the conversation in it), it simply talks about the fact that Play Services is closed source.
The first one proves I should visit OSNews more often. 😉
How is Obama a fraud? He is shrinking the middle class while giving EBTs to people who haven’t applied for a single job the past month and giving free money to welfrare queens, JUST like he promised. It’s the fault of the middle class for voting for him without carefully reading the spec (or for thinking that the Republicans and the Teabaggers were the only alternatives)
Edited 2016-01-09 16:38 UTC
I have no problems with you being a broken record.
Besides, it insures the current projects remain honest and people are aware of what sort of influence the holder of Cyanogenmod will inflict on the open source deployment of the software.
I personally own Microsoft products to play games and waste time.
Microsoft products are pretty good at the former and simply outstanding in business at the latter.
I find this whole thing a bit hypocritical! The whole financial support system behind Google and Android is based on advertising. And…so the players involved may do the same thing. The partners they choose is up to them and I’m betting also generate revenue from advertising. Google did not pioneer it, but they did take it to new depths. I’m a little sick of the commentary. I loved BeOS and hated Microsoft. Now, I’m really starting to hate Google for other reasons. In the end, I don’t see much difference between these two large cooperation’s: only their deep internal strategies. I find Google a bit slier and hidden. I believe that if Google were to really destroy Microsoft, they will start to charge for many of the services we find free today.
Edited 2016-01-10 17:01 UTC