Greetings from Singapore.

Sheesh.

You'd think that of all places, a Linux user group forum would be the *last* place where people would stare at a FOSS software distribution and not know what it was.

CM is but one of many Android distributions, with a diversity that would embarrass Distrowatch.

There are the commercial ones that add on proprietary bits such as Samsung's Touchwiz, indeed the Google reference standard (which only comes by default on Nexus and no-name supercheap devices).
There are the barely recognizable mutations such as what's used in the Kindle Fire, deliberately designed to look as non-Android-like as possible.
And then there are the pure FOSS efforts, which include Paranoid Android and the hundreds of small-team or single-person efforts that can be found on XDA-developers.

So CM turned from a project into a brand, and attracted outside attention and money. The BRAND signed an exclusive deal with a handset manufacturer in India, that will prove to be a Very Bad Move for them because it's ruined its relationship with a much bigger, global, partner.

And so the drama unfolds.

Since there are no (well not yet) any proprietary bits in CM12, the only thing that can be "stolen" is the name. That may change. There could be prorietary bits added to CM (like Samsung, HTC and others do regularly), and CM could change its app defaults for email, search, cloud storage etc from Google to MS. (How different is this from Firefox switching its default search from Google to Yahoo?)

Over the last decade-plus, Linux distribution politics has had more than its share of soap opera moments... Oracle forking Red Hat, Novell buying and then divesting SuSE, and the brief fallout from Caldera buying a company that made Unix for PCs. That last one was entertainment enough to sustain its own fan site, groklaw.

But not Linux distributions are boring, Very little gawking value these days.

So the focus is now in Android space, where the stakes are even higher and some of the players are very, very big. Whether Microsoft is involved in CM to disrupt Android, or simply to disrupt Google, or simply to give it an MS-culture-friendly liaison with the Android ecosystem, remains to be seen. But if nothing else, we have a new source of entertainment and a new form of distro wars.

It can't do any sustained damage to the ecosystem, and might even result in some healthy competition.

Grab your popcorn.

- Evan