[Touch Pro, Fuze ROM Development] d0ugie:
Hey I hear you with the c'mon argument.

Yes Microsoft and HTC know about us. I've gotten hundreds of hits from proxy server hosts under .microsoft.com downloading everything on my site and HTC has gotten plenty of love letters from us as well as petition websites brewed by XDA people. We don't really pose a threat to Microsoft though one could argue we have a tepidly adversarial relationship with HTC for our criticism of them and our attempts to generate negative publicity against them as well as our attempts to pressure them to do business differently (like with the Kaiser video driver saga). Though XDA may be some server in the Netherlands, we comprise XDA as we are clumped together in the minds of The Man when we do something The Man doesn't like so we, thanks to the likes of P1Tater and other volunteers, have to spend an enormous amount of time cleaning up not just spam and dumb threads but making sure no one posted Skyfire when it was recently in private beta and so on. We're on self-warez-patrol, defcon 1.

You add extracted and redesigned software with different branding artwork, possibly copyrighted software, operating systems, leaked or hacked drivers etc on top of that and you have a large happy community such as ours that is operating in the gray area. We're more good to MS and HTC than we are bad but if they so choose to exercise it they have power over XDA, power to kill XDA, and we must act accordingly. People can post cabs and links but there is some vague protection for XDA, sort of like Slashdot but with attachments, as those are posted by individuals and are therefore sort of owned by the poster not XDA and XDA with their moderators tries to operate in a manner that projects an air of good faith /in addition to/ helping Microsoft and HTC as we are a resource for ways they can produce better products. We're pretty harlmess -- why would HTC care if someone else cleans up after them with GPS driver fixes? Cheapest thing for them to do is copy /our/ work.

In the event of Microsoft or HTC or Opera or whoever developing a major grievance with something that goes down here and sends XDA a cease and decist letter that XDA cannot afford to defend themselves against and must comply with, demanding XDA to take down threads containing *, when you've got bittorrent in the mix as you're suggesting XDA loses the ability to comply swiftly and effectively with such a demand to the satisfaction of these potentially litigous companies if satisfying them includes pulling the plug fully on a proliferation of a file that made its debut here if it's floating around in bittorrent and making its way to the high traficked torrent portals with traces back to XDA.

No one cares about FTP and for these purposes no one even knows what FTP is. Rapidshare (or good samaritan mirror operations like mine) is not on the MPAA's hitlist either. But the reputation of bittorrent, even though those who defend bittorrent adamantly cite that it's great for kosher stuff too like Linux (and us), makes it not an option for XDA as XDA does, again, to some extent operate in a gray area and does not have the resources to do so with the audacity of providing bittorrent solutions in the event it needs to pay legal bills. XDA may not even know how gray our gray area is, doubt we have a lawyer on retainer. I doubt most lawyers would know the answers anyway. Unchartered territory (but gray territory). So XDA has to assume an MO of paranoia. Blending in bittorrent to XDA either with an XDA-sanctioned and maintained portal/tracker or just encouraging users with wikis and such on how to set up their own tracker when they release their own rom, given that there are other options, is bad for business. Now me I am not even going to bother researching how legal these roms are; I am cool with my ISP and I'll assume the risk by putting them on hosts directly connected to me and my identity but you won't find these roms on XDA's ftp server probably not just because their more than 1MB but because they are sketchy in nature. XDA can barely pay for bandwidth with these banners ads that most of us don't see with adblock and the small stream of donations. Where's XDA going to get $20K one day if **** hits the fan? Nowhere. Just because we've got thousands of members here, often extremely talented and good-hearted people, does not make us immune from total destruction and bittorrent gives that doomsday scenerio an elevetated probability.

XDA's doomed at best to walk on eggshells. Bittorrent is a four letter word. XDA cannot, in my estimation, live with it; certainly not when XDA can live without it.