Soon after Cyanogen Inc. announced that they are shutting down nightly builds of CyanogenMod and other Cyanogen-branded services from December 31, 2016, the original CyanogenMod team put together a blog post announcing their future actions and how they plan on keeping the ROM alive.

The post from developer ciwrl says that it’s no surprise that Cyanogen Inc. was shutting down the infrastructure used by CyanogenMod, and this was a given after Steve Kondik a.k.a Cyanogen himself was ousted from the company. He further adds that the CM community “have lost their voice in the future direction of CM,” with the possibility of the brand being sold to any third party at any time. Steve Kondik had to risk the CyanogenMod IP to start Cyanogen Inc which has led to this problem.

Additionally, thanks to quotes like putting a “bullet through Google’s head” and his other poor decisions, Cyanogen Inc’s ex-CEO Kirt McMaster has done more than enough to create a very negative image of  “Cyanogen” in the eyes of the common public. Lastly, a new user will always get confused between Cyanogen Inc. and CyanogenMod due to the similarity in their name.

So, while Cyanogen Inc.’s latest move is a death blow to CyanogenMod, the core team has not given up on their vision.

However, CM has always been more than the name and more than the infrastructure. CM has been a success based on the spirit, ingenuity and effort of its individual contributors – back when it was Kondik in his home, to the now thousands of contributors past and present.

Embracing that spirit, we the community of developers, designers, device maintainers and translators have taken the steps necessary to produce a fork of the CM source code and pending patches.

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We will take pride in our Lineage as we move forward and continue to build on its legacy.

The CM team will now work over the coming weeks and months to start afresh under LineageOS and build on CyanogenMod’s legacy. Regular nightly builds for CyanogenMod-compatible devices will not be available in the meantime though, so if you are running a CM nightly on your device, you will be stuck on the same build for at least a few weeks.

LineageOS will be a continuation of what CyanogenMod was. To quote Andy Rubin, this is the definition of open. A company pulling their support out of an open source project does not mean it has to die.

As a huge CyanogenMod lover, here’s hoping the team comes back stronger than ever. Directly or indirectly, CyanogenMod had given a lot to the Android community and it would be a shame if they end up vanishing from the ROM development scene.