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by oliwarner 3461 days ago
The conflation was deliberate. They wanted to trade on the good name of the original open project.
1 comments

It was nothing sinister. Cyanogen himself, Steve Kondik, was the CEO of the new company. They were 100% open about it.
Once you've made a for profit enterprise, it's fundamentally deceptive to trade on the good will of things like volunteering, charity, add open source, because the incentive structure and relationship has changed. Someone selling me a OS for profit should be trusted far less than someone who does it for free and/or as a labor of love or duty.

There's a buying power that a consumer has that a user of something provided for free doesn't, but there is also a hell of a lot more reason to cheat, lie to, defraud a consumer than a user. There's an adversarial aspect to the relationship now.