1. Not all core devs were invited

2. He tried getting some GPL software relicensed as Apache under false pretenses.

But this is what confuses me. If you don't want this happening, why license your code as Apache?

If Samsung would have done this, this would have been hailed as a success of non-copyleft licenses (like when MS used BSD's network stack). Why do they have a problem when a core dev does is?

Because he lied to the developers about what he was trying to do.

Is this the end of custom ROMs?

Between Xposed and a "better" standard android, a lot of the "big" custom ROMs have bit the dust. Aokp, paranoid, slim, omni is moribund, and now CM?

The only feature from CM that I miss is the ability to hold the volume up button to skip to the next track (as a global option, not just a per-app thing). Everything else that they did so well has pretty much been added to stock android.

And the fact that they support old phones, and their privacy guard is better than stock android

I don't bother with custom roms as much as I used to, I'm happy enough with root to nuke bloatware and get a systemwide ad-blocker installed.

OEM's are finally gaining a little bit of taste in the UI department and I'm not revolted with their products out of the box as much as I used to be.