Since Steve Kondik, the founder of CyanogenMod, announced in 2013 that they were creating Cyanogen Inc and going to create a more closed operating system (which they ultimately partnered with OnePlus for the OnePlus One in 2014), things have gotten a bit confusing. Cyanogen Inc is basically the proprietary version of the software, while CyanogenMod is open source and community driven. They have actually become very different from each other over the years, but still confusing. Now according to Kondik, the Cyanogen Inc side of things won’t have “much if any involvement” with CyanogenMod 14. For those that may be unaware, CyanogenMod 14 will be based on Android 7.0 Nougat, which just landed in AOSP a few weeks ago.
However, the confusing part of Kondik’s remarks is the fact that Cyanogen Inc and Kondik will have “an active role” in CyanogenMod. That’s kind of contradicting what Kondik said in his first comment. Users will have to wait and see how all this plays out with CyanogenMod 14, which should be beginning nightlies fairly soon, since the code has been available for quite some time already.
Cyanogen Inc has been struggling recently. There have been rumors of the company switching from the OS to just doing apps. This is after a number of employees were laid off. Other members have opted to leave the company and find something better. When Cyanogen Inc was first announced, the Android development community had mixed reactions. Some were happy that they’d be able to buy a phone that has CyanogenMod (at the time, that’s what everyone thought would be running on these phones, but instead it’s Cyanogen OS) running on it, without needing to root or ROM it. While others were a bit upset that this likely meant that some parts of the OS would become proprietary. And that has indeed happened. As a number of features in Cyanogen OS are not available in the community driven CyanogenMod.
At one point, it was rumored that Google was looking to buy Cyanogen. Google didn’t buy them, it’s not clear if that was due to Google changing their mind or Cyanogen not wanting to sell, or if the buyout was even real. For all we know it could have been fake. But Cyanogen may be looking for a new buyer in the near future.