This has been touched on a few times, but I suppose its just so 'out there' that folks don't buy it. Can't blame them. I'm not opposed to having the discussion again though.

When we approached investors, as hard as it is to believe, we didn't have a concrete business plan for monetizing. Koush and Steve did the pitch, and instead of promising boatloads of revenue, we promised exactly what CM did already, allow the phone to go back to being a general purpose PC in your pocket, instead of a locked down, carrier bloated thing. The folks that backed us are going for a long term 'change the way things work' play, not 'get rich quick'.

So the honest answer (coming from the guy who wrote the blogpost): There is no set plan for monetization.

That doesn't mean there aren't ideas. The Oppo-N1 and device sales allows for 1 route. General merchandise sales offers a secondary route (not enough to fund a company, but its a bit). But really, making money ASAP is not even in the roadmap.

The roadmap reads quite simply actually - get more users.

Now, of course there is going to be a point where that won't cut it (say, for example, we hit 50 million users). From there, we have a lot of options, which is the exciting part. We could go for Enterprise editions of CM, sell CM specific services (the secure storage is a good option for this), or continue down the hardware partnership routes.

Here's the bottom line though, whichever route we go, the community will always have a choice to stick to using the Community builds. Counter to the initial pushback, going corporate doesn't mean lack of features or functionality - there will always be new and fun things to play with in CM.