Recently HTC sent a C&D (Cease and Desist) letter to a well known member of the mobile community, Conflipper. He operates a site called
Shipped ROMS, that hosts ROMS from HTC.
Its one of the very few places that you can find shipped ROMs for older devices.
Windows sent a similar letter in mid 2009 to XDA and all ROMS were temporarily pulled.
There is some speculation regarding what is really behind this action;
One theory is that is was just a web crawler searching on keywords that send the letter automatically, and it is worded as such.
Another theory is that the lawsuit between Apple and HTC is motivating HTC to tighten up their copyrights.
A few memnbers from XDA have sent their grieivances to HTC and the responses were basically;
"While HTC tries to take a hands off [approach] about the modder / ROM chef community, this site's sole purpose [is] to make HTC's content available for download from a source other than HTC. That content is not just the open source parts and kernels of Android but all of the software that HTC itself has developed. This is a clear violation of our copyrights and HTC needs to defend itself in these cases."
IMO, HTC would be quite foolish to take an Applesque approach to their OS.
I only purchase WM devices because they CAN be modded. The ROM from HTC sucks!
...and we already know that M$ is heading down the Apple path when it comes to WinMo7....
It will be interesting to see how this all pans out.
Stay Tuned!
Peace!
