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Following the brief announcement on Twitter that he’d be ceasing work on his Crystal Clear ROMs to work on Cyanogen Mod, Cvpcs – through Droid-Life – issued a letter of intent, clarification, and a “farewell” of sorts. He talks about the flak Cyanogen has received for the move, issues in his personal life that urged him to join Cyanogen, and more about what he’ll be doing with #TeamDouche. If you’re a fan, it’s worth a read. You can find his text quoted below.
As one era comes to a close another is just beginning!
So many of you have probably heard by now through twitter or the grapevine that I will be halting my work on GEM in order to pursue a new position as a developer for CyanogenMod. Since I first told this to people I have gotten mixed reviews as to whether or not people feel this is for the better, and I just wanted to clear the air, give my reasons, and just lay down everything that brought this about.
First of all, I wanted to address my reasoning for moving to CM. It was a hard decision and as much as I know people think it came out of the blue, I was honestly thinking about it for about a month now. At present I was developing for five devices (Droid1, DroidX, Droid2, Incredible, and Evo), one of which I didn’t even have. Most developers will tell you that they don’t like to maintain more than two devices, as it becomes quite a chore. It was becoming so much work that I wasn’t even getting time to visit with my friends and family anymore, as every moment I took off from developing meant that everything ground to a halt. The problem being that after almost a year at the helm of GEM, I was still (for all intents and purposes) a solitary developer. This put an immense amount of stress on me to make things work in a timely manner, as well as to add new features. Every day I would go to the bug tracker, and for every bug/feature I fixed or implemented five more would pop up in its place. It was becoming so daunting that I didn’t even look forward to doing it anymore, and that was when the red flag shot up.
I have always said that Android Development is a hobby, and as a hobby it should be fun. If it’s not fun then you shouldn’t do it. For anyone out there who thinks that it is for the money (as far as donations are concerned) it is a lie. To give an example, I began working on GEM in March of 2010, and from then to now we have made approximately $1600 in donations. If you consider that I spent roughly three hours a day every week within that time period, with the exception of my three month hiatus from September to November 2010, that totals roughly 33 weeks, which comes to 693 hours, and therefore approximately $2.30/hr. But add into the mix that all of the donations went to purchase devices for development as well as web hosting (there were never any actual payouts to team members in the form of cash), and it becomes easy to see why this is a job that you need to have a passion for to keep working on it. It is for that reason that I decided that I needed to find a way to bring the “fun” back into the equation.
After thinking long and hard about it I decided that I wanted to join the CM team so that I could not only add my skills to the mix to further improve their OS, but as part of their team I no longer would be under the immense amount of stress that I was under with GEM, and will have comrades to assist me if I need it. The whole prospect is very exciting for me and I hope that people will continue to like the work that I do.
I also wanted to clear up something. I have gotten some feedback that people are upset that CM “swallowed up” another independent developer. It should be noted that not once when I was working on GEM did CM contact me about joining them. This was entirely my decision and they simply welcomed me into the fold, which I appreciate immensely. They are an awesome team and I can’t wait to add to that.
So I know that many of you will be sad that GEM is no more, and a part of me is as well. But I don’t like to see it as GEM dying, so much as the best parts of GEM assimilating into the best of CM and producing a truly epic result that will help the vendors out there take notice of what an amazing product this community can turn out.
Now that all of the explanation of my reasons is out of the way, what can you expect moving forward? Well, I have officially signed on to maintain CM7 on the Droid (OG Droid for some, though I prefer just Droid). I will also be doing general work within the CM repo tree, one of the first of which will be to add the scrollable Notification Power Widget from GEM into CM. I also will be looking into porting CM7 over to the DX/D2, but I don’t want to lay down anything concrete on those fronts yet, since I haven’t even begun working on it and therefore don’t know exactly what to expect, but just know that it’ll be looked at in the coming weeks.
The existing GEM source will remain online at my github (github.com/cvpcs), and the wiki will remain online as well but will eventually be moved back to my private server at www.cvpcs.org. All of my work was open source so people are free to take it and build upon it if they wish. I will also be maintaining my IRC chat on freenode at #cvpcs, so if you have any questions you can usually find me there. I thank everyone who supported my work and am extremely appreciative of all of the positive feedback I received.
I hope everyone is as excited about this as I am, and for those who aren’t, I hope I can change your mind!
-cvpcs
All I could think about while reading this is that all these devs need to just get together and launch their own phone company. Customisable hardware, customisable software, guaranteed sales from the entire modding community and a LOT of happy people.
Best wishes. I would love to see a port to the D2. I miss my OG and its unlocked bootloader.
@ Simon
In a perfect world, it would be great to have a modder-run phone company, but, unfortunately, there is MASSIVE difference between some coders writing ROMs and starting up an actual phone company with infrastructure, towers, fiber optics, engineers, etc., etc.
All I can say is… way back when, after much research on the best roms available… I rooted my Droid… flashed your rom… can still remember the wonder of seeing my Droid come alive with the beautiful sapphire! Thank you, and looking forward to more awesome things.
@DG
Making your own phone company has nothing to do with towers or fiber optics.. He means a phone manufacture like Motorola or Samsung, not Verizon or Sprint.
@ThePhysician
Perhaps I missed his point, I thought he was referring to a phone company (provider) rather than an actual manufacturing company. Irrelevant, to go back to the POINT of what I posted; I agree with Simon 100%, that’d be great! Now, how much do you suppose Motorola, Samsung, or HTC spend on research and development, production facilities, engineers, workers, etc. ? Then, you are going to have to get FCC approval (and that is just for the US), and get a major provider to carry them. THAT was the point I was trying to make. Financially, there is a massive difference between coding and starting a phone company (be it service provider OR manufacuring)
yes but a carrier would have to agree to carry the phones. The carriers want control over your phone and the OEM’s implement it for them.
CM should try to partner with a phone manufacturer to build a new or special version of a known phone and put cyannogenMOD as official ROM, then maintain the official CM ROM for 2 or 3 years in the contract. They could charge all the code work and let the manufacturer only think on the Hardware to create the best “future proof” phone. It would be great to buy a phone with Cyanno as stock ROM and know that it will be properly supported during its lifetime. Obviously I don’t expect Moto, HTC, Sony or Samsung to follow, but maybe other good hardware manufacturers like Asus, LG or Acer. Many people will pay a plus (me included)to get this. Marketing guys take note: THE ONLY OPEN PHONE IN THE MARKET (sounds great)
@DJ
Dude, don’t be a party pooper. Let him dream a little. That’s the idea behind Android anyway… to be open source and imagine that there are no boundaries.
On the subject of a developer phones. I waited for the FIC Neo 1973 by OpenMoko to be a viable product for a long long time. Before it could mature, Android started climbing fast and furious. From what I heard there were talks of porting android over to it, but I don’t think anything viable came of that either.
On the subject of the only open phone on the market, see my above statement
The companies should release the uncustomized Vanilla version of their ROMS to the commmunity to work with before adding in their skins and customizations and releasing updates… only in a perfect world :/
@Guardian452com
I was super excited for the OpenMoko project. Sadly though I wanted a phone that had 3G and they went out of business before the third gen when they said it would come out :-(
never even knew about this guy. but sounds like cyanogenmod is about to get some nice little tweeks here and there
Back after the weekend…
Yes, I did mean manufacturer (I’m in the UK and still getting a little used to the idea that handsets tend to be tied to one carrier over there). I know it’s highly unlikely it’d happen — I imagine it would need Kickstarter funding and a very, very well-thought-out business plan in order to have a glimmer of success…but still. Imagine how free the devs would be if they weren’t working within the constraints of the hardware anymore.