Over the past few months, there have been plenty of reports coming out of Cyanogen Inc. that things weren’t working out. Earlier this week, it came out that they were going to be closing down their Seattle office and that Steve Kondik (Cyanogen himself) was out. Well, Kondik took to the CyanogenMod Developer community on Google+ to clear the air, so to speak. For those that are unaware, Kondik co-founded Cyanogen Inc. with Kirt McMaster, who was the CEO of the company, then moved to Executive Chairman recently. Kondik stated in his post that McMaster “apparently became unhappy with running the business and not owning the vision.” Going on to say that that was when all of the “bullet to the head” stuff started. Shortly after that, bad businesses deals were signed, which didn’t help Cyanogen Inc either.
Kondik explains that the “worst of it happened internally” saying that it became a terrible place to work (he used an expletive there, that we won’t reuse). McMaster apparently believed that the “backlash from those initial missteps convinced him that what we had needed to be destroyed.” Kondik was basically saying that they started off on the wrong foot, and it just didn’t get any better from there.
As far as what Kondik is planning to do moving forward, well he doesn’t have a concrete plan. But has noted in the comments of his post that he may relaunch the CyanogenMod ROM through a crowdfunding campaign, and turn it into a non-profit organization. But with Cyanogen Inc. owning rights to some of the branding and trademarks for CyanogenMod as well as Cyanogen, they may have to fork and rebrand CyanogenMod to use the ROM legally again, that’s according to Kondik who obviously is not a lawyer. It’s clear that it’s a pretty big mess over there right now, and there’s no real plan as to what the future will be like for Cyanogen Inc., CyanogenMod and Kondik. But it is nice to see the father of CyanogenMod come out and sort of confirm some of the reports that have surfaced recently, although he didn’t confirm the closure of their Seattle office.