I'm assuming people here know a bit more about this than I do, so I'll ask.
Why is CM still a 3rd party developer? I'm curious as to why Google/Samsung/Motorola etc hasn't bought them out and applied their talent to make the stock setup better? Honestly, I'd much rather buy a "XYZ phone, CyanogenMod version" over to the stock Touchwiz/SenseUI etc front end.
Excuse my ignorance if this is a dumb question.
Cyanogen, the initial author, was hired by Samsung some time ago. But CM is still a volunteer project, the developers don't get monetary compensation for their work, so there's nothing to buy out.
It should be fairly easy to "buy them out". Pick out the ones that do the most work and/or the work relevant to what you need done, and shoot them a letter with an NDA/check that offers them a contracting gig to get CM up and running on a device before launch.
They of course could keep on working on CM in general, and do contracting for other people as well, but at least your phone would have CM support out of the box.
I imagine the CM people could organize a bit to facilitate such contracting, but I suspect the reason this hasn't already been happening is that there just isn't really any demand from the manufacturers. I can't really say I know anything about the industry at all though, so I might just be talking crap.
Not a dumb question. Samsung hired, Steve Kondik, CM's lead developer in 2011. I'm not sure I've seen how this has affected Samsung, but I haven't really paid to much attention to their newer phones. Still, we won't ever see a CM phone by Samsung. Although I agree, that it would be preferred to any TouchWiz phone. http://www.theverge.com/2011/08/15/samsung-hires-cyanogenmod...
Just a FYI, I had a SG3 for 3 weeks and I recently got the note 2 and I have no complaints. A lot of the tweaks they implemented are pretty f'in awesome and I find myself saying "that makes sense" quite often, so maybe hiring this guy helped.
Thanks for the answers and I'm happy to see that samsung did that. I know for a fact, that if I was a company and someone was making MY product better....for free, that I'd be offering them a job. That is the kind of employee I want in house, self motivated and creative.
