Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2013/09/23/cyanogenmod.html

I’m thankful for Christopher Allan
Webber
for pointing
me
at this
interesting post from Guillaume Lesniak, the developer of Focal (a once
fully GPL’d camera application for Android/Linux), and how he was (IMO)
pressured to give a proprietary license to the new CyanogenMod,
Inc.

I mostly think Guillaume’s post speaks for itself, and I encourage readers
of my blog to read it as well. When I read it, I couldn’t help thinking
about how this is what Free Software often becomes in the world of
“Open Source”. Specifically, VCs, and the companies they back,
just absolutely love to say they’re doing “Open
Source”, but it just goes to show the clear difference between
“doing Open Source” and giving users software freedom. These
VC-backed companies don’t really want to share freedoms with their users:
they want
to exploit
Free Software licenses to market more proprietary software.

Years ago, I helped get the Replicant
project started. I haven’t been an active contributor to the
project, but I hope that folks can see this is an actual,
community-oriented, volunteer-run Free Software alternative firmware
based on Android/Linux. In my opinion, any project controlled primarily
by one company will likely never be all those things. I urge
Cyanogenmod users to switch to Replicant today!