[AT&T, Rogers HTC One X, Telstra One XL] gigel_georgel:
jcase - thanks for clearing a few things up.

I had no intention to offend; I had no idea the world of phone exploits is like that, where there are serious concerns about a) not receiving credit and b) worry that others might profit. I guess I confused you folks with the open source community.

Boy have things changed in the last 10-15 years or so.

It used to be that calling back home was something shameful, that nobody would want to be caught doing; companies would 1) flat out deny; 2) claim that it's technically required for the software to do its job; 3) admit to it not being necessary but that it's really only for "updates", yet go to lengths to encrypt communication; 4) admit to using the connection for the purpose of verifying licenses - which is still an honest goal, but the practice had such a bad name that nobody would dare say it out loud. But here we are in 2014 and this is now viewed as legit and normal and it's become ubiquitous with most commercial software.

I will not accuse you or the firewater developers or anybody of spying or planting backdoors, without concrete evidence, but I am confused about your reasons. And of course they might differ from one developer to another but here are some general questions for the typical exploit writer:

1 - are you looking to make an honest buck out of your work or not?

2 - if you are, how about saying it out loud; instead of posing as "contributors", do-gooders and world benefactors who only take "occasional" donations to "cover the costs", how about you come out as commercial software writers, and then nobody will wonder why you don't release source code and why you obfuscate and you call back home. Also, I won't find it funny that you don't show the world the actual bug that you found so that others can write their own exploits as they wish, since that will then understandably be a trade secret.

But if you are claiming that you're not looking to profit, but only to unleash the full power of Android onto the people, all of the above don't make sense at all, outside perhaps of the issue of not being credited - which doesn't seem to be a problem in the the open source community, even LGPL.

As far as your worries about people being fooled and installing crap that's not the real thing from scum who steal your work and package it nicely, together with ad/spyware, for good measure.

Why does it have to be so hard to find the real thing? A FORUM is where I have to download your software that's sometime quite brilliant and elaborate, and that much effort has been put into in developoment and maintenance? I have to read through threads to find cryptic documentation and change logs? A forum? Who downloads software from forums? Cool, smart people, you say? Do I detect a sense of pride in not wanting "noobs" to be part of your community?

I spent a couple of days just getting an idea about the current advancements in rooting my HTC phone. A scumbag posts a website that says "root your HTC phone here", together with a link to some software and he gets the first search result on google. Why can't you be that website? Because instead of coding something easily usable (by people who are not familiar with "root", "recovery", "s-off", "adb", "fastboot", etc ), and very important, findable, you spend your time devising schemes to prevent others from selling your product in those nicely laid out packages and websites.

Sure firewater has a website, which is easily reachable by typing "firewater" into google. But how would I know that? Not your problem, you say? Well, yes it is your problem, if you are concerned about others stealing your work.

Personally I wish I had the energy to contribute but I'm not 20 anymore and I need to pay the bills. How do you folks do it, and not want money from it, is sometimes hard to follow for me, that's all.