Let the dog see the rabbit
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HTC sends out a cease and desist letter
TAIWANESE MOBILE PHONE MAKER HTC has sent a cease and desist letter to Shipped ROMs.
The company is gunning for the website owner Conflipper, and has told him to stop distributing home brewed ROMs.
"We have very strong reasons to believe that the HTC Intellectual Property was illegally obtained by fraudulent means," said the letter from HTC's legal eagles.
"The subject dissemination and publication of HTC's Intellectual Property is in clear violation of HTC's legal rights and is an infringement of the HTC's copyrights, goodwill, as well as the other intellectual rights," the letter intoned.
HTC has given Conflipper two weeks to remove the offending material and will pursue him "by any means necessary" if he fails to comply. It almost sounds like if they were in Silicon Valley, HTC might call in the Apple police that busted into the Gizmodo editor's pad to investigate the leak of an Iphone prototype.
HTC is also peeved that the website is hosting illegal copies of HTC's original artwork as well.
The website Shipped ROMs focuses on HTC ROMs but also has an array of cooked Blackberry ROMs. If it does get taken down, ROM modders will find another source in less time than it takes us to finish this sentence. µ
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I am considering a HTC Desire phone.
It will be my first purchase of an HTC product if I do. News such as this seems to be a negative to me. I may just consider a Samsung Galaxy S.
I don't think anyone is making money from ROMs. HTC should consider it as selling a PC, and not bothering what people do with it. If it wants to crack down on free ROMs, maybe it should also make sure that it's reputation as a bad provider of updates is changed.
They already lost my custom a few years ago when I switched from an HTC Wizard to their Tytn II, which is supposedly an upgrade. I remember wondering why the second phone felt so sluggish, and according to XDA Developers it was because HTC never bothered to drive the display with the hardware on the board - it was all rendered by the CPU instead.
It seems software is the last thing considered on HTC phones. The fact they slaughter the phone is all the encouragement I need to leave as I quickly learned messing around with ROMs was a lot of agro just to have an acceptable product. Bye HTC!
You clearly have little understanding of the situation.
With only a small handfull of exceptions hardware devices have a feature set this set can not be changed, Custom ROMS take what is freely available over the internet or to put it another way, they copy what HTC freely release in there ROMS, nothing is stolen, nothing is a paid for service, if i recieve an official update to my HTC phone i will not have to pay for it.
I think HTC will have a hard time on this one. Cooks will take a released ROM by HTC and make it work on another compatabile device. Again no law is broken as i am freely able to do what the hell i want with my phone and its updates.
HTC at the moment have a tendency to dump their users at the first opertunity, and i agree that they should not be forced to update software for ever, which is exactly why XDA and such like are a god send because they do support them.
HTC dont like it because you are correct that that will stop people buying newer phones but my counter argument is this, i have NEVER and never will buy a new phone based on its software, i and like many other will buy a new device because a, their old one is nackard, b, its too slow or c, they need a new piece of hardware (HSDPA, GPS, 4G, Bigger screen)
No, HTC know too well what custom ROMS are about, id love to know how much they take out of them and use in official ROMS but the fact is this, at no point in any custom ROM is paid for software released to the public.
If HTC got their act together and designed better phones THEN they would see people like my buying new ones.
Like others on here have said, if custom ROMS die then HTC have lost a 9 year old customer buying devices from the original XDA to the HD2
Shipped ROMs are stealing HTCs intellectual property, and HTC are telling them to stop, or else - something that they are perfectly within their rights to do.
You might well think that this is a suicidal move on HTCs part, but if a third party can update your phones ROM with all the features you need, then where is your incentive to buy a shiny! new! HTC phone? And if you dont keep buying new phones, how are HTC going to stay in business? So you see, it would be suicidal for them *not* to do this!
Declaration of interest: I have never owned an HTC phone. And now I never will.
...and it's not like people are profiting at HTC's expense. Nor is it like they are porting the software to work on other manufacturer's hardware. Really, what is the problem?
Sites like the one above and XDA Developers are not only beneficial to HTC but it is one of the reasons a lot of users have supported HTC for years.
I mean, lets be honest, WM is a dog of an OS in its default form. Along comes HTC and creates a pretty skin for it. However once you get a phone it is rarely updated, not to mention that some phone carriers (looking at you AT&T) tend to think they know better and cripple the phones. Sites like XDA let you tweak your phone to perfection. They are not re-selling HTC software, nor are they giving you anything that was not in the phone in the first place. In fact they have very stringent rules against people posting pirated software. What XDA does is basically keep your phone up to date and let you customize it.
One look at the brilliant customizations like Cookie's Home Tabs, MaxSense, and MaxManilla tell the whole story. They basically improve the original Sense interface to an amazing degree. It is beyond anything any of the phone companies will give you by default.
It is because of sites like this that I am on my 5th HTC phone. Take this away from the community and I might as well go for an iPhone.
Because I will skip HTC products forever if they cause the death of its own fan sites.