[dispose13432]

The question is what will ensure the continual non-profitness of lineageOS?

The problem is two fold:

1. Get maintainers. 2. Make sure that the high ranking individuals can't just "take the ball and go home", and (however unpopular this opinion may be here), GPL is the only way to ensure that they will never be able to sell out ever again.

And especially after the CM/CyanogenOS/Focal/Paranoid Android situation, private ROMs seem to be too much of an "aquihire" risk.

[g_p]

GPL is the route that OmniROM tried to go down, in order to attempt to ensure that the ROM remained community focused and true to its roots.

One potential issue with CM is that users were signing contributor license agreements (CLAs) to the "project leads" of the "CyanogenMod Project" [1]. While everything is under Apache 2, which ensures it can be used in future, there were plenty of cases where people submitted code under the copyright of the project (see headers which state "Copyright (C) 2016 The CyanogenMod Project").

You are correct with point 2 - if you want to prevent "acqui-hire" type takeovers, you need to ensure that there isn't a tight-knit group of individuals willing to agree and sign over the rights.

This situation would be very, very different if the original CM project had taken a better approach at the start - perhaps forming a 501(c)3 for the holding of the cyanogenmod.org domain and any trademarks/name rights. Then a commercial license could be granted to the incorporated form of CM.

I wish I could find a good primary source, but best I can see at the moment are fairly blog-type news sites [2]. The issue we see here is that the project's stewards were turning their focus from the project to the "commercial spinout", rather than in keeping the project going. At that point, there's little that the contributors could do really - it seemed the leaders had made the decision to build the inc version, despite high profile disagreement. Not sure GPL would fix that, but it certainly helps ensure a community project can live on, even if it won't guarantee it will.

[1] https://review.cyanogenmod.org/static/cla_individual.html

[2] http://www.androidheadlines.com/2013/09/author-cyanogenmods-...

[dispose13432]

That's the point. You can't aquihire Linux.

You can aquihire Linus, you can take his team, but any code you develop "in house" is going to have to go public anyways (because no one owns enough of the code).

[hackuser]

> GPL is the route that OmniROM tried to go down

You write in past tense; what happened?

[g_p]

Nothing, sorry - was using the past tense thinking about when the decision was made a while back. Omni seems to be getting more traction of late with people concerned about the CM issues. They are still GPL and that probably acts as a fairly decent barrier to any kind of acqui-hire attempts. Also having a diverse range of contributors (many with good jobs) helps there too, by making it very expensive/complex to try to get enough people onboard.

In an ironic sense, the argument used by CM was "CM Inc is different from CM community", and I think that was enough to keep some of the alternative ROMs pretty small. Sadly though, it has now emerged CM community was indeed a subset of CM Inc, and not so separate after all.

[redahs]

User donations earmarked for X phone model + Y OS version held in trust and paid out to the first developer who completes (X,Y) port of the OS as a one-time cash prizes, with Z% overhead taken out each donation to fund the central developers \ organization.

[BuuQu9hu]

> completes

This would have be defined carefully to avoid the device dropping out of support quickly.

Personally I think full-time work would be better than bounties.

[em3rgent0rdr]

Excellent idea. Reminds me of tip4commit.com or BitHub.

I also wonder if make sense for donator to be able to select their desired Z percentage.

[erlend_sh]

My hope is that they can find a way to collaborate with fairphone: https://code.fairphone.com/projects/fp-osos/

LineageOS needs a flagship phone, FairPhone needs a community-empowered OS.

[dispose13432]

Although I do understand the PA devs, as they _do_ need to get paid, and Android OS dev is not easy,