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I love the project but I worry about the brain trust working on and improving the project getting massive "OMGWTF?!" offers to work full-time for Google on Andr

by mikece 7y ago

I love the project but I worry about the brain trust working on and improving the project getting massive "OMGWTF?!" offers to work full-time for Google on Android itself. Over-paying per head to lure the main devs away from Lineage would be a devious and effective way to put a stop to it.

kagenouta 7y ago
This actually happened once before -- Cyanogen himself spent several years working as an engineer at Samsung. The project didn't actually start running into serious sustainability issues until the team tried to build it into a company. Of course, that's probably got to do with bus factor. A similar story happened w Paranoid Android, only OnePlus hired several of their devs to work on OxygenOS, and the project hasn't been the same since.
- kubanczyk 7y ago
  That's why I pay attention to the license when contributing to FOSS. For MIT, BSD, Apache 2, it's quite easy for a company to hire a handful of active maintainers and starve the original project by redirecting their attention to a closed-source fork. http://hintjens.com/blog:27 http://hintjens.com/blog:27 GPL, and especially AGPL, are better in this regard.
est31 7y ago
But why would Google want to stop Lineage OS? First, in the grand scheme of things, Lineage OS is so small that it doesn't matter, according to stats.lineageos.org it's 1.7 million active installs (that have turned on tracking). Android on the other hand has around 2.5 billion devices. Second, LineageOS might not ship Google apps by default, but opengapps makes it possible to install them, and Lineage OS installation guides mention it as an option. I guess many people do it so that they can participate in the Google ecosystem. So Lineage OS only adds more customers to Google's apps and services, more eyeballs that Google can sell. The main damage is dealt on the device vendors due to the LineageOS use case as an aftermarket firmware creating less need for people to buy their new hardware. My phone was released in 2014. I bought it in 2020 and thanks to Lineage OS, I can use modern Android on it. IMO since then, phones have gotten worse in many regards (non-removable batteries, no jack, glass everywhere so that phones break more easily, overall more expensive, etc, ...), so I'm quite happy with this setup.
- nexuist 7y ago
  It's not that they care so much about stopping it as they want to steal the talent to work on Android proper. If you've got a person who's already reached an expert level understanding of the codebase, that is a valuable addition to any official team trying to push the project forward.

by mikece 7y ago

kagenouta 7y ago

This actually happened once before -- Cyanogen himself spent several years working as an engineer at Samsung. The project didn't actually start running into serious sustainability issues until the team tried to build it into a company. Of course, that's probably got to do with bus factor. A similar story happened w Paranoid Android, only OnePlus hired several of their devs to work on OxygenOS, and the project hasn't been the same since.

kubanczyk 7y ago
That's why I pay attention to the license when contributing to FOSS. For MIT, BSD, Apache 2, it's quite easy for a company to hire a handful of active maintainers and starve the original project by redirecting their attention to a closed-source fork. http://hintjens.com/blog:27 http://hintjens.com/blog:27 GPL, and especially AGPL, are better in this regard.

est31 7y ago

But why would Google want to stop Lineage OS? First, in the grand scheme of things, Lineage OS is so small that it doesn't matter, according to stats.lineageos.org it's 1.7 million active installs (that have turned on tracking). Android on the other hand has around 2.5 billion devices. Second, LineageOS might not ship Google apps by default, but opengapps makes it possible to install them, and Lineage OS installation guides mention it as an option. I guess many people do it so that they can participate in the Google ecosystem. So Lineage OS only adds more customers to Google's apps and services, more eyeballs that Google can sell. The main damage is dealt on the device vendors due to the LineageOS use case as an aftermarket firmware creating less need for people to buy their new hardware. My phone was released in 2014. I bought it in 2020 and thanks to Lineage OS, I can use modern Android on it. IMO since then, phones have gotten worse in many regards (non-removable batteries, no jack, glass everywhere so that phones break more easily, overall more expensive, etc, ...), so I'm quite happy with this setup.

nexuist 7y ago
It's not that they care so much about stopping it as they want to steal the talent to work on Android proper. If you've got a person who's already reached an expert level understanding of the codebase, that is a valuable addition to any official team trying to push the project forward.