[Galaxy Note II Original Android Development] pulser_g2:
Alas, ladies and gents... The Cyanogenmod team have managed to surpass even themselves in misdirection and disorganisation. I honestly am surprised just how absurdly short-sighted they are. Seriously. In fact, I would like to suggest that anyone who feels strongly about this lets them know about it as loudly as they deem necessary.

There is one individual, Ricardo Cerqueira (aka arcee), who seems to have single-handedly decided to go and remove huge sets of features from CM. Particularly device specific ones, under the auspices of "tidying up the settings menu". Sure, by all means have a go, but don't REMOVE functionality in the process... If you must do it, do it a step at a time - remove the features from "Advanced" as they are created into the new menu.

By way of example, recent builds have removed the Advanced menu, offering you amongst other gems, the ability to change HSPA/HSDPA/HSUPA modes, as well as to disable the incredibly annoying button backlights on the soft keys on the note 2. Oh, and the ability to remove Samsung's garishly over-saturated colours of the AMOLED screen.

All this comes from the same individual who denied Mako (nexus 4) users many advanced options, because of his own personal dislike of the "Advanced" menu. While I cannot find any public acknowledgement of this, Nexus 4 users were denied many features and tweaks due to his maintainership of the device, and there are countless occurences where his own dislike has emerged in private, hidden discussions, that you are being kept from... Such as, for example,

and

Want some more proof? He was told about all these features on our devices.

And here's his reply:

This was met with another reply from another sensible developer, pointing out the need for these features.

Ask yourself - why were users not made aware of this discussion? Why were these changes decided by one man on his own personal crusade? Why was there no consultation carried out before his own personal dislike was imposed upon us all?

Alas though, these discussions take place in secret, behind closed doors, which you and I do not see, because we are not felt "worthy" to see what happens there. Have no fear though, for I shall expose each and every one of these things, including the upcoming commercialisation of CM.

Yes, that's right... You heard me right - CM are attempting to now licence all new contributions as dual GPL and commercial licence. Why? To allow them to go on and sell the rights to the open source code to third parties. And one of their own "leads" even tried to strong-arm a valued contributor into re-licencing his work. I had to step in there, and point out they actually had no right to do so, as the contributor agreement doesn't cover that eventuality. Nonetheless, his attitude was frankly horrendous, TELLING the contributor it would be relicensed, not asking permission. That's gone quiet for now though. The reason they want to be able to licence the code commercially? To allow them to sell YOUR contributions to a third party, such as an OEM or carrier, who wants the features, but doesn't want to follow the open source licence of a GPL component.

They're also selling out and going commercial - there's rumours around the internet, but a little bit of smart thinking will lead you to the answers.

Unfortunately, due to CM now trying to be as secretive as possible, you probably won't see any of this elsewhere. They are making every effort to be as closed as possible in their structure, and decision making processes. That means you, the user, are running code where the changes are arbitrarily decided with no input by yourself, beyond the "false" pretence of their gerrit instance.

There are significant contributions made to CM which bypass their gerrit code review (mainly upstream merges), but also other large pushes. There is also the "submit and +2" mentality from their leads, where their own contributions are beyond testing, and should be pushed immediately, often leading to breakages.

There is a lot more going on, and I will expose more and more of it. Please encourage your beloved CM people to have a look at this. Also, let them know that their "secrets" are not safe, since they are ridiculously easy to find on the internet. So if they try to stop me finding things out, I will simply share more and more with the world. Fair is fair, right? The less open CM are, the more open I will be. When you're running code on your device, you expect the developers to be open, upfront, and honest with you, right? Is that happening?

What does this all mean? Well, there won't be any new "upstream" builds for a while, until I resolve a few issues such as the major removal of important features, thus crippling CM from being usable. I need to figure out what to do, whether it's re-adding them, or rewriting the settings to work properly. It will be worth it in the long run though! Trust me on that ;) I might introduce some more #nicethings :)

Finally, if any of the CM leads wish to engage in a dialogue about this, feel free. You can do so, in public, here because the public trust you in running your code, so why not trust them in return? Or is this a trustless relationship? Perhaps your users should stop trusting you?

More to follow ;)