Focal : A replacement camera app found in the latest CyanogenMod Nightly builds, has been scrapped off. The creator of it, Guillaum Lesniak seems to have cut off from the CM team.
Guillaum Lesniak
On September 1 Entropy512, Elite recognized developer of XDA forums, a close friend of Guillaume Lesniak a.k.a xplodwild took it to XDA to vent his anger over the decisions of the CM core team.He was the first to let out info about “Cyanogen Inc” but instead of making a post we simply chose to let Steve Kondik A.k.a Cyanogen know about it via twitter.
Now, just as expected Focal has been removed from the CM project due to problems that popped up.
Here is what Entropy512 had to tell :
Note how the CM leads went out of their way not to address one of the claims in any way, shape, or form.
What I will say is: Steve’s response is bull****.
Firstly, he spindoctored heavily by translating “CM is almost purely GPL *OR* Apache” (true) to “CM is almost purely GPL” (which is indeed false) and accusing people of spreading bull**** because he couldn’t read the claim properly, or chose not to read it properly.
A commercial relicensing of Focal with assignment of commercial rights to Cyanogen, Inc. does not give xplodwild any additional freedoms whatsoever – He already has the freedom to relicense Focal if he chooses IF there are no other contributors (however, Hugin’s presence may result in Focal not being relicensable even if xplodwild wanted to). The only organization who gains any additional freedoms from such an arrangement is Cyanogen Inc – and the only freedom they gain is to create a closed-source proprietary derivative. So Steve claims not to be trying to create a closed-source derivative – but one of his first actions (actually, it was Koush’s action, Steve supported him though) was to take an action that can only lead to a closed-source derivative. Actions speak louder than words.
What is especially scary is the fact that Koush didn’t ask politely, he just went to xplodwild and said, “We’re relicensing it, the contributor agreement allows us to do so.”First: The CM contributor agreement allows for sublicensing, not relicensing. It doesn’t allow someone to sign away a right they may not have in the firstcplace. (In the case of GPLed code, the contributor agreement doesn’t magically’allow CM to relicense GPL contributions.)
Second: Focal was forked into CM via github, bypassing the contributor agreement, so it doesn’t apply.
On top of this, the first rule of bending xplodwild over and giving him the shaft is – don’t talk about bending xplodwild over and giving him the shaft. There has been zero discussion of this even in internal private CM channels, and any attempt to discuss it has been squashed rapidly, including pressuring xplodwild not to talk about their attempt to shaft him to anyone.
Something that used to be a way for me to get my mind off of stress has now become a massive source of stress for me. I’ve been staying quiet about this in public for a while now, only hinting to issues, hoping things could be resolved amicably. But the fact that the project leadership insists on sweeping this under the rug and not discussing it at all means it’s highly unlikely to get resolved. Which leaves me in a ****ty position – I really can’t motivate myself to contribute to an organization that pulls **** like this, but there isn’t really much else in the Android world.
Yes, there’s been some discussion of possibly forking – but my stress levels are high enough as it is. I’d rather just go back to shiny blinkenlights and microcontroller projects than
deal with this drama.
On top of that, multiple devices were tagged for 10.1 RC/stable that do not in any way deserve such a designator.
Seriously – if a major app such as Netflix doesn’t work (which it doesn’t without horrible hacks that have no business being in a stable release on Exynos4 devices), then CM shouldn’t be marked stable on that device.
However, the leads went and tagged all Exynos4 devices as stable without any discussion with those devices’ maintainers (they claim otherwise, but I can tell you without a doubt that Xplodwild and I were not consulted on N7000, nor was I consulted with I777), in order to get the stable device count up and look better to investors. In addition to Netflix not working, performance is complete and utter **** on 4210 devices – it’s mostly working, but not in a way that merits calling it “stable”.
The above post was preceded by this one :
Other things that have happened over the past two weeks that we are EXTREMELY unhappy about.I’m seriously contemplating finding a new hobby and retiring from Android work.
It clearly seems that Entropy512 is not a happy man, we only hope that he wouldn’t retire from his awesome work on Android.
On a personal note, CM turning into a company is actually a huge thing and Steve rightly deserved it for all the hard work put into CM since day 1.As long as CM remains OPEN, the community wouldn’t be having a problem, infact we believe Steve wouldn’t do anything stupid like what Xiaomi did with MIUI.
Post on XDA can be found here.
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