[HTC 10 Questions & Answers] mrbox23:
Good points. It is risky to S-OFF, last time I flashed a write value to the safety state of an HTC modem was the Evo 4g, locked to Virgin Mobile when I got it. I had to cut a small section of a wire from an ethernet cable after flashing the unlock binary. Using that cable to ground contact points(at the risk of bricking) I read how to bypass some safety and get into diag mode writing some hex value to something else using fastboot.

I got into Android(and Linux) by hacking the HTC Touch Pro 2 and a laptop to flash it with. That was a Microsoft Phone. Using Haret, and installing Android Donut system/kernel images on the sdcard, you could boot into the Android Linux kernel and everything was loaded. It was slow, no cellular connection, it booted as a proof of concept.

Unpractical for daily use, I just kept Windows with the earliest version of the Sense interface, compulsively flashing every new Energy ROM. Then came the HTC HD2, the last Microsoft Phone(before Windows Mobile), my first practical Android phone. Started off booting Froyo using the same sdcard install and Haret psuedo bootloader method. Dark Forces group eventually formatted the EEPROM of the HD2 using a Linux friendly file system and moved Android from the sdcard to the internal memory. Adopting Linux kernel and vendor sources from the HTC Desire, the XDA community hacked together a fringe device.

I had a few HD2s running Android on a foreign device. Even bricked a couple of them flashing European radios. Only to restore them by buying the same not bricked devices with busted screens on eBay.

You can do things with an HTC, not possible otherwise using other Armel hardware . I mean try writing low level binary states to the modem of an Nexus device, not only to re define the locality of where the device was manufactured to function, but even downgrade firmware versions and the respective security patches.

Won't happen, not without Jtag and a few years of bricking devices while you earn an unrequited masters in computer science, as I imagine the phreakers/developers behind Sunshine must have.

My point, if I have one, is the raw potential before the OP and the device we're taking about.

To even look up a device on XDA demands a degree of user autonomy not encouraged by many manufactures. Like those that resort exclusively to advertising and pandering to made for TV "group think" expectations and attitudes of what a device is capable of. Only what is most profitable to most manufactures will work easily on the device without risk of destruction.

End users intolerant of bloatware and advertising, or limiting personal driving, shopping, usage and locality data to services they chose or at least use and know about. Those are examples of what's outside the stock ROM box.

The communications service industry as a whole will lose profits if they don't buy the majority of these inherently open devices and tailor them to fit, for the most part, their ends. I mean yeah, KNOX is secure, and that's a great cover story to isolate open development. Groups of independent developers, builders, and users can take technology in a direction different and less predictable than what is otherwise a profitable direction.

I like to imagine this fora as a nail in the coffin of computer hardware and software development that unnecessarily limits experimentation and inflates security risks to homogenize those capable individuals under the same or similar payroll. Focusing them on profit over communal benefit, as if we can't have both.