I wouldn't say it's a 'totally separate effort'. Much of the core CyanogenMod dev team are also Cyanogen Inc. employees. I assume what you meant to say is that

I wouldn't say it's a 'totally separate effort'. Much of the core CyanogenMod dev team are also Cyanogen Inc. employees. I assume what you meant to say is that CyanogenMod is entirely separate from Cyanogen Inc.'s commercial product, Cyanogen OS, which has always been true.